John Lasseter
John Alan Lasseter is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and animator who currently serves as head of animation at Skydance Animation, a position he has held since 2019. He previously served as chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios, as well as principal creative advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering. He is best known for directing Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Cars, and Cars 2, and for overseeing all of Pixar's films as executive producer through 2018. He began his career as an animator at Disney before joining Lucasfilm's computer graphics division, which Steve Jobs acquired in 1986 and spun off as Pixar.
“Walt left like half of his estate to fund this institution. And it was that... All of them were hired directly by Disney and Disney animation right out of school. And then Disney fired all of them.”
Source→“Pixar was the quiet technical partner behind this—building the software that Disney used and contributing the first 3D-rendered background footage in any Disney animated film (the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast).”
Source→“John's girlfriend at the time comes along with them and she says to them, just think, someday this park is going to be filled with the characters that you guys are going to create. And she had no idea both how right and how wrong she was.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.