 Good evening, everyone. My name is Caroline Bowman. I'm the director of Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum and Thank you. Thank you. And I am absolutely delighted to welcome all of you here for our Design by Hand design talk with Pixar's John Lasseter. This really is the event of the season and to accommodate demand we decided to host tonight's design talk in Museo Del Barrio's stunning El Teatro, which seats a few more people than Cooper Hewitt's lecture room. Tickets sold so fast, not even Woody and Buzz Lightyear could get their hands on them. And I think when I was coming in I saw sadness outside weeping. I don't know. Seriously though, John is a legend and it was something else to witness the teenagers today following him as we walked through the Cooper Hewitt. Design by Hand is Cooper Hewitt's series of workshops and conversations dedicated to the exploration of the vital role of the human hand in the design process. Many thanks to our partner Van Cleef and Arpels and thanks to them we have brought the designers of iconic firms like Mari Mekko, Heath Ceramics, Ralph Rucci and now Pixar Animation Studios to the museum to lead hands-on workshops for all ages as well as to take part in public discussions. Pixar of course is the perfect fit for our Design by Hand series and when you visit our installation Pixar, the design of story at Cooper Hewitt, just a few blocks south of here, you see why. Exploring the more than 600 preparatory drawings, paintings and sculptures Pixar designers have created by hand to make their classic films and that are now installed on our digital tables and in our process lab. You really see that. No matter how technologically advanced we become as designers, the hand remains critical to the creative process. Tonight's conversation coincides with the launch of an exciting three days of immersive learning at Cooper Hewitt with members of Pixar's creative team. In fact, just this morning over 84th and 5th graders from PS 102 in East Harlem took part in a Pixar led workshop where they sculpted dinosaurs and designed their own inside out characters. The students were simply enthralled with the design process and amazed to learn how hard Pixar designers work on each film project. When told how much time it took Pixar to create inside out, one student said, four years, that's how long I've been in school. I'd like to give a very warm thank you to Pixar's talented Brim Imagiri, Chris Sasaki and Albert Lozano for sharing their expertise with our Design by Hand workshop participants. And I have to give a shout out to our curatorial director, Cara McCarty and deputy director of education, Kim Roblita Diga. It was very funny today after meeting with John at the museum. Kim said to me, working on this Pixar project with the Pixar team and meeting John Lasseter today, I have to give my resignation. I can't get any better than this, which I just loved. Special thanks as well to our dear friends at Van Cleef and Arpels for their generous support of Design by Hand. Alain Bernard, president and CEO of Van Cleef and Arpels in the Americas has created a special video message for us tonight, which I'd like to share with you now. Good evening and welcome. I am Alain Bernard, president and CEO of Van Cleef and Arpels in the Americas. On behalf of Van Cleef and Arpels, we are proud to welcome you tonight as we continue our partnership with the Cooper Hewitts to bring you the fourth installment of the Design by Hand series, Pixar, the design of Story. The development of Design by Hand was born out of the museum and the Maison's shared belief in the importance of the Design by Hand process and the mutual desire to preserve interest and awareness on exceptional craftsmanship across the arts. In many ways, the Pixar's approach to design is much like our own creative process at Van Cleef and Arpels. While the link between hydrary and animation may seem unlikely, and our tools may be quite different, our co-objective is the same. We are both in the business of bringing imagination to life. Each of our creations begins with a story, one that captivates imaginations and captures our emotions. Each stage of the design process calls upon exceptional talents, true masters of their craft, who rely on innovative techniques and parallel expertise to transform these ideas into their own forms of art. In the end, our creations present our own unique and positive vision of the world, where butterflies and ballerinas are transformed into precious jewels, and where our childhood toys, curious robots, and good dinosaurs are transformed into cherished characters. A vision of the world as it should be, not always as it is. We really want to extend our thanks to a few people in the room tonight who have made this evening possible. To Caroline Bowman and the Cooper Hewitt for continuing to be champions of design through educational programs such as Design by Hand, to Michael Beirut for leading this evening's discussion, and of course to John Lasseter and Pixar Animation for allowing us an inside look at your design process and reminding all of us all that great art begins with a great imagination. Thank you very much and have a great evening. We are really missing our friends at Van Cleef tonight. We wouldn't be here without them and we really thank the whole team at Van Cleef from the bottom of our hearts. Great design does indeed begin with a great imagination, but few possess an imagination that compares to the brilliance of John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. It has been a long dream of ours to bring John to Cooper Hewitt to share his singular vision. During my recent unforgettable tour of the Pixar campus, what really struck me were the designer's studios which reflected the designer's creative spirit, like nowhere else I've seen. And John's office stops you in your tracks when you see every inch filled with his marvelous collection of antique and contemporary toys. It has become part of film history that in 1986, when John showed Pixar's new studio owner Steve Jobs the storyboards for his first computer generated short tin toy, Jobs gave but one comment, all I ask of you John is to make it great and boy did he ever. Both in his storytelling and his use of technology, Lasseter showed the world that computer animation could be just as emotional and exquisite as any classically animated feature. And since winning an Oscar for his first feature tour story in 1995, John has animated, written, directed, produced and even acted. Yes I said acted, how do you think animators make their characters so lifelike in one classic movie after another? When The Good Dinosaur opens later this month, it will be Pixar's 16th feature film and as with every Pixar animated feature, the realness of Arlo's world will be breathtaking and the story of a dinosaur and his boy will move you to tears. John will be in conversation tonight with Michael Beirut, another design genius and a dear friend of mine and of Cooper Hewitt. A graphic designer, author, design critic and educator, as well as a partner in the International Design Consultancy Pentagram, Beirut was the recipient of Cooper Hewitt's Design Mind Award at the National Design Awards in 2008. It is now my enormous pleasure to welcome John and Michael to the stage. There was a big, big debate before you guys came in is to, there was a big, big debate before you guys all came in is to, should I sit under Woody or Buzz? And Michael sit under Woody or Buzz so, I let you choose. He kind of looks like Buzz doesn't he? So John, thank you so much for joining us this evening. So glad to be here. If you haven't seen the Pixar Design by Hand at the Cooper Hewitt Museum exhibit, you have got to go see it. It is, I'm really proud of it that Pixar team working with the incredible Cooper Hewitt team has done a great exhibit and it's very inspiring. It's beautiful and, you know, with Cooper Hewitt and our country's National Design Museum, it delivers more thinking about what design is and what it can do in more concentrated a space than I think anywhere in the world probably. So it's really an amazing thing. Well worth your time and you'll be able to spend a lot of time there. Trust me. John. Yes. When you were little, what did you want to be? When I was little, my mom was an art teacher and so all I really cared about was drawing, you know, in painting and whatever. My mom would bring home at the end of the school year, all of the kind of paints and things that would kind of dry out and the old construction paper and board and we would just draw and do stuff. And so I always loved cartoons as a kid, even when I was growing up when I should have been into girls or cars or sports. I still loved cartoons. I would quietly race home with my best friend and we'd sit and watch Bugs Bunny cartoons at 4.30 every afternoon. And I just love that. And so when I was a freshman in high school, I read a book called The Art of Animation by Bob Thomas and it talked about how Walt Disney made animated films and it dawned on me. And seriously, I never even considered that people actually make cartoons for a living. You actually could get paid money to draw cartoons for the rest of your life. That's what I want to do. And my mom blessed her heart. I mean, I was kind of rare to have a mother who really felt that the arts was a noble profession because she really felt that way. It was her whole life of being an art teacher and she said, you know, that's a great goal to have. And I said I want to work for Walt Disney Studios and be an animator. She goes, that's a great goal to have. And from that point on, that's the only thing I've ever wanted to do. Do you remember the first movie you saw that really kind of moved you that sort of like transformed you in a theater? Right after I read that book, The Art of Animation, I remember going to see, and for all you young people, you didn't experience this world, before there was a home video, yes, there was a before. There was such things as a first run movie theater, then there was kind of the general movie theaters, the second run and so on. And then there was always your last run movie theater, the budget one. And for me, it was I grew up in Whittier, California. It was a Wardman theater, Uptown Whittier, 49 cents to get in. And you knew when it stopped, when it left the Wardman theater, you were never going to see the movie ever again in your life. And I remember a re-release of The Sword in the Stone, the Disney animated film was at the Wardman. And I begged my mom to take me up there, she dropped me off, I went in by myself, I sat and watched that. And I had seen cartoons my whole life and loved them. But it was now with this new realization that this was an art form that people actually created. And I looked up there and it was just pure magic to me. And I remember coming out and sitting in the car, my mom picked me up and that's when I said, I want to work for Disney. I want to be an animator. She said, John, Johnny, she always called me Johnny, that's a great goal to have. And I just was filled with it. And so that to me always has a special place in my heart. But my favorite movie of all time is Dumbo. I think Dumbo is like, what do you like about it? It's not a near perfect film. The more that I always loved it because it was so funny. And I always thought how amazing to have a main character that actually never speaks a word through the whole movie. I thought that was really interesting. It's the most cartoony of all the Disney films, which I love. And it's also very short. It's just over an hour long. And it's so concise, storytelling. But the more I learned about animation and storytelling and filmmaking, the more that I realized how tight the story was and stuff. So even the more that I learned, the more I loved the movie. And as you talk about that character never saying a word, I think immediately of films like Up and Wally that have prolonged almost movie, tell a whole movie's worth of story in the first few minutes without saying a word. It's a really remarkable thing to be able to do. And you would say that's in a way the essence of storytelling. Yeah, because one of my mentors whose work really, really always inspired me was Chuck Jones, who was a great Warner Brothers cartoon director. And he always said, John, great animation. You should turn the sound off and still be able to tell what's going on. And that's always been sort of as I've made films myself and then overseen the films that Pixar and Disney animation. It's my big mantra to all the filmmakers is like, how can we tell the story visually? And it's the dialogue and the voices and all like that. It's great, but telling the story visually. And if you, you know, all of the short films we've made at Pixar, most of them in Disney now as well, most of them are told without any dialogue at all. Yeah, Luxo Jr., which is on view. You can go watch Luxo Jr. like any time the museum is open, it's on continuous view right next to the exhibit as part of the exhibit. And our new movie, The Good Dinosaur, is probably our most... I'm so proud of this. It's in a weird way. We've made very brave movies before in the sense of doing something no one else has ever done before. But this is really special, this film. There's a simplicity to it that was really hard to get. And there's only dialogue in 20% of the film. I mean, it's pretty amazing and one of the main characters, the little boy character, and it actually never says a word the entire time. And it's really, but I would say it's one of our most emotional films. You know, Pixar's made some emotional movies. Don't you think? Yeah. This one's gonna gut you. Bring the hankies. Yeah, I'm warning you. No, I heard there was gonna be that little preview before and I brought my handkerchief and used it actually myself so I can vouch for that. It's a little tangent. I think I read somewhere that one of the directors you admire most is Preston Sturges. Oh yeah. But he's extremely verbal. All that rapid fire of screwball comedy back and forth. I mean, what do you admire about that? Well, it's his strength of character. The incredible, he creates characters that are incredibly smart. Incredibly witty and very, very, very clever. I would say also there is a moment, I saw a film of his when I was at Cal Arts and I had never seen it before and it had such a profound effect on me. It was Sullivan's Travels. And do you guys know Sullivan's Travels? If you don't, please go see this film. It's a remarkable film. It's very, very funny. Preston Sturges made really, really funny movies. And daring movies too for the time. Yeah. This movie though is really exceptional. There's a, it's about, the main character is like a Steven Spielberg like director. Like the most famous director in Hollywood for his comedies and his feel good movies. And it's the depression. And he's feeling so guilty because all these people are out of work and stuff. And he says, I want to make a drama. I want to make a great American drama. And it goes on the road. He decides to do a thing where he becomes a hobo with his friend to see what it's like. Well, they turn it into a big publicity stunt and there's a giant bus with all these press behind him as he's walking down the street with a knapsack on. I said, this isn't going to work. So he needs for him just in the middle of the night, ditch. And they just disappear, you know, in a railroad yard. But immediately he's mugged and his jacket is stolen from him and it had his identification in it sewn into the lining. And the guy who mugged him got killed in a train accident. And so they thought that this great, great, great filmmaker, Sullivan had died and they did this giant Hollywood funeral for him and all like that. Meanwhile, he wakes up knocked out on a train in the south and he's arrested for being a hobo and trespassing on a train and he's thrown into a work prison. And no one believes that who he is because the guy just died and they had this funeral for him and so they don't believe. So he's stuck. But the profound moment comes later on. He's had a miserable time in this prison and Christmas Eve, he and his fellow prisoners are invited to, in the segregated south, to a black church to sit and have a Christmas Eve, you know, worship and then afterwards they pull out a projector and they show a Pluto cartoon. The famous one where he gets his paws stuck on the fly paper. Very legendary, great cartoon. It's really funny. And in the depths of their misery, both the parishioners of this church and the prisoners, they're laughing hysterically. And he realized the power of movies to deeply entertain people and for a moment in their life take them out of their daily lives and they get lost in this pure entertainment and he sees the importance of what he does and how entertainment is actually a good thing. And when I saw this, and it starts, he figures out a clever way, I'm not going to tell you how, but to get back and then they say, oh my goodness, you've had such a horrible existence, you clearly got great material to do a drama like you wanted to and he goes, no, I'm going to make comedies. That's what this world needs. And it had such a profound effect on me because I've always been so deeply moved by the films of Walt Disney. It's why I do what I want to do. That very special entertainment that only Walt Disney was able to do and I just really want to do that. But when I saw that movie, it just really affected me so deeply saying that's what I want to do. And it was, I was already at animation school at Cal Arts but this really had a profound effect. And by the way, you just heard John Lasseter pitch a movie to you. So many have not had that privilege. Thank you, John, even though it was made 60 years ago or so. It's fantastic. Can you talk about Cal Arts a little bit? Yeah. Talk about your first day there, your arrival there, what you were expecting and what you found. Cal Arts, I was very, very fortunate. I graduated high school in 1975 and I know to all you young people, yes, yes, we had pencils and paper. It wasn't, we weren't carving on stone back then. I know it's a long time we go to you, but I was really fortunate. I had written to the Walt Disney studios and sent them my drawings and say I'm really interested in becoming a Disney animator. They were great. They invited me over. They walked me around the studio. They introduced me to the animators and they were so excited to have a young person really interested. And they, at that point in time, they recommended, you know, this, I think it was probably a software in high school at this point, and they recommended to me to take a great grounded art education, just a general art education, then come to the studio and they would teach me animation, right? Because there was really no animation schools that taught their style. And so I said, that's what I'm going to do. And then I got a letter in my senior year of high school saying that they were starting a Disney-style character animation program at California Institute of the Arts, which was a school that Disney helped found with combining Shenard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory Music together in one school. And they were going to start it. And they invited me to submit a portfolio. And I couldn't believe this. So I submitted a portfolio. It was the second person accepted to the program. And so we started that class. And they made the first couple of years classes out of young people that had been writing to the Disney studio. So we were incredibly passionate. And it's like we found our tribe, right? I was like a lone nutcase at my school that I still loved cartoons and wanted to make cartoons. And we were all that same way. We were so excited and passionate. But in my class, it was John Musker, who went on to do, I still work with him, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, just some of the greatest Disney films. Brad Bird, who you probably know with Incredibles and Ratatouille and Iron Giant. Tim Burton. Chris Buck, who did Frozen. Mike Giamma was the art director on Frozen. And kind of on and on, a guy named Joe Lancicero, who's one of the head imagineers for Walt Disney Imagineering. So we were all in those first two years of classes. What were you guys like as college freshmen? I'm trying to imagine this. We were nerds. And we couldn't get a date to save our life. Plenty of time. Plenty of time to spend in the studio. We were, oh, it was rough, I tell you. I mean, back in those days, you know, being like, wanting to be an animator and wanting to be an animator, it's like, there's no way any girl in Los Angeles would ever like, oh, that's nice, okay. I'm walking away from you. And no one had girlfriends and no one could get a date. We all just kept hanging out with each other, you know, all the time and stuff. We loved, we actually had so much fun together. We probably learned, what's great is our teachers were these great Disney animators that they had pulled out of retirement that had helped invent the art form of animation with Walt Disney. And they were, none of them had ever taught before. And they would come. And so they would kind of teach us lessons about the, you know, my design teacher was, a layout teacher was Ken O'Connor, who was a great, great Disney layout artist who invented so much things, you know, within Disney films. And he was Australian. He had a dry sense of humor. And he said, I've never taught anything before. I'm just going to tell you what you need to know. And I said, it's good for me, you know. And they would go, they had access to the Disney, you know, the archives in the morgue. And they would bring all this original Disney artwork up, pin it up on our boards. And it was just pin, pin, pin, pin, pin. And, you know, these things are working like millions of dollars now. And they're just pinning them up on the board. And, you know, and we're like amazed by this stuff. And they would talk about it. And it was really great. And then in the afternoon, and it was very interesting because our classes were structured very old-fashioned art education. We had one class that was the entire day, figure drawing, design, layout, animation. You know, we basically had spent the whole day, you know, really, really working and studying. And it was magical because after lunch, you know, they would just start telling stories of working with Walt Disney and inventing this stuff and hearing the good and the bad side. And it really was fascinating to hear, you know, the difficulties of working with Walt as well as like how magical he is. I mean, you know, there is, you know, the historians tend to tell, you know, all the grandfatherly and positive sides of Walt. But he was tough. And he was strong. And he was driven in all these things. And it was fascinating, you know, it was absolutely fascinating, you know, hearing all those stories. And in fact, so much of my leadership, you know, the things that I've learned was from those stories of what to do and what not to do, you know, and hearing those stories. And I can't imagine it was like, now I look back and I realize, oh my God, what they were doing, they were handing the torch off to us. Because there was a short period of time in the 1960s that they actually, after Walt had died in 1966, they actually were considering just closing the animation department at Disney and not making any more Disney animation. But it was this handful of great Disney animators that said, no, let's start training a new generation. Because what happened is that they were doing all the work and they didn't hire anybody at the Disney studio for a good 20 years, like through the 50s and 60s. They never hired anybody. And so they started a training program, one of the great Disney animators, Eric Larson, said, I won't train the new animators when they come in. Then they started the character animation program right behind that as a feeder to Disney. And it was pretty remarkable. Now that looking back at it, I was telling Michael that the head of the program was Jack Hanna, who did all the Donald Duck. He's not Hanna Barbera Hanna. It's Jack Hanna who directed all the Donald Duck cartoons. And he was the head of the program and he asked me to be his student assistant. And I worked at the Disney studio the summer between graduating high school and starting the program in September. And it was only, now looking back, I realized it was only nine years after Walt Disney had died, which at that point in time, it was half of my life practically. It was half of my life. It was 18. And it was, yet, but now it's like a drop in the bucket. And it was amazing, just yesterday. And so it was just so exciting to think back of being there during that time. And all the great Disney artists were still working in the prime of their lives. And it was so exciting. And we just talked about animation. But I learned a lot from them, but I also learned equal amount from my fellow students. We were so passionate about this. Disney had given the Cal Arts Library 16-millimeter prints of six of their animated films, six of them. And we kept checking those films out. And we would watch them again and again and again. We had a 16-millimeter projector in our animation room. And we were kind of the new kids on the block at Cal Arts. And so they gave us this room. All of our classes were in the same room. And there was no windows. It was kind of in the basement. Did the room have a number or a name? Yeah, it was the famous A113, if you've heard of that. I put it in all of our films. Brad Bird puts it in all of his films. I think Tim Burton has put it in some of his films, too. Anytime there's a license plate or a room number or something, you'll see A113 used a lot. And part of it is because it's a badge of honor, because it was the room no one else wanted. And it was really like... But we loved it because of that. It was like a bunker. You were down inside. And we were right across the hall from the Indonesian gamelan room. Gamelan is a beautiful, beautiful form of music. But hearing like American kids learn it... I had no idea what it was. At first, we were sitting there drawing and doing stuff. Are we near the kitchen? They're like banging pots and pans all the time. I thought, what are they doing? Me and a couple of guys went over there and kind of poked our heads in. And it was like, oh, it's music. I didn't know that. And so anyway, I finally went to a gamelan concert and it's magnificent music. But it was hard hearing people learn it all the time. Did you guys feel like you were girding to fight a lonely battle? The films you were watching, none of your friends were watching these old movies. Oh my God, yeah. They were watching Dirty Harry or whatever was big in the mid-70s. And you must have thought that these guys were passing you a torch but sort of like a flame that was barely flickering, right? Yeah. It's a good way, Michael. It's a great way to put it because we had this strong belief that animation was for everyone. Walt Disney, when he made his films, he made them for everyone. Snow White and the Seven Doors when it came out was the number one movie of 1938. The number one movie, the first feature-length animated feature film. You don't get to be number one with just kids going to it and families, right? And so we believed in that. Chuck Jones, all the Warner Brothers cartoons we know and love were made to be seen in theaters before Warner Brothers films for adults. But it was television. When TV came along, the movie studios closed all of their cartoon studios. Every big major Hollywood studio had their own cartoon studio making cartoons. And they closed them down and they sold their libraries to television. Television showed cartoons only during kids' hours, Saturday morning and after school. And so it was during kind of the late 50s and mostly the 60s, the public opinion of who animation was for shifted to being, oh, it must just be for kids because television is only putting it on during the kids' hours. And so even when we started working at the Disney studios, even the folks like the great Disney animators had retired and there was this kind of second tier of animators like during Waltz time that were not the ones that were really good enough to be a top animator. They were in charge through attrition, not through talent. And they were really scared of us and they firmly believed what they were making was just for kids. And we were like, you know, and I don't know if you know Brad Bird, but he's so passionate about like, come on, man. It's like this revolution that was going on in cinema with Francis Coppola, with Scorsese, with Spielberg and Lucas and Star Wars had come out, man. And like, Raging Bull, come on. We can do this in animation, you know. And that's how we felt. We said we want to make movies for everybody. We believe in it. And we literally were the only ones that believed that. We literally were the only ones. The animation industry in Hollywood existed. It was Disney and it was Hannah Barbera in Filmation and that was about it. You know, and they did Saturday morning cartoons. It was really cheap, limited animation. And Disney was putting out a movie every four or five years. And even they were thinking it was just for kids, but we really believed and we kept pushing and we kept pushing and we kept pushing. And that time at the Disney studio was really hard. I mean, it's amazing to have this dream for so much of your life to work at the Disney studio, to be there. I went to Cal Arts and I breathed all these stories into myself. It became part of my DNA of working with Walt and all these things and invention and all this stuff. And I can't tell you how it felt to have your dreams so thoroughly crushed when you got to the place of your dreams and they didn't want to hear anything from you. You know, we kept trying to make the movies better, kept pushing, kept trying to do things and I just kept getting into trouble. What were the kind of arguments you would have? Like what would you propose and why would you reject it? Well, okay, here's a great example. So, I don't know if you've seen The Fox and The Hound, right? Don't applaud, please. I mean, you know, that was a film that we were working on when we got there. And, you know, it started out with these amazing, amazing pastels by this great Disney artist named Mel Shaw. Oh my gosh, this guy, I had the fortunate opportunity to work with him for a while and he taught me how he drew pastels. And I just loved his drawings. This incredible story of like, you know, The Fox and The Hound becoming best friends when they're young and they grow up to be, they separate and then they come back together as adults and they're supposed to be mortal enemies. You know, it's such a great story and it's like, in the hands of these guys it was just pathetic what they were doing and we were watching it and we were just going, this could be awesome but it's not. And so we kept pitching ideas like that. And I was literally told by the guy who was managing the animation department and he said, we don't want to hear your ideas, just be in your office and do what you're told and, you know, if you don't want to do that there's a line of people outside this studio that would be willing to take your place. I was so hurt and I thought, that's amazing. In what's that? Three sentences. The guy just made me not care about the project and not care about the studio. And I just thought to myself, boy, if ever I'm in charge I'm never going to say to a passionate young person who's just trying to make the movie better, I'm never going to say those words to him. Because what you want to do is encourage the opposite, I thought. I'm never going to do that. And it actually formulated kind of a way that I was dealing with this as I was learning what not to do, you know. And we have my wife Nancy and I have five sons and their entire life we told them, you will, and all of you young people, you will in your professional situation go up against people who are threatened by you and are, you know, and are scared of you or don't want to listen to you or are tours and single-minded and folks like that. And just in the worst situations in your professional life just learn, take out the positive spin on it and just learn what not to do from it. Because one day, you know, you will be in charge at some point in time and never do what that person did to you to the young people in charge. Never do it. Because to me, you know, creativity is about collaboration. And you can't possibly have all the ideas in the world. You can't. And animation is the most collaborative art form there is. And it's about one person saying one thing and the other one, I hadn't thought of that. That's a great. And then you could do that. And you go, oh, that's it. And it just snowballs with great ideas. And that's a foundation of a great creative collaboration. It's what the great Disney animators all had together. And it's just this excitement building upon each other's ideas. And it's like we were just being squished at that time. But did I stop? No. Never. I didn't stop. I just would go to somebody else and pitch ideas and stories. And so I got, we were talking to, we saw a screening of Fox in the Hand. And the ending was so pathetic. It was awful. And so I got together. My real close friends were the great Disney animator, Glen Keane and Randy Carr, another great Disney animator. The three of us were sitting there. And just talking, talking, talking. And I remember this one incredible drawing Mel Shaw had done of this waterfall. And they wanted to have a bear come in and threaten the hunter. The hunter owned the hound dog. And get in this thing where basically, at one point the hunter is about to shoot the fox. And the hound dog steps in the way. And there's a bear. And it just was like messy. And it had no emotion, no power, no nothing. And so we pitched this idea to have this incredible bear come in. I think, yeah, we came up with the idea of where the bear come in and have this, you know, really have this exciting ending and bring it to this emotional point. And the only thing that could be more powerful than this bear is this giant waterfall. And we said, oh, we could do this. And so we pitched this idea to one of the directors. He said, oh, that sounds great, guys. And then he went off and he storyboarded it. And later we heard that the head of the studio goes, yeah, I heard you guys came over the idea for the ending. It doesn't really work very well. And we were like, what did he do? So he got the reels. We put it on our movie Ola in our office. We watched it. And it was awful. It had nothing to do with what the power we thought. And so we sat there. And we just, we had turned on a tape recorder. Look at that player. And we started talking. We were just talking about what this ending could be. And we just talked it through, you know, the three of us. And just passionately and just with the power, with the kind of filmmaker we wanted to have. And I remember taking the tape player home and just handwriting verbatim of this whole story on animation paper and just wrote it out. I think it was, I want to say like six or seven pages of just picturing. It was not really a script. It was just literally telling visually what this whole ending would be. And I stayed up really late doing this. I was living at my parents' house at the time. I drove in really early. And I went up to the head of the studio. His name is Ron Miller. And it was Walt's son-in-law. And so I just went in before anybody and went into his office and set this on. I made a copy and then I, you know, first thing. And then I set this thing that I had written on his desk. And I just went back to my office and just working away, working away. I'm wondering, I don't know. And all of a sudden the director of the film poked his head in to my office and said, hey, do you have a copy of that thing you put on Ron's desk? And I go, yeah, yeah, I have one right here. And he grabbed it to me and walked away. And then by lunchtime, myself and Glen Keane had been assigned to storyboard the end of the film. And so we sat there and it was, it worked. I mean, it had this, you know, we wanted to have this profound, powerful ending to this film. And if you remember the film, right, it's like, you know, the Fox and the Hound and we're like, you know, cute little things and all that stuff. And all of a sudden the ending is like from some other movie. This giant bear and this action, and it's awesome, you know. And it's just like, you know, it's a completely different movie. And it was like, well, that Glen Keane and I did that ending. And it's awesome, you know. It's so great that ending. And it was just, but it showed the power of what animation could do. You know, and they weren't happy with us because, you know, I just kept going. And that's about the time I saw, I started seeing the beginnings of computer animation. And so your time at Disney came to an end. Yeah. So that Fox and the Hound story kind of illustrated my relationship with the people who were running animation at the time where they would typically say, no, go back to your office and I wouldn't. I would find somebody else to talk to and try to, because it was just about, I knew we could make these films even better. Then two of my good friends that had worked in Disney animation and left came back working with a guy named Stephen Lisberger to do Tron, the very first Tron. And they were storyboarding and choreographing the computer animation. And they invited me up. And I was really curious about this. And they invited me up to their office when they got the very first dailies back for the light cycle sequence from a company in New York, a computer animation company in New York called MagiSynthivision. And I came out to look at it. And when I saw that, it was like this door in my head opened up and I walked through and there was a magnificent new world. It was really like one of those profound moments in my life. And I looked at it and the first thing I thought to myself, this is what Walt was waiting for. Walt Disney was always striving to bring new technology into his film and his films to help make the animated films more believable. He was always striving for more depth, the multiplying camera, all that stuff. They dabbled in puppet animation and stop-motion animation, but it never had the smoothness that hand-drawn animation had. Because you could not iterate. There's a notion of when you're doing art that you try something and you adjust it, you adjust it, you adjust it and you keep doing that. And that's one of the beauties of computers. Computers make it whether it's Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator or Paint Systems or Word Processes or anything like that. It makes it so you can iterate and change things and edit and cut and paste and do all this stuff really fast. But hand-drawn animation, you could do that as well, but it was much more labor-intensive because you had to erase a lot. And redrawn and trace and all that stuff. But what Walt was waiting for was three dimensions, was making the worlds more believable. And I looked at this and I went, this is it. This is what Walt was waiting for. And it wasn't what I was looking at. It's the potential of what I saw in it. And to me it was clear as day. It was clear as day. And I turned to everybody else at the studio and I was like, hey, look, it's so great. And everybody's like, it looks kind of cold to me. I go, don't look at that. Look at what I'm thinking about, what you could do with it. And so I got Glenn Keenan and I, we kept pushing it within the animation department and they didn't want to have anything to do with it. And it's the same guys that he and I did, the bear fight sequence of the Fox and the Hound. So I can understand it. But we found a young guy who was the head of production of live action at the time, a guy named Tom Wilhite, was developing something with Marie Sindak. And so he said, well, let's do a test. I said, we want to do a test. And he goes, great, let's do it. And so we started with development money from where the Wild Things are, from Marie Sindak projects. So we took the first two pages of the book, Children's Book, where the Wild Things are, where Max is riding on the wall and there's the dog and he chases the dog out the room. So it's two pages. And we just took that and we kind of created this little test where, and our idea was that the backgrounds would be done with a computer and we would do hand-drawn animation over it. We did computer animation with MagiSynthVision. And a guy turned into my best friend, Chris Wedge, who did Direct to the First Ice Age. And we will always thank him because he introduced my wife, Nancy, to me. And so he's really talented and he was working at MagiSynthVision. And so we worked together on this. And I did all the backgrounds and computer work and stuff like that. And then we animated like a little geometric shape that represented Max and represented the dog through the scene and did all the camera work. And then we took it and gave it to Glenn and Glenn did the animation over the background stuff. We printed out on photo stats that were the size of animation paper and he did this drawing. And we did it and then we colorized it with a computer paint system that we kind of invented for the project with tone mats and everything. And we did this test and then we showed it to everybody. And the whole time we were doing the test, I said, I want to have a feature film that we can say, look at this amazing test. Here's a film we could do with it. And a good friend of mine had given me a collection of sort of fantasy and science fiction short stories and in it was a little novella, a 40 page story by a guy named Thomas Deesha who was called The Brave Little Toaster. And I got Tom Wilhite, the live action had to license to get an option on The Brave Little Toaster. We did and we started developing it as a feature film and Joe Raft and I did this at the Disney studio while we were doing the Wild Things test at Magi and Glenn was working on it. So I had these things going and it was so exciting, you know. And we finished the Wild Things test. We presented it and pitched The Brave Little Toaster as this we can use this for it. And I didn't know this thing called politics. But I was just so excited and eager and all like that and the whole project had been undermined by the manager of the animation department, the guy who told me to just do what I was told. And so we pitched the whole project to the head of the studio and he asked, well how much is this going to cost? And we did a rough budget that was going to be the same as a regular animated feature film and he said the manager said the only reason to do computer animation if it makes it cheaper or makes it quicker to do. And he got up and walked out and said, you know, we're not going to do this. And then the manager of the animation department after, you know, by the time he got down to his office he picked up a phone, called me, went down and he fired me. He said, your project is complete, your employment with Walt Disney Studios is now terminated. Boom. And I was like, I can't tell you how devastating that was to have a dream from a young boy, like a 13, 14-year-old and a singular focus, the one who worked for the Disney Studios to go through college, to be trained by these great Disney artists to get there and just keep pushing to make it better to be fired from the place of your dreams. And I'll be honest with you, I never told anybody I was fired. I, by the time that this happened I had met Ed Katmell, who was doing the Lucasfilm Computer Division and doing computer animation research at Lucasfilm. And they loved the stuff I was doing, but they were not in any market. I was looking for someone to do the computer animation backgrounds for Toaster. And they were just a research facility. And I, you know, Tom Wilhight kept me on, there was a last few things I needed to do on the Wild Things test, so he kept me on in his division, you know, but I was not part of animation anymore. And my days were numbered and I finished the project. And during that time I went to a computer graphics conference at the Queen Mary and Ed was there and gave a talk and then he saw me. He said, how's Toaster going? I said, it's been shelved and, you know, it's been shelved. They didn't want to do anything to it. And he was so sad and he came back and then in the middle of a talk, I'll never forget it, you know, from behind a column in the grand ballroom, it's like, Cha, cha, cha. And I snuck in and he said, do you want to come work with us? And I was like, yeah, that would be great, you know. And so it was just a freelance job he had that would last about a month. And I said, you know, I'll go. And so I basically had, I didn't get fired from Disney once. I got actually fired twice. And then I got let go a second time. But I had gone up to, you know, by this time I was on my way up to Lucasfilm. But it had a profound effect, you know, of just this... But it was the best thing that ever happened to me. That was the start of Pixar, basically. Yeah, it was the start of Pixar. You know, and I just never let go of that dream. And Ed Katman had always had a dream to do a computer animated feature film one day. But the tools didn't exist and all that. And he was just working. And so when I first went up to Lucasfilm I was so worried that I was going to need to learn how to program because, you know, that's really what all the computer animation, everything was all programmed based animation. Nothing was interactive back then. And, oh man, I hate math. And I'm going to have to like... I went to art school to not do math. I have to do math. And so we went to... So I went up there and I found that I was sitting around and it was like... I was so into computer animation at that point I was getting every tape I could get. I was looking at all this stuff. And when I got up there and I looked at... And there was a tiny, tiny group of people doing the computer animation research at Lucasfilm, computer graphics research. And I realized, oh my goodness, Ed had gotten every top... All the stuff I loved that I'd seen, he had gotten those people there. And I said, Ed, how did you get all these amazing people? And he just goes, oh, it's easy. I just try to hire people that are smarter than myself. And I laughed. But I walked away and I thought just from my experience at Disney of these people being so threatened by young people and people who are smarter than them to have a leader that says, oh, I try to hire people that are smarter than myself. And then he lets them be amazing and lets them be stars, lets them shine. And I was like, that's the guy I want to work for. And so I started working with him and I realized these guys all have PhDs. I'm never going to know what they know about computers. But then I thought, you know what? They don't know how to bring a character to life and give it personality and emotion through pure movement. That's what I was taught by the great Disney animators. They don't know that. So I said, I'm just going to sit right next to them and I'm going to work in collaboration with them. I don't need to know what they know. And they don't need to know. And they don't need to know what I know. And what happened in my working relationship with Bill Reeves and Evan Osby and Ed Katmell and Tom Porter, those original guys, who by the way are all still at Pixar and we're all making movies together. The way I worked with them, I coined this phrase, that art challenges technology and technology inspires the art. It's this incredible kind of yin-yang, this circle that happens. And what it is, is that I would say, I'll get so excited and I would draw something. Can we do this? And they go, no, we can't. Not yet. Wait, and they would disappear and they'd come back. And they go, how's that? And I go, that's even better. Oh my goodness. And they were like, well, if you can do that, can you do that? And I would get an idea I would have never thought of in a million years if I hadn't seen the R&D that they were doing. And I loved the mistakes when things didn't work out because then I was like, oh my goodness. Can we, can you do that again? Oh, then we could do this. And it became this thrilling, thrilling, like, it was so exciting that we were inventing this stuff and it was so fun to keep like developing new stuff in this incredible circle that kept happening. And I just, and our whole philosophy was that the technology is never going to entertain an audience by itself. It's what you do with a technology.