John Lasseter famous quotes

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

#Character #Drawing #Actors

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Believe #Add #Needs

Sunday, for me, is all about being home with the family with no plans.
-- John Lasseter

#Home #Sunday #Plans

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Reality #Looks #Littles

Quality is the best business plan.
-- John Lasseter

#Quality #Best Business #Plans

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Chance #Produce #Shots

Your voice is worthwhile. Have faith in it.
-- John Lasseter

#Voice #Have Faith #Worthwhile

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Successful #Artist #Player

If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.
-- John Lasseter

#Children #Stories #Sitting

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.
-- John Lasseter

#Art #Technology #Challenges

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.
-- John Lasseter

#Artist #Computer #Animation

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

#Cinema #Mediums #Audience

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

#Character #Joy #Parks

Every single Pixar film, at one time or another, has been the worst movie ever put on film. But we know. We trust our process. We don't get scared and say, 'Oh, no, this film isn't working.'
-- John Lasseter

#Trust No One #Scared #Pixar

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?
-- John Lasseter

#Real #Thinking #Movie Love

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Believe #Pride #Two

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Mother #Baby #Simple

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

#Children #Earth #Toys

I worry about kids today not having time to build a tree house or ride a bike or go fishing. I worry that life is getting faster and faster.
-- John Lasseter

#Kids #Fishing #Worry

'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.
-- John Lasseter

#Beautiful #Watches #Today

If you can think about it, you can create it.
-- John Lasseter

#Thinking

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

#Fun #Play #Stories

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Joy #Different #Film

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Children #World #Film

'Cars' was about Lightning McQueen learning to slow down and to enjoy life. The journey is the reward.
-- John Lasseter

#Journey #Car #Enjoy Life

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

#Unique #Voice #Vision

People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don't have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there's this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.
-- John Lasseter

#Growing Up #Kids #People

You can achieve all the things you want to do, but it's much better to do it with loved ones around you; family and friends, people that you care about that can help you on the way and can celebrate you, and you can enjoy the journey.
-- John Lasseter

#Journey #People #Family And Friends

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.
-- John Lasseter

#Father #Burning #Four

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Waiting #Tape #Saws

Animation is the only thing I ever wanted to do in my whole life. I have no desire for live-action or anything else.
-- John Lasseter

#Desire #Action #Animation

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

#Careers #People #Cartoon

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

#Heart #People #Way

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Love #Beautiful #Heart

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Art #Hands #Two

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

#Character #Stories #Imagery

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

#Jobs #Creative #Talent

I've got Disney blood running through my veins.
-- John Lasseter

#Running #Blood #Veins

I believe in research you cannot do enough research; believability comes out of what's real.
-- John Lasseter

#Real #Believe #Research

Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience. Our challenge is to make stories that connect for kids and adults.
-- John Lasseter

#Kids #Play #Challenges

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Character #Ideas #Inspire

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Mean #Artist #Unique

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Character #Cartoon #Watches

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

#Entertainment #Economic #Inexpensive

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

#Giving #Creative #Way

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

#Attention #Pay #Computer

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

#Helping Others #Benefits #Helping

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

#Oil #Cartoon #Veins

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.
-- John Lasseter

#Growing Up #Curls #Details

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

#Talking #Pun #Jokes

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

#Real #People #World