John Lasseter has a unique place in computer animation - after 17 years' pushing the boundaries of what computers can do for animators. His direction of the first computer animated feature film Toy Story in 1995 won an Academy Award. This was followed by critical and commercial success for A Bug's Life three years later. His latest film Toy Story 2 opens in Ireland next Friday after great success in the US.
He also has a special place in the hearts of parents who find that his films are among the few children's videos which bear repeated viewing. Toy Story, for example, is so rich in visual jokes, references and quirks that there is something new to be found even on the 20th time through it.
In Dublin to promote Toy Story 2 recently, he was full of enthusiasm for the medium he has made his own. "The tools are photo-realistic. You can create things that can't possibly exist and still make them look believable, kind of real. That's what I love about it."
His own animation story began long before Toy Story. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter became interested in cartoons and animation in school and studied them at the CalArts centre for art design and photography. After graduating in 1979 he worked at Disney as a traditional animator, drawing by hand.
It was there that he became excited about the possibilities of computer animation. "I was just doing traditional animation and I was feeling like Disney animation had kind of reached a certain plateau. Movies like Star Wars inspired me to take things further, how to entertain audiences and the energy of their film making. "Then at Disney they were making the movie Tron . . . it was the first computer animation I saw, some of the early work being done for the movie. It was like a little door in my head opened up and there was a big bright world beyond it."
Animation poses particular problems for computers: Creating 3D models and having them move realistically; rendering their surfaces with the correct textures for their position, interaction with other characters; and the lighting of the scene. These are huge computational tasks, capable of sucking the last drop of power from even the most heavyweight hardware.
Back in the early 1980s the computerised tools for animators were extremely crude. "Everybody back then who was doing computer animation had written their software. There was no off-the-shelf software available. It was the same people who were doing the animation." There was also a novelty value that made people look uncritically at the work produced. "Everybody would be really amazed. They wouldn't look at it and go `yeah, but it's ugly'. It was made by a computer and that alone was what made it interesting and popular.
"From the beginning, I believed in the same philosophy that the Disney had been built on. It's not the medium or the tools that make an entertaining film. It's the story and the characters - it's what you do with that medium."
He left Disney in 1984 for Lucasfilm, which later became Pixar, to pursue the possibilities of computerised animation. A series of short films and adverts followed, as the new company built its skills and tools. Five of the short films were shown together in Dublin last month as part of a tribute day at the Irish Film Centre. Lasseter professed himself thoroughly embarrassed by the star treatment, but the screenings were full and the shorts provided more entertainment than most full-length films. His short films from the 1980s show the possibilities of computer animation: much more realistic, three-dimensional worlds than those of traditional animation. At the same time, they chart the huge advances in computing power since then, reflecting it in ever-greater realism and refinement.
"What the added memory, speed and power of these computers (and the cheaper cost) bring is the ability to create more and more complex imagery. Everybody assumes that we will be able to do the same things that we do, only faster. We always kind of fill up the capacity because we keep doing more and more complex imagery."
He says the amount of computing power for A Bug's Life was 12 times that of Toy Story. That of Toy Story 2 is three times that of A Bug's Life.
"One of the things that's most important about the development of the future is that at Pixar we always have the need of the story dictate the technical development." The creative team will ask for a certain effect and as the technical teams research it the work may well inspire further ideas by the creative team. "It's the true blending of art and technology. The way we work is that art challenges the technology and technology inspires the art."
Much of Pixar's work has been in developing its own computer tools for animation. They had to be powerful enough to be interactive and not disrupt creative work. "Can you imagine typing on a word processor and it takes between three seconds and three minutes for each letter to come up . . . it would block your creative flow. At times that's what computer animation was like."
Cray Computer is credited on one of the early short films because the company donated the use of systems that it was running in before delivery. Nowadays, Pixar runs mostly on Unix, with Sun and Silicon graphics hardware supporting its in-house software. These software tools, Marionette, Alias and Renderman are what made Toy Story 2.
Although he repeatedly stresses the primacy of creativity and storytelling, it is clear that the technology that gives expression to his creativity also fascinates him. Now that computer animation is no longer a novelty, he says proper attention is being paid to the story telling involved. "The border between art and technology is really blurring."
fomarcaigh@irish-times.ie
Toy Facts
Box office takings of Toy Story: $360 million world wide
Toy Story US video sales: over 22 million
Crew on Toy Story 2: Over 250 artists, animators and technicians
Virtual sets used in the film: 18
Individual models: Over 1,200
Lines of code used to define skin surface of human characters: 7,750
Images painted to define skin characteristics: 10,000
Size of skin painting data: 17 gigabytes
Hairs created on the dog Buster: nearly 4 million