Kings Of The Rodent

John Lasseter may now be the Most Powerful Man In Hollywood, but he has always seemed perfectly happy to talk to the press, and we, in turn, have always been happy to talk to him. He is, after all, one of the industry’s most charming Cinderella stories.

25 years ago he was a young turk who came into Disney alongside Tim Burton, Brad Bird and Tim Musker, until a pitch to make a computer-animated version of The Brave Little Toaster was enough to persuade the suits in charge that they had a crazy man in the building. He was promptly dismissed, only to return last year as the chief creative officer of animation at Pixar and Disney, a position that makes him the overlord of cartoons, Imagineering and the whole shebang.
Today, during his third encounter with Movie House, you can tell he’s a man who is suddenly shouldering great responsibilities. The jolly giant in a Hawaiian shirt we’ve become accustomed to has given way to a more cautiously spoken individual, one who knows that an unfortunate turn of phrase could wipe out a billion dollars worth of stock. Though he’s still visibly, well, animated when it comes to his medium, you can hear that certain corporate platitudes and mission statements have crept into his speech.
“I oversee everything creative at Pixar,” he says, as if learned by rote. “And now, after the merger with Disney, I maintain the same role at Walt Disney animation features. But Pixar and Disney are unique. We are not executive driven studios. We’re director driven. Directors develop the stories. It has to be a story that comes from the heart.”
It’s a simple idea, but it has been enough to propel Mr. Lasseter to the top of Premiere magazine’s power list.
After his unpleasant experiences at Disney first time around, John Lasseter moved to the animation division of Lucasfilm where he found himself surrounded by boffins.
“Pixar has invented much of the computer technology through a collaboration between the artist and the technology,” he says. “In the old days, the software guys did little bits of animation. I was the first traditionally trained animator to work with computer scientists on this. So there I was, side by side with these amazing PhDs. I couldn’t possibly know what those guys know, but equally they didn’t know how to bring a character to life with movement and personality. Everything we have done, no one has done before us. We’re pioneers. That’s our culture.”
In 1986, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, bought out the computer-graphics division of Lucasfilm and renamed it Pixar. Since then, Lasseter has produced Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Cars. His success has been such that Disney were forced to fork over $7.4 billion to secure Pixar and Lasseter’s creative services last year.
Theoretically, Pixar would retain its own identity while Lasseter would work his magic on Disney’s ailing animation studio. Alternatively, Disney’s bureaucrat-heavy culture would swamp its younger, hipper cousin and they would all go down together.
Could this possibly happen to the ‘$7-billion-man’? Of course it could. Since Pixar emerged, computer-animation has become cheaper, faster and, crucially, readily available to any Johnny Flick-Book who comes along. The market place is now saturated with CG animation. Indeed, since the release of Pixar’s Cars last year, rival studios has given us Hoodwinked, Open Season, Ice Age 2, Barnyard, Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, Shrek The Third and many other inferior knock-offs.
Surely this is bad for business?
“Well, let me ask you something”, says Lasseter. “Do you ever get worried that there’s an over-saturation of live action films in the market place?”
Erm, yes. I think that’s true of certain genres.
“Okay, then,” he says. “But there are 52 weeks of the year. Last year there were 16 animated films in that calendar. See, I love that there’s more animation out there, however it’s produced. Whether they’re good or not comes down to the individual filmmakers, but I love working in a healthy industry. I’d much rather be there than to be the only player in a dead industry.”
Fair enough. But it’s apparent that many studios attribute Pixar’s success to computer-animation, to the medium not the message. There are now lots of crummy 3D cartoons out there to take the lustre off the medium.
“What you’re saying touches on something that I’ve never understood,” he says. “I love animation and that includes hand drawn animation. Saying audiences don’t want to watch those films anymore is like saying that we shouldn’t use this camera anymore to shoot a movie. Let’s use this camera instead. It made a hit movie. That’s ridiculous. Audiences are not going to be maintained by novelty, not since the audience ran away when they saw the train pulling into the station during that Lumiere film. Since DW Griffith, it’s been about telling the story.”
Lasseter’s methods are currently being tested with Ratatouille, a crucial release for Pixar. Like Toy Story 2, the film has a tricky production history. Director Jan Pinkava came up with the concept in 2000, creating the design and main storyline for an endearing movie about a Parisian rat who wants to be a chef. Two years ago Pixar management replaced Pinkava with Brad Bird (of Simpsons and Incredibles fame) who rewrote the film as a high-octane physical comedy and addressed what he calls the Rodent Factor.
“They had shortened their tails and made them like little humans,” says Bird. “I thought we had lost something that was interesting about the story by doing that. There are so many great stories like The Hunchback Of Notre Dame that play with the fact that you feel revulsion before you move past it. So I had them lengthen the tails and put them back on all fours.”
That ratty quality helps define a film that is already ranked as the eighth best film of all-time according to Metacritic’s sums. A more sophisticated entertainment than last year’s Cars, it’s another instant Pixar classic. How do they do it? Well, asking Bird about his influences provides some vital clues. He, like Lasseter, is always aiming high.
“I’m really into Kurasawa and David Lean and Spielberg and Coppola and Milos Forman and Chuck Jones,” he tells me. “I’m not saying I’m putting them in there but if you are what you eat then I eat a lot of Jones.”
Sounds like that $7 billion was very well spent.

Ratatouille is released October 12