The man who saved Disney
How John Lasseter created some of the studio’s most beloved work
Somewhere on a computer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, there’s a video of John Lasseter dancing to Let It Go. It was shot by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, directors of Frozen, during a meeting with Lasseter and other members of Disney Animation’s Story Trust, a group of writers and filmmakers who get together to chew over problems that crop up on the studio’s projects.
Everyone knew the song would be a crucial part of the film — when Buck and Lee heard it, they rewrote their entire plot to better accommodate its lyrics — but the directors wanted to do it justice with some dramatic, sassy choreography.
It’s not stretching the truth to say Lasseter saved Disney. When he arrived from Pixar in 2006, the studio was in the 20th year of a low ebb. But the first films to be produced under Lasseter’s stewardship were The Princess and the Frog and Tangled: two sharp, witty, painterly princess stories, as proudly forwardlooking as they were indebted to the studio’s most beloved and enduring work. Next came two films made in tandem that could have hardly been more different: the pastoral, handpainted Winnie the Pooh and the computerized 3D Wreck-It Ralph.
Then, of course, came Frozen — the most successful film Disney has ever made and the first to win the best animated feature Oscar in the award’s 13-year history. Its latest film, Big Hero 6, is a mash-up of Marvel Comics and Hayao Miyazaki: it’s like nothing the studio has done before, but rooted in the storytelling traditions it helped set down the best part of a century ago.
So how did this 57-year-old lifelong Disney obsessive and father of five boys from a leafy Californian backwater effect such an astonishing turnaround?
Lasseter was one of the original animators at Pixar, the creators of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and any number of modern-classic animated films, and had become so synonymous with visionary filmmaking that Disney staff were racking their brains over who might bring the same creative spirit back to their venerable but ailing studio.
“All through that time, we were looking at the incredible things Pixar were doing and saying, ‘Who’s going to be our John Lasseter?’ ” was how the situation was described by Chris Williams, one of the codirectors of Big Hero 6.
Eight years ago, at a surprise meeting called in the main hall at the studio’s Burbank headquarters, he and his colleagues found out. It would be John Lasseter.
When he took charge of Disney, one of his first actions was to reverse a decision that had been quietly made two years earlier — not often readily acknowledged by the studio even now — to shut down its entire hand-drawn animation division.
“The previous regime had decided that their audience didn’t want to look at hand-drawn art anymore, they wanted computer animation,” he says. “They didn’t care about the artists, the history, the art form.”
But Lasseter did. As a child, he’d pored over a hardback Disney book, The Art of Animation, and dreamed of following in the footsteps of the ‘Nine Old Men,’ they were the animators who had worked with Walt Disney during the studio’s early days.
So he rehired John Musker and Ron Clements, the co-directors of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and asked them to pitch a new, hand-drawn Disney princess story.
“They thought the world had grown too cynical for traditional fairy tales, but I was sitting at Pixar thinking, ‘No! Hollywood’s grown too cynical for them! The rest of the world loves them!’ ”
Working with Musker and Clements allowed him to revive the old Disney recipe, albeit with a Lasseterian twist.
“You’ve got to tell them for today’s audiences,” he says. “You can’t have a female main character sitting around for a guy to come save her. There’s not one woman I know — my mom, my wife — who is waiting around for a guy to save them.”
The result was Tiana, Disney’s first African-American princess, who wanted to start her own restaurant in New Orleans — a dream that, perhaps significantly, her father had lacked the wherewithal to realize.
“The technique was what Disney had been using for years, but the story had to have a little something extra,” he says, adding the same formula was used for Tangled.
“This was a challenging story that involves child abduction and a poor girl being raised in one room for her whole life. But her decision not to wait for someone to save her was what ended up driving the story. We switched Rapunzel from a damsel into an aspirational character.”
The change suited her. Tangled made $740 million and was Disney’s first film to top the American box office in 16 years. Frozen, which followed, developed the idea even further: here was a princess story in which the day-saving act of love had to be bestowed, not received, and by one sister on another.
“The idea of the ending where Anna sacrifices herself for Elsa was something that came up early on,” said Andrew Millstein, the studio’s head. “And John just said, ‘That’s our ending.’ ”
These days, the respect Lasseter commands at Disney borders on the cultlike, but it wasn’t always the case. This is his third spell with the studio. His strained earlier dealings with it run almost exactly in line with Gandhi’s account of standing up to an oppressive regime. First they ignored him, then they laughed at him, then they fought him, then he won.
He first arrived at Disney in 1979 as one of a number of graduates of a character animation course taught by some of the Nine Old Men. (His classmates included Tim Burton, Pixar’s Brad Bird and Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline.)
“But the studio’s creative leadership were kind of the second-tier animators at the end of Walt’s time and they were threatened by us. They had lived for a long time in the shadows of these great Disney animators and finally it was their chance to shine and then, all of sudden, these young whippersnappers started coming in.”
For Lasseter, this meant computer graphics, with which he had become obsessed in the late ’70s and which he was convinced the Disney of old would have embraced. But his employers were less enamoured.
“They were honestly just kind of not really open to it at all. And they were in control and they wanted us to do what we were told. They were following in the footsteps of what came before, but they weren’t really talented and were just trying to maintain control.”
In 1982, Lasseter pitched a fully computer-animated film, based on The Brave Little Toaster, to Ron W Miller the studio’s then-president. The meeting was a disaster and within an hour, he was summoned to the office of Ed Hansen, the animation administrator, and fired.
But Lasseter found kindred spirits at Lucasfilm and spent four years working for the studio’s computer graphics division where, in 1985, he created the stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes.
In 1986, Pixar spun off from Lucasfilm and embarked on its further experiments with computer animation, funded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. But things were getting better at Disney too: Musker and Clements, two more of Lasseter’s classmates on the CalArts program, had stayed the course and in 1989 made The Little Mermaid, which spurred the studio’s second golden age: a burst of what Lasseter calls “big, Broadway, break-out-into-song musicals” that peaked in 1994 with The Lion King.
At the time, Jobs had negotiated an agreement between Pixar and Disney that would lead to Lasseter’s first feature, Toy Story, being jointly produced by both studios. But once the deal had been struck, Lasseter found himself losing control. He and his team would fly from Northern California to present their work to a board of Disney executives, who gave them notes on what they saw:
“Except the notes were mandatory, and we had to do what they said,” Lasseter says. “We were like, ‘OK, they know what they’re doing,’ but at a certain point they were taking the movie down a path that wasn’t our original intention — they wanted it to be edgy, with cynical, unlikeable characters.”
After what Lasseter describes as a “disastrous” work-in-progress screening, Disney shut down production and the Pixar team begged for two weeks to fix things — in effect, to make the film they’d wanted to make all along. The result, hailed as one of the greatest animated films ever made, convinced Disney Pixar knew what it was doing and should ideally be left to it.
They were following in the foot steps of what came before, but they weren’t really talented and were just trying to maintain control. JOHN LASSETER DISNEY CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER