When you can have a character that the audience likes from the beginning, but then you put them in a situation where they grow - I think that gives it a lot of heart.
— John Lasseter
I've noticed with my own kids, it seems like they have so much more homework than I did.
When you're a director, you really live whatever you do.
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.
Fortunately for me, I'm married to an amazing woman - Nancy Lasseter - who is wise enough not to let me buy every car I want. If I was single, I would be living in a very small apartment and renting a warehouse full of cool cars.
Probably more than any other movie we've made here at Pixar, 'Up' was the one we were the most nervous about.
The greatest bad guys, you understand where they're coming from. They believe they're doing the right thing. Sometimes it's for greed, sometimes it's for other reasons, but they are what they call the center of good. They always believe they're doing the right thing.
I believe God is in the details.
In overseeing both Disney and Pixar Animation, each studio has a unique culture.
The specific influences on villains to me is, 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.
As a filmmaker, I'm very collaborative. I don't pretend to know everything that is needed to make a movie. What I like to do is get together with a group of people, starting with developing the story and bounce around ideas.
I think that as I had children, I have five sons, and they got into video games and were the prime ages through the development of video games. It was so much fun seeing them play the games and seeing it through their eyes.
I think the best movie ever made was 'Dumbo.'
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.
When Walt Disney was making his films, he trusted his instincts and made films for himself, but they appealed to everybody, not just kids.
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.
Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.
Sunday, for me, is all about being home with the family with no plans.
The iPad changed my life!
I believe that, by directing, it makes me a better executive as well.
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.
I have met a lot of top chefs around the world during my travels. Each one of them has said 'Ratatouille' is their favorite movie and the only movie that truly captures what they do.
Pixar films are not realistic. They are believable for the worlds we are creating.
I love French auto design of the early '50s, '60s, early '70s of Citorens, Renaults, and Peugeots. They're so unique.
Every young person gets so excited about new software packages and new technology.
The magic of Disneyland, walking through the tunnel underneath the train station to Main Street, it just transports you to other places and other times.
When you really study espionage movies, or spy movies, the beginnings are really set up to have, like, an amazing bit of action, but at the moment you're watching it, you have no idea why or what it's about.
I think 'Disney Infinity' is exciting. It's hard to even call it a video game, because it's so different. What excites me about this is how it's going to put more and more of what happens in the game into the hands of the user; it's up to them. You can play it to where everything's laid out for you.
I was born in 1957, so when I was a kid, there wasn't anything called a video game. When 'Pong' came out, it was awesome.
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.'
At Pixar, after every movie we have postmortum meetings where we discuss what worked and what didn't work.
When I was a freshman in high school, I read a book about the making of Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty' called 'The Art of Animation.' It was this weird revelation for me, because I hadn't considered that people actually get paid to make cartoons.
When you go into the theatre and the lights dim, you want to entertain people from beginning to end. You want them to be swept up in your story, on the edge of their seats, unable to wait to see what happens next, be blown away and afterwards just go, 'Wow!'
Pixar has been compared to fine furniture makers who polish the backs of drawers - even if you don't see everything in a particular scene, you still feel that every little detail has been met.
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.
Steve Jobs is like a brother to me and he's one of the founders of Pixar, and when the first iPad came out, I got one right away.
We use shorts at the studio extensively to develop talent. I always love to give opportunities for young story people, animators, layout people something like that to take the next step up in their career and try things out.
'Cars' is a really personal story for me because, first of all, I grew up in Los Angeles - the car crazy capital.
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.
Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.
'Cars' was about Lightning McQueen learning to slow down and to enjoy life. The journey is the reward.
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'm a huge fan of Blu-rays myself.
There was a period of time when they estimated the two biggest stars in Hollywood were Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse.
I love 3-D. I have been a big fan of 3-D for a long, long time. I took my 1988 wedding pictures in 3-D!
'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.
To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry.
At Pixar, we've been huge fans of any new technology that makes the viewer experience of our movies better. Blu-ray is the best yet because the picture quality, especially for our movies, is unbelievable.
My brother liked sewing and sculpting and making things, and my sister sewed and painted and cooked and baked. She's a professional baker now and makes the most gorgeous sculpture-like cakes. She's the queen of wedding cakes in the Lake Tahoe area.
Rotten Tomatoes is such a great website, in that it has one foot in the Internet world and one foot in the cinema world, and it keeps its grounding between them just perfectly.
