Just as he was putting the finishing touches to his latest opus, cars, John Lasseter's animation company Pixar was gobbled up by Disney for a mind-boggling sum. Hugh Linehan talks to the cartoon enthusiast about his new movie and his new role as head of Disney's troubled animation division
'OH C'MON!" John Lasseter looks at me in grave disappointment. I feel as though I've let him down - badly. The European press interviews for Lasseter's new movie, Cars, are taking place in Barcelona on the weekend of the Spanish Grand Prix, and the organisers had organised tickets for the press pack to attend that noisy event. I've just admitted that I'd rather visit the dentist than go to a Formula One race, and had spent the day strolling around the city instead. "The spectacle was pretty amazing," the burly, forceful director, clad in his trademark Hawaiian shirt insists. "Unlike you, I love racing."
This will come as no surprise to anyone watching Cars, Lasseter's fourth feature film as a director, and the seventh from Pixar Animation, the hugely successful company of which he is creative kingpin. Toy Story 1 and 2; A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles: taken together, those six films amount to one of the longest winning streaks in the history of American movies. As you may have guessed from its title, Cars aims to do the same for, well, cars.
Lasseter loves the damn things. If you want to talk emissions, global warming, road deaths, social fragmentation. . . you've come to the wrong place.
"I grew up in Los Angeles, and cars are such a way of life there," he says. "There's a saying that when you see someone's home, that's who they are. But when you see their car, that's who they want to be. It's so much about image and cars are such a part of that. But I also grew up in a family where my dad was a parts manager for a Chevrolet dealership. I loved going to the dealership when the new cars came out. I've always loved cars. Part of it is that I love auto design, old and new. And the history is really interesting. And I love driving too. Whether it's a family car trip or just me driving along a country road."
That's clear enough, then. And Lasseter's enthusiasm is infectious, even to a carphobe like myself. Still, there's something rather disappointing about the new movie. It's not just that Pixar's gags seem to have lost some of their zing, or that the characters' expressiveness is limited by Lasseter's insistence that they should conform realistically to the steel-and-glass rigidity of their manufacture. It's also the storyline and theme.
"The initial idea of this movie was that the cars are characters," says Lasseter. "Then we thought: let's try to create a world where there are no humans, just cars. We had fun thinking of how to make that world believable. We were thinking of what humans need and what cars need and trying to find connections. So a restaurant is to humans as a gas station is to cars."
Set in a world where everyone is a car (insects are tiny flying VW Beetles; cows are big, dozy tractors), the film tells the tale of Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a young racer challenging for top spot in the Piston Cup, a Nascar-type event which takes place in huge arenas in front of thousands of other cars. En route from East Coast to West between races, McQueen finds himself stranded in the sleepy desert town of Radiator Springs, a former waystation along Route 66 which has been left to moulder since the new interstate motorway was built (think Kinnegad in 2020). Initially scornful of the hicks and has-beens who populate the town, McQueen slowly (very, very slowly) comes to realise that their traditional values and loyalty to each other are worth admiring and cherishing.
As you would expect from Pixar, all of this is detailed in ravishingly beautiful animation. But it's all a bit soggy and sentimental. That particular sub-genre of American contemporary cinema in which shallow coastal sophisticates reconnect with traditional homeland values is always a little hard to take, and one wonders how well the film will travel outside the US. If Toy Story 2 was about mortality, and The Incredibles about midlife crises, Cars, unfortunately, isn't about much more than America's autoerotic love affair with its own fantasy of itself.
It has to be said, though, that Lasseter's own affection for both subject and theme is clearly heartfelt. "I always say it's really important to choose a subject matter for a movie that's something you really love," he says. "Because then the research is just fun, which is really important, if you're working in an art form where it takes four years to make a film. So out of that came racing, which I found so exciting, then Route 66, these old highway towns which were bypassed by the interstate. It was an era in the post-war US where everything modern was good and everything old was bad, and they just threw the baby out with the bathwater in certain aspects of life."
In 2001, Lasseter and his family climbed into a motorhome and set out on a two-month trip with the goal of travelling from the Pacific to the Atlantic while staying off the interstate highways. For Lasseter, it was an opportunity to turn away from work and reconnect with his wife and children. "And I learned that the journey in life is its own reward, and I just let the story start from that."
The sleepiness of the Radiator Springs sequences contrasts with the Piston Cup races, which are screamingly loud and fast (though that might be my racing-car phobia again). As ever, Lasseter and his team were meticulous in their visual research in creating a world which took the real textures of NASCAR and married them with the fantasy of cars as people. "In this world he's an athlete," says Lasseter of Lightning McQueen. "We wanted him to have a natural ability when we animated him. Nascar drivers came to Pixar and told us about racecar driving and what you do when you're driving. And I took racedriving classes. We wanted it to be animated like a real racecar, with that speed of 200 miles an hour. But then on top of that, we wanted it to come alive with a real sense of style. We looked a lot at snowboarding, surfing and skateboarding, the way a surfer drops down a wave and then comes up. You don't just copy one thing, but you get inspired by them."
In recent months, Lasseter has been mentioned as much in the business sections as the entertainment ones. The dramatic deal whereby Disney purchased Pixar for a whopping $7.4 billion, in the process putting Pixar CEO Steve Jobs on the Disney board and Lasseter in charge of Disney's troubled animation division, has provoked much debate and comment. It can't have helped that this huge deal was being brokered just as Lasseter was putting the finishing touches to Cars?
"By that time, most of the major creative decisions were behind me," he says. "I'm not going to say it was easy, because this film was very challenging. But I'm glad it didn't happen a year earlier."
He's already started in his Disney role. So, with that job located in Los Angeles, will he be able to keep running Pixar, which is located in an understatedly palatial Bay Area headquarters in northern California, more Silicon Valley than Tinseltown? "Well, I'll be going down there every week, probably two days a week at Disney, three days at Pixar. My job is not on the computer, it's not on the phone, it's with the director, the story crew, looking at stuff, talking, encouraging, that kind of thing, so I can't be remote."
I wonder what kinds of changes the new boss has in mind. "We're just getting started there. There's really great artists at Disney - directors, animators, artists - and we're helping them make their movies the best they can be, the same way I work with directors at Pixar. But Pixar is the only studio in the industry that's director-driven and not executive-driven. At most studios, executives decide what movie they're going to make and then they hire people to direct. With Pixar, a story like Cars comes out of the heart of the director, even though we all work collaboratively to make it."
Which raises the question of whether Pixar's director-centric approach will be imported into Disney. But Lasseter is far too savvy to give anything away yet.
"I am excited to work with the artists down at Disney and I don't know where that'll take me," he flatly declares.
Well, what about classical, hand-drawn animation, which has now pretty much disappeared in Hollywood? In some quarters, Pixar, with its big, bad computers, was (wrongly) accused of causing the demise of classical animation. It was always a stupid charge - anyone who looked at the actual films could see that the difficulties with Disney's more recent hand-drawn movies lay in the film-making rather than the technology. Does Lasseter think we'll see more classical animation? "Yes, there is a future," he confidently declares. "There's no question of that. It's so odd to me that the studios would decide that audiences don't want to watch hand-drawn animation any more. Imagine a live action studio that's had a string of not so successful films deciding: 'that's it - we're not going to make a movie with this camera anymore. Clearly people don't want to watch movies made with this camera.' It would be ridiculous, but this is exactly the same thing."
Perhaps he's right, but the history of movies is full of technological revolutions: sound, colour, widescreen. Many started off as fads; some, like 3-D, fell by the wayside, but others took hold and obliterated their predecessors. Is there not a good chance that hand-drawn animation will go the way of, say, black and white cinematography, relegated to the margins? Lasseter doesn't think so.
"Andrew Stanton, who made Finding Nemo, said it best: 2-D animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling. To me it's about telling good stories, and marrying the subject matter with your medium to make a world that's believable to your audience. We love computer animation at Pixar; we've invented much of it. Toy Story was made at a time when computer animation technology tended to make everything look plastic. We didn't have the sophistication we do now. All the subjects - cars, bugs, monsters, toys, lent themselves to our medium at the time we were making them. But look at the work of Hayao Miyazaki [the Japanese director of Spirited Away] and tell me people can't make 2-D animation anymore."
Cars opens next Friday
