<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Originally published in the June/July issue The father is getting drunk, and so are his children. It is the end of the day, and they are celebrating. The children are bringing their work to their father for his approval. When he approves, they drink. They are very talented children. He is a very encouraging father. They drink often. The father&amp;#039;s name is John Lasseter. Though not a particularly famous man, he is the creator of famous things. He&amp;#039;s created the movies Toy Story and Cars, for instance, whose fame among children is as everlasting as the millions of small plastic products they&amp;#039;ve spawned. And he&amp;#039;s also one of the creators of Pixar, the animation studio, which means that he&amp;#039;s created ... well, this. He&amp;#039;s created a place where he encourages the young and the talented, and where the young and the talented become his progeny. He&amp;#039;s created a place where his approval is never withheld and yet where his approval, once granted, sets off riotous celebrations. He&amp;#039;s created a place where, on a Friday afternoon, he sits in front of a monitor, in a small room at Pixar&amp;#039;s headquarters, studying the verisimilitude of cars that talk and slap each other five, while the animators who have given them life line up to hear whether they&amp;#039;ve succeeded in bringing them to life. They&amp;#039;re sitting on couches in the office, and they&amp;#039;re spilling outside the door, and when Lasseter calls their names, they take their place on a leather chair in the middle of the office and wait for his judgment, with bottles of alcoholic beverages in their hands.  It&amp;#039;s their final day of a year spent working on the movie that Lasseter is directing for release this summer \u2014 Cars 2 \u2014 and outside the little office, a party has already started. Inside, however, they&amp;#039;re all still working, when a tall young woman with limp hair and emphatic eyewear submits, for Lasseter&amp;#039;s approval, a few seconds of film in which the character of the rusty tow truck, Mater, spits out the spicy food he&amp;#039;s been eating because it&amp;#039;s too strong for him. Lasseter approves, so she pours him a shot from the bottle of Maker&amp;#039;s 46 she has in her lap. He drinks, she drinks, and when her eyes bulge and she spits it out because it&amp;#039;s too strong for her, well, that&amp;#039;s when the party really starts, because it&amp;#039;s the perfect Pixar moment, wherein life doesn&amp;#039;t find its way onto the screen so much as the screen finds its way into life. A few minutes later, Lasseter picks up a phone and makes an announcement over the intercom that rings throughout the entire building: &amp;quot;This is John Lasseter. I am proud to announce that animation for Cars 2 is now ... final!&amp;quot; Which is when the real drinking begins. John Lasseter is a man. He is fifty-four years old. He is happily married. He&amp;#039;s the father of five sons, except that he always calls them boys \u2014 &amp;quot;my five boys&amp;quot; \u2014 even though the oldest is thirty-one. He has a couple of dogs, a big house, and a few jobs. He works hard at everything he does and he makes a lot of money. He&amp;#039;s kind and loyal, with far more friends than enemies. He is as passionate about his hobbies as he is about his work, and he likes to drive. He both listens and is listened to \u2014 that rare combination \u2014 and he likes making friends of strangers by asking them for their stories. He&amp;#039;s a funny guy, and an emotional one. He likes children, especially boys, and he knows how to entertain them as well as how to calm them down. Mothers entrust him with their kids, both on a one-on-one level and on a mass scale unknown to any human being since Walt Disney. And that&amp;#039;s the twist: Lasseter \u2014 while owning and enjoying the attributes of a regular guy \u2014 isn&amp;#039;t a regular guy at all. He&amp;#039;s one of the most successful men in the world. He&amp;#039;s both historically successful and successful on terms purely his own. He has never failed, except once, in 1983, when he had the job of his boyhood dreams as an animator at Disney&amp;#039;s studios, working at the feet of the men he idolized, the so-called Nine Old Men who&amp;#039;d mastered the art of drawing image after painstaking image of made-up characters until those characters were bestowed with something like life. Lasseter, though, saw the potential of a new form of animation called computer-generated imagery and got fired for pushing it too hard and for making a CGI film without the proper consent. He never failed again, for he stayed true to his faith in computer animation \u2014 believing, as he says, that &amp;quot;this was what Walt Disney was waiting for&amp;quot; \u2014 and started making short films for the director George Lucas, until Steve Jobs, freshly fired from his dream job, bought the entire animation unit from Lucas for $10 million and called it Pixar. Jobs was buying the technology, of course, but he was also buying something \u2014 or someone \u2014 else. He was buying John Lasseter. At the time, Lasseter was still in his twenties and had never made a full-length feature. But Jobs looked to him to create not only a new kind of movie but also a new kind of company. &amp;quot;The only thing Steve Jobs has ever asked me,&amp;quot; Lasseter says, &amp;quot;in all the years we&amp;#039;ve been together and have been partners, the only thing he has ever asked me is: Make it great.&amp;quot; And Lasseter did. It took him almost ten years, but he did. In 1995, he directed Pixar&amp;#039;s first full-length computer-animated feature film, and it was Toy Story. All right? He makes the first talkie, and instead of The Jazz Singer, it turns out to be The Wizard of Oz. Then he kept on going, just like that, on a roll, either directing or producing the string of Pixar films that rendered the hand-drawn animation he loved obsolete and replaced the fairy tales set in faraway lands with epics drawn from the ephemera of American bedrooms and backyards. He started making money, you bet, not just for him but also for Jobs, who would sell the company he bought for $10 million in 1986 for $7.4 billion twenty years later. And he sold it to Disney, of all places. Now Lasseter is working for Disney again, as chief creative executive of three studios \u2014 not just Pixar but also Disney Animation, and Imagineering, which develops rides and &amp;quot;experiences&amp;quot; for Disney&amp;#039;s theme parks \u2014 meaning Disney releases nothing to the public without his approval. Not a movie, not a scene, not a ride, not a toy \u2014 nothing. And so he&amp;#039;s busy. Oh, Christ, he&amp;#039;s busy. He lives in Sonoma, California, not just in the middle of wine country but adjacent to his own vineyards, hell, his own winery, Lasseter Family Winery. It&amp;#039;s sixty chauffeur-driven minutes to Pixar&amp;#039;s headquarters in Emeryville, a little town that sits between Berkeley and San Francisco, and every day, twice a day, he spends those sixty minutes juggling three iPads loaded with video and God-knows-what from each of the three studios he oversees, and he exercises the absolute authority he has gained by seeming to eschew it. And yet Lasseter is seemingly uncorrupted by the extent of his influence. He is extravagantly uncorrupted because he is uncorrupted by extravagant design. He&amp;#039;s a man who has found power and wealth beyond his dreams doing what he always dreamed of doing when he was a boy. He is afraid that power and wealth will corrupt those dreams, and so he structures his entire life around staying pure, around staying innocent, around staying, at heart, a boy. To the extent that he has become famous, he is famous for his boyishness, for his determined preservation of his own childlike qualities, for his love of toys and trains. But he is fifty-four years old, a man forced to live, increasingly, in a man&amp;#039;s world. How does he remain a boy? And how does a man committed to remaining a boy also manage to teach boys how to become men?  That&amp;#039;s his job, you see. That&amp;#039;s always been his job, from the beginning, though he doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily see it that way. He&amp;#039;s not a teacher, he says; he&amp;#039;s a storyteller. But he&amp;#039;s a certain kind of storyteller, and at Pixar he works with other storytellers who are just like him. There are a dozen or so directors who work for Pixar in-house, and they comprise what Lasseter calls the &amp;quot;creative brain trust of the company.&amp;quot; They come up with the stories and they make the movies, and they are all men. Moreover, they are, as Lasseter says, &amp;quot;all family men,&amp;quot; like Lasseter himself. &amp;quot;We all have kids, we all have amazing wives. And we love to go see movies. We love to see movies, and we love to take our families to see movies. So we make the kind of movies we love to watch. If you talk about a philosophy we all have, that&amp;#039;s it.&amp;quot;  The philosophy might be accidental, but Pixar&amp;#039;s identity is not, and never has been. From the beginning, it&amp;#039;s been a boys&amp;#039; club. It has, indeed, been intended as an answer to Disney, with its princesses and romantic songs and its inescapable air of yearning. Characters don&amp;#039;t sing in Pixar movies. They don&amp;#039;t yearn, either, unless they&amp;#039;re WALL-E, the robot living alone in postapocalyptic squalor. And the first Pixar movie to feature a female lead character won&amp;#039;t be released until 2012, and will be called Brave, so that young boys won&amp;#039;t think it has anything to do with princesses and might agree to go see it. Lasseter is known as a filmmaker for children; what he really is, and what he has always been, is a filmmaker for boys who has found something universal in the poetry and heroism of American boyhood. Though not a moralist, he understands the moralism of boys, and has created Pixar&amp;#039;s moral universe out of it. He&amp;#039;s a man who has tried to remain a boy so that he can make movies that help boys become men, and so he can&amp;#039;t help having a philosophy. For centuries, the transformation of boys into men was so central to human societies that they contrived elaborate and sometimes savage rites of passage to make sure it was accomplished: Boys were sent away from the society alone so they could be welcomed back as men. Now boys are left largely to their own devices, and the devices are largely electronic; they go alone not into the world but into the world of media and technology, and alone is what they remain, except in the movies of John Lasseter and Pixar. In the prevailing popular culture, manhood is defined as the province of the individual; in Pixar movies, it is the opposite. In Pixar movies, boys are always becoming men and men are always becoming boys, but they are never making the transformation by themselves. They can&amp;#039;t. From cocky Lightning McQueen learning to win by not crossing the finish line in Cars, to grumpy old Carl Fredricksen living up to the promises he made his wife by letting them go in Up, to cowboy Woody giving up the prospect of immortality in Toy Story 2, Pixar characters always find fulfillment of their individual dreams by surrendering their individual dreams to the dictates of family and friends. &amp;quot;We realize that we are better together than we are apart,&amp;quot; Lasseter says, and although he could be talking about the message of any of his movies, he&amp;#039;s talking about the communal process by which they&amp;#039;re made. But that&amp;#039;s what makes Lasseter who he is and Pixar what it is: He has created the moral universe in his films by inhabiting the moral universe of his films. And by making sure everyone around him does the same. Go, for instance, to see him early in the morning, when he&amp;#039;s fresh from his 5:00 A.M. workout and sitting at the breakfast table with Sam and Jackson, the last of his boys living at home. He&amp;#039;s wearing a fleece jacket and shorts, and he&amp;#039;s pink and beaming, with watery blue eyes that make him look like he&amp;#039;s perpetually sunburned. He has pale sun-colored eyelashes under the oval lenses of his rimless glasses, notched orange sideburns, and gingery hair combed into the rectangular forelock that splits the gleaming expanse of his forehead \u2014 a comb-down rather than a comb-over. He is not tall but not short, the sort of naturally stout man who is easily winded and often damp and in the habit of smiling in appreciation when he&amp;#039;s told he&amp;#039;s lost weight. He&amp;#039;s eating an omelet his personal trainer, Dante, has made for him \u2014 a two-egg omelet with an extra egg white \u2014 and his boys are drinking smoothies and eating homemade bread, with an old dachshund rooting at their feet, a young chocolate lab invading their laps, and NPR playing in the background. In all, it&amp;#039;s the kind of morning you might expect from a rich man enjoying a family breakfast before his sons have to go to school and he has to go to work. But then it becomes Pixarian. See, for Dante&amp;#039;s fortieth birthday, Lasseter gave him a gift of a remote-controlled helicopter, and he wants to know if Dante&amp;#039;s had a chance to fly it yet. Dante says no, because, well, the remote-controlled helicopter is not just any remote-controlled helicopter. It&amp;#039;s a remote-controlled helicopter given to him by John Lasseter, which means that it&amp;#039;s a remote-controlled helicopter with blades eight feet across. &amp;quot;You have to see this thing,&amp;quot; Lasseter says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s awesome. One of my missions in life is to find the boy in every man, and I figured that with Dante turning forty, he&amp;#039;d need something like that.&amp;quot; It is around this time that Lasseter&amp;#039;s model trains start chugging around a track wound through the vast upstairs underneath floors made of perfectly clear glass. It&amp;#039;s around this time that the steam engine visible through one of the big windows is identified not just as a working steam engine but as a working steam engine that once belonged to Ollie Johnston, one of the Nine Old Men who mentored Lasseter when he was first at Disney. It&amp;#039;s around this time that you find out that the pool outside has tunnels running underneath it, and that the house itself is outfitted with secret passageways, with walls that open when you touch them and whisk you into hidden chambers. It&amp;#039;s around this time that you go into the glass cupola that houses all of Lasseter&amp;#039;s awards and realize that not only are there a lot of awards, there&amp;#039;s no freaking dust. It&amp;#039;s around this time that you see the frosty room that houses the home&amp;#039;s stacked technological innards \u2014 it&amp;#039;s a smart house \u2014 and Dante shows you another window that&amp;#039;s meant to display the artfulness of the home&amp;#039;s braided wiring. And it&amp;#039;s around this time that you realize that you have never seen a house like this, not merely because it&amp;#039;s so extravagant but because it&amp;#039;s so directed, in the way Pixar movies are directed, with every detail selected to produce experiences of wonder and awe. It wasn&amp;#039;t designed by Lasseter but rather by his wife, Nancy, and he calls it &amp;quot;Nancy&amp;#039;s movie.&amp;quot; And it is a movie, and it transforms almost everybody in it into characters, even Sam and Jackson. As a director, Lasseter might be out to find the boy in every man; as a father, however, he has to be out to find the man in every boy, which is harder. But he goes at it the same way, almost the same way an animator would. He has an understanding of the character of each of his boys, and he does all he can to help each boy bring his own character to fulfillment. You go to the boys&amp;#039; rooms, and each one is designed to be thematically consistent with the character of its occupant. Ben is serene, so his room&amp;#039;s design is Asian-influenced. PJ is the restless explorer. Sam is the artist, the one whose drawings shock Lasseter with their resemblance to the drawings he did when he was Sam&amp;#039;s age. Jackson is the scientist, the inheritor of Nancy&amp;#039;s engineering ingenuity, the boy who is most interested in the intricacies of the winery. They all grew up with a man who sought to preserve and protect the boy in himself, a father who jokingly counted himself among their mother&amp;#039;s sons. But he&amp;#039;s also a man who has staked his entire existence on the act of creation, and before Sam and Jackson go to school, he wraps each of them in a hug that is to hugs as Dante&amp;#039;s helicopter is to helicopters, as the Lasseter house is to houses, as Pixar movies are to the general run of animated films \u2014 a hug that in its extravagance seems meant to change them in some way and, at the same time, to bring them fully to life.   He&amp;#039;s a hugger. He&amp;#039;s Lots-o&amp;#039;-Huggin&amp;#039; Bear from Toy Story 3, without the abandonment issues. &amp;quot;Count the hugs,&amp;quot; says one of his assistants as soon as he gets to Pixar, and what began in the house with the boys continues at Pixar with the Pixarians. Indeed, everything that started at the house continues at Pixar, because Pixar is an extension of the house, and vice versa. The Pixar building is even directed, like the house in Sonoma, though not by the same director. The house in Sonoma, the house adjacent to the Lasseter Family Winery, is Nancy Lasseter&amp;#039;s movie. The building in Emeryville is, in Lasseter&amp;#039;s words, &amp;quot;Steve Jobs&amp;#039;s movie.&amp;quot; Jobs not only designed it; he designed it so that people inside it would behave a certain way. &amp;quot;Steve really believes in the accidental meeting,&amp;quot; Lasseter says, and to that end he designed the building around a cathedral-like atrium, which is also where he located all the bathrooms and the subsidized company commissary. &amp;quot;Steve really believes that it&amp;#039;s important to have great food,&amp;quot; Lasseter says. And it works. From the time Lasseter gets to work, there are accidental meetings in the atrium and in the commissary, which means that there are accidental hugs. But then a lot of things work at Pixar. The hugs work at Pixar, because they are from Lasseter, and Lasseter is the man Pixar&amp;#039;s built around. He&amp;#039;s the youngest man in the building and at same time the oldest \u2014 the youngest because Pixar&amp;#039;s famous culture of creativity exists in part to protect and preserve John Lasseter&amp;#039;s innocence, and the oldest because ... well, because he&amp;#039;s one of the pioneers of computer-generated animation. He made its first shorts in the mid-eighties and its first feature-length movie in the mid-nineties. He may be figuratively the youngest, but he&amp;#039;s literally the oldest, especially when he walks into a screening room filled with Pixar animators who have been working for the last year on the movie that Lasseter&amp;#039;s been codirecting, Cars 2. It&amp;#039;s the first movie Lasseter&amp;#039;s codirected since Cars, five years ago. Indeed, after Disney bought Pixar and put Lasseter in charge of three studios, he thought he&amp;#039;d never have the time to direct again; but he figured out how to do it in part to give the youngest Pixar animators the experience of working with him. The man who has tried to remain a boy is now a father figure to one and now two generations of CGI animators, and as he stands up to make a speech on the occasion of the last day of animation on Cars 2 \u2014 not the last day of filmmaking but the last day of making characters come to life through movement \u2014 he not only sounds like a dad, he looks like one, wearing, from his Pixarian closetful of 350 Hawaiian shirts organized by design and theme, a red one emblazoned with the image of Lightning McQueen:  &amp;quot;I just want to tell you that working with you has been honestly one of the greatest things of my professional career. A lot of you I haven&amp;#039;t worked with before because you&amp;#039;ve come to Pixar since Cars was finished. But you&amp;#039;re the most talented group of animators I&amp;#039;ve ever worked with and that has ever worked in the studio. You guys are remarkable and I&amp;#039;m so thankful you&amp;#039;re here at Pixar. Thank you for one of the greatest experiences of my life and I love all of you...&amp;quot; There was a time when bosses wouldn&amp;#039;t talk like that to their charges. There was a time when a lot of fathers wouldn&amp;#039;t even talk like that to their children. But the past twenty years has seen a revolution in the exercise of authority by American men, and Lasseter has been part of it, onscreen and off. His charges are his children, and he has chosen to inspire them rather than exercise his authority over them. He has chosen to let them remain children and adults both, by not making them fear him, and by exiling fear from the building. Does it work? Well, animation for Cars 2 began on May 5, 2010, and ended on March 25. It took 324 days to animate the film, and now, as the animation begins to appear on the screen, in three- and four- and five-second shots, he takes out his laser pointer, analyzes each shot with amazing speed and responsiveness to details so small, they might as well be invisible, suggests one or two minor corrections, and then approves them with a phrase he says he uses because the Pixarians like it so much: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to call ... FINAL!&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a phrase he barks over and over again for the next hour, until finally he cries out in mock despair, &amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t anyone here bad at their jobs?&amp;quot; and the lights come up, and the hugs are uncountable. He&amp;#039;s a hugger in a Hawaiian shirt, making his way to the door, but then he sees a woman standing at the front of the room and goes to her. She&amp;#039;s the wife of one of the animators, and she&amp;#039;s holding a baby, an infant five or six weeks old. &amp;quot;Can I hold him?&amp;quot; Lasseter asks. She hands the baby to him and says, &amp;quot;I hear you have a lot of sons.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Five boys,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Boys are wonderful,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I wonder how they fare when they get older.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Oh, they do just fine,&amp;quot; Lasseter says. He is holding the baby up close, up by his chin, but when the baby fusses, he slides him down to a cradle he&amp;#039;s made of his forearm and the crook of his elbow, down by his hip. The baby is facedown, on Lasseter&amp;#039;s forearm, and when Lasseter starts moving, shifting his weight from one foot to another, the baby goes quiet. &amp;quot;The football hold,&amp;quot; Lasseter says to the mother. &amp;quot;Oh, you have to learn the football hold.&amp;quot; And at the start of the day that will end with him drinking like a man, he shows her how to do it, because it got him through his boys. It got him through Pixar, too, because he started Pixar just before he started as a father. He was the youngest boy in the room then. Now he is the oldest. But Lasseter has hugged his way to the youngest, and the youngest is quiet and happy, though he&amp;#039;s being held just like a toy. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a10001/john-lasseter-quotes-0611/>