John Lasseter Quotes

At Pixar, good ideas may be cut from a film, but they are never forgotten.

When you really study espionage movies, or spy movies, the beginnings are really set up to have, like, an amazing bit of action, but at the moment you're watching it, you have no idea why or what it's about.

Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.

Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It's what you do with the medium.

Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.

Growing up, my favorite TV show was 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.', hands down.

At Pixar, we do sequels only when we come up with a great idea, and we always strive to be different than the original.

Today, among little girls especially, princesses and the romanticised ideal they represent - finding the man of your dreams - have a limited shelf life.

A good part of my leadership skills is crafted from learning from experiences early in my career that were not positive experiences.

'Bambi' is an amazing film, and when you watch it today, it's just as beautiful. It's timeless. It's just as beautiful today as it was back then.

One of the big moments of my life was watching 'Star Wars' on its opening weekend in Hollywood. I was watching all these people enjoy this film, and I thought: animation can do this.

I have motor oil running through my veins.

In overseeing both Disney and Pixar Animation, each studio has a unique culture.

I am so proud that 'Up' is Pixar's 10th film. I think it's the funniest film that we've ever made and also one of the most beautiful.

I believe in research. Each movie at Pixar involves research with college professors or taking trips to learn as much as we can about a particular subject matter.

Short films really helped me develop as a story teller, animator, and as a director.

With science, there is this culture of experimentation, and most of the time, those experiments fail.

I love Japan. I love the collision of the modern and ancient worlds coming together in that place. It's so high-tech and cool.

If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.

Winnie the Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood are among the most entertaining and beloved characters ever animated by Disney.

Take any movie with an actor you like. Turn your head and just listen to the performance. In some cases, the physical presence remains as strong when you can't see the actor, when it's just the voice.

At Pixar, we've been huge fans of any new technology that makes the viewer experience of our movies better. Blu-ray is the best yet because the picture quality, especially for our movies, is unbelievable.

At Pixar, after every movie we have postmortum meetings where we discuss what worked and what didn't work.

Fortunately for me, I'm married to an amazing woman - Nancy Lasseter - who is wise enough not to let me buy every car I want. If I was single, I would be living in a very small apartment and renting a warehouse full of cool cars.

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

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.

I've often heard people say that managing creative people is the hardest thing in the world. 'They're never happy, they drive up the cost of things, blah blah blah.' I just manage people the way I always wanted to be managed. That is, to be creatively challenged, but never to be told what to do.

I loved animation and cartoons, even when it was not cool when you were in high school. I raced home to see the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

If you think something's stupid, it probably is.

I'm a huge fan of Blu-rays myself.

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

I never quite understood why Disney hadn't made a sincere fairy tale since 'Beauty and the Beast.'

When you set out to really entertain adults as well as kids, your audience is basically anybody who is breathing.

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 Walt Disney Animation studio is the studio that Walt Disney started himself in 1923, and it's never stopped and never closed its doors and never stopped making animation, and it keeps going as kind of the heart and soul of the company.

You never hear of a live-action studio that has been making so-so films looking over at a studio that's making great movies and going, 'Oh, we see the difference - we're using a different camera.'

The greatest bad guys, you understand where they're coming from. They believe they're doing the right thing. Sometimes it's for greed, sometimes it's for other reasons, but they are what they call the center of good. They always believe they're doing the right thing.

I do what I do because of Walt Disney - his films and his theme park and his characters and his joy in entertaining.

I've noticed with my own kids, it seems like they have so much more homework than I did.

We use shorts at the studio extensively to develop talent. I always love to give opportunities for young story people, animators, layout people something like that to take the next step up in their career and try things out.

We make the kind of movies we like to watch. I love to laugh. I love to be amazed by how beautiful it is. But I also love to be moved to tears. There's lots of heart in our films.

Steve Jobs is like a brother to me and he's one of the founders of Pixar, and when the first iPad came out, I got one right away.

People want to be creatively satisfied, and having fun is such an important part of that.

When Walt Disney was making his films, he trusted his instincts and made films for himself, but they appealed to everybody, not just kids.

When I look at the success I have, it's because of my creative-thinking skills.

'Cars' is a really personal story for me because, first of all, I grew up in Los Angeles - the car crazy capital.

Toys are put on this Earth to be played with by a child.

People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don't have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there's this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.

'Cars' is simply near and dear to my heart.

I can't tell you, as a parent, how it feels when the doctor tells you your child has diabetes. First off, you don't really know much about it. Then you discover there is no cure.