John Lasseter: Pixar and the Collaborative Team

You may have been living under a rock for the past two decades if you have not heard of Pixar.

Pixar, now owned by Disney, released its first film toy story in 1995. This film was significant not only in its storytelling but for pushing the creative innovation behind movie making and introducing ever computer animation in films. John Lasseter was the main creative mind behind computer animation. Before Pixar’s founding, John graduated from the California Institute of the arts to become an animator at Disney.

He was fired five years later. Why? He was a major proponent of computer animation and wanted to push the craft further. As it turns out, this might have been the best thing to happen.

John would join Pixar, which he described as a “studio of pioneers” that worked together to create amazing and original stories in (at the time) a unique way, computer animation. At Pixar, “management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur,” allowing John and his colleagues to continue to push computer animation and storytelling further.

 A distinctive feature of Pixar at the time was its creativity in the process as well as animation. All of Pixar’s original films before the Disney acquisition were stories created by artists at the studio, not adaptations. John talked about the process of coming up with these stories in an interview with Forbes:

“We have an informal collective brain trust, we called it a story trust, where they are peers, and we show our movies internally every three months. We are always looking at our story with this group and this group is very honest.”

Even though John Lasseter as head of Pixar helped innovate the field, Pixar is a community that works together to create ideas. Pixar is the vehicle through which John was able to realize his goals and push himself in innovative techniques, but he was not alone in this process. In fact, he has only been as successful as he is, is due to the creative community at Pixar.

A quote that I think highlights this point is:

“The view that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people is rooted in a misconception of creativity”

John Lasseter certainly is a creative individual who challenged ways of making movies and even the creative process behind the story, but without the collaborative culture of Pixar, he might not have succeeded.

Sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2017/08/07/john-lasseters-magic-formula-for-creativity/?sh=e2000b75cbf3

https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity