"With computer animation, we could make things look like they were certain objects, but it's the movement that truly makes you believe what it is," he explains. "And the movement comes not from the computer, but from the principles of animation I learned from Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Eric Larson."
At the premiere of "Luxo," computer graphics pioneer Jim Blinn came up to Lasseter with a question. Expecting something highly technical, Lasseter was surprised to hear him ask, "Was the parent lamp the mother or the father?"
"I knew by Jim's question that we had entertained audiences because of the story and the characters, not because it was made by a computer," Lasseter says.
"The answer was it's actually a father, but it's based on my mother," he continues. "When we got into a kind of iffy situation, instead of grabbing at us, she would say, 'You got yourself up there, you get yourself down.' I figured that was what the father lamp did: The little lamp hopped on the ball, and the father is thinking, 'You're going to break your light bulb!' But he lets him pop the ball: 'That's what you what get for jumping on your ball!'"
The success of "Luxo, Jr." was followed by a series of shorts ("Red's Dream," "Tin Toy," "Knick Knack") in which the Pixar artists explored and developed their medium, much as Disney had used the "Silly Symphonies" as stepping stones to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
"We were a hardware company; we didn't actually have any business doing animation, because there was no money in it," Catmull says. "We were struggling as a company, but Steve knew that in our hearts, we wanted to do animation, and if there's one thing Steve understands, it's passion."
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