Jeff Lenburg - John Lasseter

Copyright 2014 by Jeff Lenburg

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Although he never sought to become famous or a household name, his childlike charm, ingenuity, vision, and imagination have brought him the kind of unparalleled worldwide success he never dreamed possible. Since the early 1980s, he has perfected, along with his creative partners under the Pixar banner, three-dimensional computer animation technology that has spawned enormously successful Academy Award-winning shorts and blockbuster movies such as Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Cars, and Toy Story 3. He has created stories and characters with true emotion that have won over audiences and critics alike. Called by many a latter-day Walt Disney, the man behind all of this is none other than John Lasseter.

For John, success did not come immediately, though it appeared early on that he was one of kind. Born unexpectedly in Hollywood, California, on January 12, 1957, when his parents were expecting only the birth of a single child, a daughter, and not paternal twins, he was the so-called "bonus baby" of the family. His sister Johanna preceded him in birth by six minutes and he became the youngest of three children after their oldest brother, Jim. John grew up in Whittier, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and former President Richard M. Nixon's birthplace. There, his father, Paul Eual Lasseter, worked as a parts manager at the local Chevrolet car dealership and his mother, Jewell Mae, was an art teacher at Bell Gardens Senior High School.

Growing up, John learned to draw and take apart cars. He loved doing both. "Scratch one vein, and it's Disney blood," he later said. "Scratch a second, and it's motor oil."

From an early age, Jewell nurtured John's artistic passions. She brought home paint and paper to encourage his burgeoning drawing skills. As he recalled, "She never formally taught us, but she always surrounded us with art supplies and showed us how to do different little projectsplaster casts, carvings, things like that."

Interestingly, the Lasseter's three children all pursued careers that tapped into their creativity. Johanna later worked as a professional baker of elaborate wedding cakes, while Jim went on to become an accomplished interior designer.

At age five, John's crayon drawing of the Headless Horseman from the classic Washington Irving tale won first placeand a cash prize of $15from the Model Grocery Market in Whittier, which sponsored the contest. Whether at home or in church, it seemed he was always drawing. During their weekly Sunday worships, Jewell always had pads of paper handy to keep her three children occupied if they began to squirm. Usually that was right after they sat down, so she immediately handed them the paper. John quietly sat in his place and drew the entire time. "I even did flip books in the corner of the songbooks," he later said.

John was like most kids in that on school days his parents had a hard time rustling him out of bed. He was a remarkable daydreamer whose drawings became an extension of his flights of fantasy. He often fantasized in his drawings of tree houses, underground tunnels, secret caves, and flying ships and a group of young adventurers. Sometimes his daydreams extended into the classroom. His teachers contacted his parents "more than once" about his need to pay better attention in class. Even then, considered "the artist of the class," he could not help himself. His mind would be flooded by ideas and stories that he would draw and write down, often losing track of time and becoming lost in his creative world.

Typical of his generation, John loved collecting toys as a kid. His favorites were his Mattel Hot Wheels cars, his G.I. Joe soldiers, and a Casper the Friendly Ghost doll with a pull string on his back that made him talk. John was also a voracious fan of comic strips, particularly Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts and Hank Ketchum's Dennis the Menace. But his love of comic strips paled to his passion for animated cartoons. As he once stated, "I loved cartoons more than anything else." He was obsessed with cartoons by Warner Bros. cartoon legend Chuck Jones and would race home after school to watch reruns of them on television. On Saturday mornings he would get up at exactly 6:30 and lie on his bed and enjoy a bowl of Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes, a mere six inches from the television set in his bedroom, waiting for the first cartoon to come on. Then he watched them straight through until the last cartoon program ended right before the popular celebrity game show Bowling for Dollars.

As he told Jonathan Ross for Guardian Online: "Back in the day when I was a little guy there was no home video, or 24-hour cable channels of animation. Animation was on Saturday morning and after schoolbasically that was it. So when Bugs Bunny came on, I was in front of the TV. I just adored it."

Even later after entering high schoolwhen it was, as he called it, "uncool" to like cartoons and toys ("I still had my G.I. Joes and my Hot Wheels")and he made the school's water polo team, John quietly hurried home after practice to watch cartoons. Lying on his belly on the rust-colored shag carpet of the family's den, he enjoyed the antics of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and Coyote, and others shown on KTTV channel 11 at 4:30 P.M. "There was no recording it," he recalled. "If you missed it, you missed it."

John was a huge fan of animated films by Walt Disney. His favorite movie while growing up was Dumbo, which he called "a perfect movie." As he commented, "It's just 60 minutes long; as a story, it's really tight, and it's incredibly emotional, especially for parents." The most emotional scene in his opinion was the one where Timothy Mouse takes Dumbo to see his mother, a scene backed by the song "Baby Mine." His mother, deemed "a mad elephant," is locked away, and they cannot see each other but only touch trunks. John also found Dumbo "the most cartoony" of all the Disney films, in his view.

Little did John realize that someday he would become a major force in the animation business himself. But the seed was being planted for greater things to come.

The turning point for John's interest in animation happened in ninth grade as a freshman at Whittier High School. He was perusing the art section of his school's library, looking for a book to write a report on for class and stumbled across a beat-up copy of The Art of Animation, an illustrated history of Disney Studios, by longtime Associated Press entertainment writer Bob Thomas. After reading the book, his immediate reaction was, "Wait a minute, people do this for a living?"

John has called this one of the key moments of his life that guided him on the path he followed. "Finding that book was one of them. I read it from cover to cover," he said. It was right at the point in time that he decided animation was what he wanted to do for a living.

Not long after this eye-opening experience, John went to see a 49-cent showing of Walt Disney's animated feature The Sword in the Stone, at the art deco-styled Wardman Theatre downtown. His mother had dropped him off and picked him up, and he experienced an epiphany afterward, telling her during the drive back home, "I'm going to work for Walt Disney." She was nothing but encouraging. "That's a great goal to have," she told him. John has admitted in interviews that he had no idea at the time how rare that kind of support from a parent was, but his mother always felt strongly that pursuing the arts was "a noble profession."