John Lasseter Quotations | Page 2

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.

I try to make pictures I would want to see.

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 laugh very hard at work every day.

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

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

I love working for a company full of geeks.

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

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

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

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

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

I promise you we will make films that entertain you the moment the lights go down. We're making Disney the one place you have to work (as an animator).

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

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.

I never understood why you wouldn't start designing a ride when you start making a film so two months after a film comes out you have a ride. I promise you we are not only going to make great motion pictures we are going to make great rides.

I had been working nonstop through the '90s ... and my wife Nancy said, 'Be careful, your boys may go off to college and you will have missed it.

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

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

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

'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.

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.

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

I believe that, by directing, it makes me a better executive as well.

The level of detail, the patina on the road, the peeling paint, the dirt - everything looks so real.

The interstate highway system was built to get people from point A to point B as fast as possible. And they knocked down mountains and filled valleys and made everything nice and big and flat, and they bypassed every town.

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

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. Humor, you can add. Even to the last minute you can be adding little bits of humor. But the true earned emotion is something that you really have to craft.

You make a movie to entertain audiences. That's why you make a movie. The product sales is because people love the characters, and to me, that is a testament to how our movie has become so ingrained in family's homes all around the world and that's why I make movies.

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.

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.

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.

To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry. There are so many great artists out there. And the goal is to make great movies, you know? So to be successful, quality is the best business plan as I always say.

What's fun about the story development at Pixar is it's a journey. You don't just write a script and then that's the movie you make. It's just constant evolution and being open to that and that collaboration with the voice actors and with the artists and animators at Pixar.

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 always felt a little bit like a little kid that's never grown up in the world of adults.

I think that the entertainment industry and the entertainment press tends to focus on opening weekend box office as a measure of the success of a film and I think the true success is out there in people's homes and how much they absolutely love these characters.

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.

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.

I think the painted backgrounds in animations are absolutely stunningly beautiful. There's something really special about this medium. I don't believe audiences have grown past it. I think what audiences love is to be entertained-thoroughly, deeply entertained, and that's what I've always set out to do.

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

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

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.

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.

Every young person gets so excited about new software packages and new technology.

Slice open one of my veins and cartoons will pour out; open another vein and you'll get a flood of motor oil.

The spirit of Route 66 is in the details: every scratch on a fender, every curl of paint on a weathered billboard, every blade of grass growing up through a cracked street.

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

The more we all help each other, the more we all benefit. So go out there. Help others.

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

People have a real love of looking at small worlds - something inside them is innately attracted to that 'miniature' realm.

One of the fun things about play is making up stories...

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.

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

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

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

There is such amazing talent at Disney. My job is 100% creative, and I am very excited to creatively lead them.

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.

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.

You need others. Too often people think that being unique means being isolated, and being a great artist means coming up with genius ideas out of nowhere. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

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

'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.

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

When you make these films, they become like your children. But at a certain point, they don’t belong to you anymore; they belong to the world.

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

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

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.

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

Humor is the easiest to achieve; the 'heart' is always the toughest, because you can't tell people to feel a certain way.

I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?

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.

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.

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

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.

I've always loved animation it's the reason why I do what I do for a living - the films of Walt Disney. This art form is so spectacular and beautiful. And I never quite understood the feeling amongst animation studios that audiences today only wanted to see computer animation. It's never about the medium that a film is made in, it's about the story. It's about how good the movie is.

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

There’s never a wrong idea. You just keep throwing stuff out and inevitably there are elements of different things that inspire a character or environment.

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.

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

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

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.

Your voice is worthwhile. Have faith in it.

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

Quality is the best business plan.

You have to do three things really well to make a successful film. You have to tell a compelling story that has a story that is unpredictable, that keeps people on the edge of their seat where they can't wait to see what happens next. You then populate that story with really memorable and appealing characters. And then, you put that story and those characters in a believable world, not realistic but believable for the story that you're telling.

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