John Lasseter Quotes

I've always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early '80s.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

You look at CG sometimes and its terrible. You look at CG sometimes and its great.

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

I learned a lot about 3D animation from and with my dear friend Michael Hemschoot of Workerstudio. Taught me that I want to play more with animation and image manipulation. Fun stuff!

A lot of people have helped me along the way. But you know the biggest thing for me was when computer animation came along.

The great thing about computer animation is that all of those environments exist as three-dimensional worlds, so these VR worlds already exist.

As I look back on my career, I had a goal, which was to build the first feature computer-animated film.

It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held.

In computer animation, every detail has to be thought out, designed, modeled, shaded, placed and lit. The more you add, the more computer memory you need.

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.

Pixar is not about computers, it's about people.

I do a lot of CG stuff for fun.

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.