The development of Animation -John Lasseter

John Lasseter is a Disney animator who came from Cal Arts, he helped animate the old classic Fox and the Hound. He found that animation at that time is lacking something, he felt Disney’s animation style is reaching a dead end especially with 101 Dalmatians, all styles, characters and moments were wonderful but they were just the same old thing and nothing was progressing in terms of technology and techniques for the animation.

During the time Lasseter was working on the Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Disney was also creating another animation called ‘Tron.’ John was deeply inspired am thrilled from watching some of the early tests, not because of the quality of work or story but the feel of the 3D dimension feel it has generated. He was so happy and filled with ideas, he found tremendous possibilities with the use of computer generated imagery which he knew it was the future. Lasseter came up with the idea of merging both 3D world and 2D characters where it can move around freely. He was the first person in the world make this happen with the help of Disney animators Glen Keane and Tom Wilhite. He created a 30 second test film called ‘Where the Wild things are’ where it was a combination of a hand drawn character and with a computer generated background. The camera moved like a steady cam shot for the first time in animation, this followed the character in and all around the objects, it clearly shows lots of possibilities with the 3D world even though the matching of colour and textures was not quite there yet, which appears very hard solid and more approaching realism. Lasseter was quite impressed by the work and willing to develop it further and can see the future of animation evolving.

The next dream was to create a feature film using the style and techniques they have developed, they wanted to utilise the techniques for the story ‘Brave Little Toaster’ by Thomas Disch. John Lasseter had contacted other well-known and experienced animators and technicians from the Computer Graphics Industry, others worked from Lucas Films. To make John Lasseter’s dream come true, things didn’t quite go like the way he hoped it to be, things went wrong when he unknowingly has upset a few superiors in effort to stride their dream project. The Idea had been turned down when Lasseter presented his work, then in a few minutes time he got the information that he was fired from the company.

John Lasseter later then joined Lucas Film with Ed Catmul and Alvy Ray Smith and created the very first completed 3D animation short called ‘The Adventures of Andre and Wally Bee.’ This was then later followed by other shorts like ‘Luxo Junior’, ‘Red’s Dream’, ‘Tin Toy’ and ‘Knick Knack.’ After developing more of his skills, he then later moved on creating his dream of making the famous first fully animated movie ‘Toy Story.’ As we all know Pixar was then swallowed by Disney for a few years back for a whopping amount now ‘the man once who got fired from Disney decorates the role of the key decision maker.’ In my opinion, this is the best beautiful gift John can receive.