John Lasseter Quotes

I have this saying. Quality is the best business plan. I believe so strongly in that.

I was born in 1957, so when I was a kid, there wasn't anything called a video game. When 'Pong' came out, it was awesome.

Your voice is worthwhile. Have faith in it.

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.

Animation, for me, is a wonderful art form. I never understood why the studios wanted to stop making animation. Maybe they felt that the audiences around the world only wanted to watch computer animation. I didn't understand that, because I don't think ever in the history of cinema did the medium of a film make that film entertaining or not. What I've always felt is, what audiences like to watch are really good movies.

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

I don't believe that an animation studio should be an executive-driven studio.

To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry.

Probably more than any other movie we've made here at Pixar, 'Up' was the one we were the most nervous about.

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them, 'Ok, be sad now.'

Every technology that comes into filmmaking is first a gimmick. Think about sound with 'The Jazz Singer' or the first colour or surround sound - it takes a while for filmmakers to understand how to use it.

The way the films look will never entertain an audience alone. It has to be in the service of a good story with great characters.

Of all bugs, growing up I just loved the pill bugs. They roll up, you play with them, you wait for them to open up, and then when you touch them they roll up again. I just love that.

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.

I think that as I had children, I have five sons, and they got into video games and were the prime ages through the development of video games. It was so much fun seeing them play the games and seeing it through their eyes.

I was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.

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

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.

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.

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

Every movie has three things you have to do - you have to have a compelling story that keeps people on the edge of their seats; you have to populate that story with memorable and appealing characters; and you have to put that story and those characters in a believable world. Those three things are so vitally important.

Pixar films are not realistic. They are believable for the worlds we are creating.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

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.

A gem of a short film has a sense of pure joy in animation that is different from anything you see in a feature film.

When you can have a character that the audience likes from the beginning, but then you put them in a situation where they grow - I think that gives it a lot of heart.

Every animator is really an actor performing in slow motion, living the character a drawing at a time.

I've got Disney blood running through my veins.

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

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.

I laugh very hard at work every day.

I always loved the idea of a spy movie and part of it came from my personal love of spy movies. It started when I was growing up as a little kid in the 60s.

I love the Sonoma wine community. It's like Pixar - nothing competitive, only supportive. They're always rooting for you.

I have met a lot of top chefs around the world during my travels. Each one of them has said 'Ratatouille' is their favorite movie and the only movie that truly captures what they do.

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

I just devoured all of his [Buster Keaton's] films because his sense of comic timing was amazing. He's the closest a human being has ever come to a cartoon character. And I was just amazed at his sense of character and timing, the humor. It's all just so ... sophisticated, even when you watch it today.

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

It's so important to create in your own voice, to hold onto what makes you unique, and have faith in your vision.

I'm really proud of 'Cars.' 'Cars,' when it first came out, got probably the most mediocre reviews of a Pixar film.

Quality is the best business plan.

I'm the biggest fan of animation. I love the history of animation, I know it well.

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.

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.

As a filmmaker, I'm very collaborative. I don't pretend to know everything that is needed to make a movie. What I like to do is get together with a group of people, starting with developing the story and bounce around ideas.

It [moviemaking] is about entertaining audiences with great characters and great stories, you want to make people laugh, you want to make people cry, you want to have great music that is memorable. You want a movie that, as soon as it's over, you want to watch it again, just like that. That's what it is, whether it's live-action, animation, hand drawn, computer, special effects, puppet animation, it doesn't matter. That's the goal of a filmmaker.

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

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

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.

Animation is the only thing I ever wanted to do in my whole life. I have no desire for live-action or anything else.

I'm a big Disneyland nut.

The only thing Steve Jobs has ever asked me in all the years we've been together and have been partners, the only thing he has ever asked me is: 'Make it great.'

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.

Art challenges technology, but technology inspires the art.

This is what I always tell my filmmakers-you have to do tons of research, because you don't know where the inspiration is going come from.

I believe God is in the details.

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.

You know, going to the movies has always been recession-proof. It's fairly cheap entertainment; it's classic escapism.

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.

Pixar is not about computers, it's about people.

Nobody pays attention to the way a person's shirt folds around his shoulder when they sit down, but if that shirt folded in an unusual way, you'd notice it.

In an animated film you can do whatever you want, but that doesn't mean you should do everything you want.

When you go into the theatre and the lights dim, you want to entertain people from beginning to end. You want them to be swept up in your story, on the edge of their seats, unable to wait to see what happens next, be blown away and afterwards just go, 'Wow!'

The spy genre is something I loved.It also extends to the bad guy because I think, to me, what I love the most about the spy genre is when you have a great bad guy. What makes a great bad guy, to me, is the logic. What he's about has to make sense to me, that if I was in his shoes, yeah, right, that makes sense.

I'm a big fan of pantomime storytelling, being an animator.

If you can think about it, you can create it.

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

Everything I do and everything Pixar does is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.

At Pixar, 'Wall-E' was our ninth film, and they've all been successes - more than that, they've all really touched people. Everybody wonders, 'How do you do it?' Well, how do you not do it? You just work hard.

We work very hard in all of the Pixar films to not make anything in the imagery that causes people to think of something other than the story.

Of all studios that should be doing 2-D animation, it should be Disney.

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.

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.

I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.

One of the big technical advances that's really great looking is the water.

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

I think the best movie ever made was 'Dumbo.'

I believe in research you cannot do enough research; believability comes out of what's real.

I believe in the nobility of entertaining people and I take great, great pride that people are willing to give me two or three hours of their busy lives.

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.

The closer you get to reality, the harder it is to make it look convincing to the audience. That's why I tend to make things [films] that are a little bit more caricature.

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

I love French auto design of the early '50s, '60s, early '70s of Citorens, Renaults, and Peugeots. They're so unique.

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

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

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

I've always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early '80s.

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

Every Pixar movie at one time was the worst motion picture ever made.

What I love about Goofy is the flesh on his cheeks. You can almost feel it.

I love working for a company full of geeks.

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.'

I don't really think of myself as a businessman at all. That's why I have the 'chief creative officer' role.

One of the things about animation is it's so expensive to do the animation, that you can't produce coverage. You only have one chance to make every shot.

Disney Infinity gives you the ability to be creative in a way that nobody's ever seen before.

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

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

Directing is one of my favourite things to do because I love telling stories and I love working with the individual artists and it's something that I really missed.

If you've seen 'Spirited Away', 'Spirited Away' is set in a very, very Japanese sensibility. And so, to Japanese audiences, when Sen would walk up, the main character, and look at this big building with a flag on it with Japanese writing on it, everyone in Japan would know what that is.

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.