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Gary Thompson | Lasseter has last laugh at Disney's expense

THEY SAY the best revenge is living well, but I think Pixar honcho John Lasseter has redefined that axiom.

The best revenge is being fired by a company that has to pay $7 billion to get you back.

That, in a nutshell, describes Lasseter's career trajectory with Disney, where he started out as an eager-beaver animator in 1980 before being swatted down and eventually fired by corporate bureaucrats. His initial stint ended with Lasseter trying to explain to tin-eared executives why computer animation could fulfill Walt Disney's dream of fully dimensional animation.

"Disney was an executive-driven studio. They had a concept for what they thought a movie was going to be, they'd assign directors to it, whether they wanted to work on it or not, then give them story notes to use, and you had to use the executive's notes. You couldn't trust your own instincts, and you couldn't even trust the notes, because they were often contradictory," Lasseter recalls.

When he argued for computer animation, his bosses had only one question: Could it save us money? The answer was no, and Lasseter was let go, but as he went on to prove at Pixar, the company he eventually built, computer animation could sure make you money.

Pixar's run of "A Bug's Life," the "Toy Story" movies, "Monsters Inc.," "The Incredibles" and "Finding Nemo" have made, oh, $2 billion worldwide. Meanwhile, while the penny-pinchers at Disney finally achieved the cost savings they desired, they closed their 2-D animation unit, bringing expenses down to zero.

To Disney's embarrassment, it made most of its animation money distributing Pixar's movies. When a new chairman took over last year, he made a trip to Disneyland and realized that all the new characters were Pixar creations. So he approached Pixar and Lasseter with a proposition: How about we buy you, and you come run our company?

Pixar and Disney agreed to a merger, which took effect last month, and Pixar is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney.

Time magazine described this as Disney paying $7 billion "for Lasseter's brain," but a lot of what's going on in that brain is a reaction to the shortsighted policies he encountered at the old Disney.

"One of the things that's most important about Pixar is that we're a director-driven studio. What I mean by that is, while the director doesn't call all the shots, the movie comes from the heart of the director. We then surround the directors with people to help them make their movie the best it can be. Sometimes we tell them it's not working, and we're honest. Not to put someone down, but to make the story more powerful."

Hollywood looks on Pixar as a closed circle of Northern California mavericks, but the company welcomes directors with vision: Pixar brought in "Iron Giant" director Brad Bird to make "The Incredibles." Bird is working on the company's next release, about a rodent in Paris.

Lasseter wants to bring the same process to Disney, and while all of this may seem like a radical reformation, in truth it is a restoration of Walt Disney's ideals - Bird and Lasseter studied at Cal Arts in the late '70s under all the old Disney animators, learning Walt's technique and also his creed.

In the 1980s Lasseter clashed with Disney execs who wanted "edgy" stories, which loosely translated to cynical. The great Pixar irony is that it uses its advanced technology to render old-fashioned stories about family, community, friendship and, above all, heart.

Lasseter's "Cars" is about a selfish loner of a race car that breaks down in a small town and learns to accept the help of the people there. The movie boasts the company's usual eye-popping animation advances, but it is also, like "Toy Story," strangely sad at times.

"The concept that was taught to me by my mentor, Frank Thomas, the great Disney animator, was pathos. It was handed down from Walt, who believed that for every laugh there should be a tear," Lasseter said.

"You create pathos not by telling an audience it's time to be sad, but by creating characters that people believe in, whether it's a toy or a car, and putting them in situations and predicaments that teach characters the importance of having heart," he said.

Infusing the movie with personal emotion wasn't difficult for Lasseter; his lifelong love of automobiles started in car-crazed California on the floor of the auto dealership where his father was parts manager, and where young John worked as a teenager. He grew up loving cars, and often used a drive on the open road as a way to unwind; never was that more needed than after four straight years of nonstop work on "A Bug's Life" and the "Toy Story" movies.

"At the end of 'Toy Story 2' my wife said to me, 'Be careful, or one day you're going to wake up and your kids will have gone off to college and you'll have missed it,' " he said. "So I bought a motor home, took a summer off. We started out with our feet in the Pacific Ocean, then turned and headed east. For two months we were lost in America, and it wasn't over until we put our feet in the Atlantic Ocean."

Lasseter stayed on back roads virtually the whole way, and his "Cars" is a visual ode to the country's forgotten, bypassed small towns, as powerfully evocative to baby boomers as the retro playthings in "Toy Story."

Given his reverence for the past, can it be long before Lasseter restores the company's defunct 2-D animation division?

"First of all, 2-D animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling at a number of studios, Disney included. It's wrong to conclude that people don't want to watch it anymore. That's like saying live-action movies should be ended after a couple of duds at the box office," he said. "When has technology ever directly equated to box office? It's ridiculous. People want to watch good movies, period."

So his answer to the possibility of classic 2-D at Disney is a qualified yes.

"We don't have any firm plans. But if there's one studio that should be making 2-D, it's Disney," he said.

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