Pixar Animation on The South Bank Show – Preview

From Toy Story to The Princess and the Frog – ITV1 Documentary

Oct 8, 2009

John Lasseter and his creative team talk about story, creating animation magic and being inspired by Disney on ITV1's The South Bank Show.

Once upon a time there was a magic studio brought low by phoney executives who turned out forgotten flops such as Atlantis, The Emperor’s New Groove and Treasure Planet.

Then, in 2006, a knight in garish Hawaiian shirt and glasses came along, took the ‘creative’ execs to lunch and told them, ‘If you don’t draw, you don’t belong here.’ And moviegoers lived happily ever after…

ITV1's The South Bank Show, which celebrates the Pixar-inspired renaissance in animation and at Disney Studios, interviews that brightly-clad knight, John Lasseter, Oscar-winner and the creative force behind such much-adored modern classics as Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc and Ratatouille (Sunday, 11 October 2009).

While the programme also talks to many in Pixar’s gifted team, it is really Lasseter’s story. It traces how he went from award-winning student at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), to being the Disney animator fired for his pushy belief in computer animation, to Pixar founder and onto his eventual comeback as Disney’s chief creative officer when the studios merged in 2006.

It also gives fascinating insights into the creative processes behind Pixar’s gems – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Wall.E, and through to its latest, Up. But while every computer-animated Pixar film has enjoyed critical and commercial success, Lasseter & co have not allowed their output to stagnate, and The South Bank Show offers tasty snatches of the upcoming The Princess and the Frog, which marks Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation.

Lasseter says that his only worry has been ‘about becoming complacent’ by thinking that ‘we know what we’re doing’. His and Pixar’s obsession with the importance of story over technology and marketing in moviemaking also comes through loud and clear.

Which is ironic, because when Lasseter saw the early, crude computer-generated effects in Disney’s 1982 movie Tron, he became enthralled by the technology’s potential.

Try as he might to interest his bosses in pursuing it at that time, however, Disney eventually kicked him out for pushing a computer-animated project. So Lasseter did his own thing, co-founding Pixar and thrilling audiences with his first feature, Toy Story. This huge hit broke new ground as the first computer-animated, feature-length movie, but it was more essentially a wonderful buddy story, sophisticated, witty but with emotional clout.

By the time Lasseter had taken control at Disney the orthodoxy had changed, and drawn animation had been dropped after Home on the Range in 2004.

But Lasseter was not fixated on computer or hand-drawn animation, only how they are used to project story. So one of the first things he did (along with kicking out dead-weight executives) was to recall Ron Clements and John Musker, two of the old guard who worked on The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, to direct The Princess and the Frog.

Trumpet-Playing Alligator

With its trumpet-playing alligator, jazzy show tunes and beautiful animation, this looks like rekindling Disney’s magic and being a surefire hit.

‘In Hollywood, everybody wants to play it safe,’ Lasseter says in this documentary, relying on ‘what was popular last year’.

Creative Process

The South Bank Show does a good job in revealing how Pixar avoids the complacency of marketing focus groups and lame sequels, and how much loving craft the studio’s ‘movie junkies’ pour into these films.

Pete Docter, a Pixar writer/director, talks about the studio’s creative process – idea to script, storyboards (‘We can redo a sequence 40 times’), designing characters, casting actors, special effects and lighting (which was quite beautifully rendered in Wall.E).

Greatest Storyteller

But even he comes back to story, revealing that making Up was a five-year process, with three-and-a-half years going into perfecting the story.

Lasseter says, ‘Quality is the best business plan.’ But perhaps Bruce Vaughn, the chief Disney Imagineer, puts it better – ‘John is one of the greatest storytellers of our age.’

The copyright of the article Pixar Animation on The South Bank Show – Preview in Hollywood Animated Films is owned by Robin Jarossi. Permission to republish Pixar Animation on The South Bank Show – Preview in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.