John Lasseter

You can achieve all the things you want to do, but it's much better to do it with loved ones around you; family and friends, people that you care about that can help you on the way and can celebrate you, and you can enjoy the journey.

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.

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

People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don't have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there's this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.

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

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

In dire economic times, movies are relatively inexpensive entertainment for the whole family.

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

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

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 love Japan. I love the collision of the modern and ancient worlds coming together in that place. It's so high-tech and cool.

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

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

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 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.

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.

I'm a car nut. My father was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership.

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.

You cannot base a whole movie on just the imagery alone. It has to be the story and the characters.

I loved animation and cartoons, even when it was not cool when you were in high school. I raced home to see the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

'Bambi' is an amazing film, and when you watch it today, it's just as beautiful. It's timeless. It's just as beautiful today as it was back then.

When I look at the success I have, it's because of my creative-thinking skills.

I love working for a company full of geeks.

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

It's the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear.

In computer animation, every detail has to be thought out, designed, modeled, shaded, placed and lit. The more you add, the more computer memory you need.

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.

There was a period of time when they estimated the two biggest stars in Hollywood were Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse.

To take full advantage of computer animation, you have to pay as much attention to the believable as you do the unbelievable.

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

When I was a freshman in high school, I read a book about the making of Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty' called 'The Art of Animation.' It was this weird revelation for me, because I hadn't considered that people actually get paid to make cartoons.

At Pixar, after every movie we have postmortum meetings where we discuss what worked and what didn't work.

I believe once you watch a Miyazaki film, you'll get hooked.

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.

Art challenges technology, but technology inspires the art.

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.

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

I love bringing the inanimate object to life.

Walt Disney always said, 'For every laugh, there should be a tear.' I believe in that.

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

I've got Disney blood running through my veins.

Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.

I am, by nature, an honest person. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. There is no 'behind closed doors' with me.

Pixar has been compared to fine furniture makers who polish the backs of drawers - even if you don't see everything in a particular scene, you still feel that every little detail has been met.

'Bolt' was made by Walt Disney Animation Studios, not by Pixar.

I realized that people make cartoons for a living. It had never dawned on me that you could do this as a career.

I've noticed with my own kids, it seems like they have so much more homework than I did.

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.

'Cars 2' is about a character learning to be himself. There's times in our lives where people always say, 'Well, you've gotta act differently. You should always be yourself.' That's the emotional core of the story.

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

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.

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

'Finding Nemo' was originally shot in 3D.

I have motor oil running through my veins.

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.

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

Quality is the best business plan.

I think 'Disney Infinity' is exciting. It's hard to even call it a video game, because it's so different. What excites me about this is how it's going to put more and more of what happens in the game into the hands of the user; it's up to them. You can play it to where everything's laid out for you.

Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience. Our challenge is to make stories that connect for kids and adults.

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

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.

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

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

Look at the films of Walt Disney: 'Snow White' came out in February 1938, and I can't think of another film from that year that's watched as much. The same is true of 'Bambi,' 'Dumbo'... even, frankly, 'Toy Story,' which is probably watched more than any other movie of 1995.

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

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.

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

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

When you take something that's inert, and through motion, give it life, make it appear to be alive, living, breathing thinking and having emotions, that's animation. But when you take something that's live-action, and move a part of it, that's a special effect.

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.

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

I've often heard people say that managing creative people is the hardest thing in the world. 'They're never happy, they drive up the cost of things, blah blah blah.' I just manage people the way I always wanted to be managed. That is, to be creatively challenged, but never to be told what to do.

I can't tell you, as a parent, how it feels when the doctor tells you your child has diabetes. First off, you don't really know much about it. Then you discover there is no cure.

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.

Toys are put on this Earth to be played with by a child.

I love 3-D. I have been a big fan of 3-D for a long, long time. I took my 1988 wedding pictures in 3-D!

Rotten Tomatoes is such a great website, in that it has one foot in the Internet world and one foot in the cinema world, and it keeps its grounding between them just perfectly.

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.'

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.

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.

Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.

My brother liked sewing and sculpting and making things, and my sister sewed and painted and cooked and baked. She's a professional baker now and makes the most gorgeous sculpture-like cakes. She's the queen of wedding cakes in the Lake Tahoe area.

The specific influences on villains to me is, I love the villains who are really hyper-smart. When at the end of the movie you find out what they were about, and it makes absolutely perfect sense from their point of view.

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

We make the kind of movies we like to watch. I love to laugh. I love to be amazed by how beautiful it is. But I also love to be moved to tears. There's lots of heart in our films.

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.

Car love is the sound of a throaty V-8 rumbling and revving, the acceleration throwing you back in the seat - especially when you get on a beautiful, winding road and the light's dappling through the trees.

The magic of Disneyland, walking through the tunnel underneath the train station to Main Street, it just transports you to other places and other times.

For me, personally, I will always do G-rated films, which the world needs more of.

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

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

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

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 would get so into playing as a kid that I'd lose track of time.

I love the work of Hayao Miyazaki. 'My Neighbor Totoro' and 'Castle in the Sky' are two of the great films that he's made that I just love.

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.

The magic of Disneyland walking through the tunnel underneath the train station to Main Street it just transports you to other places and other times.

When you're a director, you really live whatever you do.

I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.

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