The Creator of 'Cars' on His Four-Wheel Fascination

The Creator of 'Cars' on His Four-Wheel Fascination

A portrait of John Lasseter graces the cover of the May 29 Fortune magazine, a portrait in which he wears a slightly outre Hawaiian shirt and an expression that can only be described as delirious, rather like a man whose door has just been visited by Publishers Clearing House. Which, in a way, it has.

The 49-year-old animator recently ascended to the title of chief creative officer of the newly merged colossus known as Disney-Pixar. That's a bit like being promoted to Grand Pooh-bah of Cartoonland, and so his giddiness is entirely apt.

Another reason he's smiling: His latest film, "Cars," just opened Friday and is no doubt cleaning up at the box office as you read this, thanks to an avalanche of advance promotion and largely favorable reviews.

If your two biggest childhood fascinations were cars and cartoons, a movie like "Cars" would seem inevitable. Still, it took the creator of such contemporary money-printers as "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" years to settle on an approach.

"When you bring an inanimate object to life," he said from Charlotte, where "Cars" was about to have its world premiere at Lowe's Motor Speedway, "you always think, 'What is the face? Because that's the window of the soul of the character." Previously, animators had put a car's eyes in its headlights, but in that case, "the face is way down on the front of the car and the whole body is laid out behind it, kind of like a snake."

Lasseter's innovation -- inspired by the 1952 Disney short "Susie the Little Blue Coupe" -- was to "put the eyes in the windshield. That changes the whole dynamic. The entire body of the car is the head of the character," with the tires positioned below like four legs. The cars become, in essence, dolls.

That automobiles have a human side is a theme of "Cars," and like humans, they are not immune to proverbs. After a long trip west, Lightning McQueen, the film's hero, learns that it's the journey in life and not the destination that matters (of course!). That's because the Lasseter family, after a trip east, arrived at the same conclusion.

Lasseter's journey came while in the midst of an extraordinarily creative period in the 1990s, a time when he was reinventing animation for Pixar, introducing the world to Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Flik and -- most important -- CGI.

"My wife was so supportive of my career. But when 'Toy Story 2' was being completed, she said, in 1999, 'You know, be careful. One day you're gonna wake up, your boys will have gone off to college and you will have missed it.' " Lasseter immediately made plans for a family retreat with his five sons.

"I took the summer off, we bought a used motor home, we put our feet in the Pacific Ocean near where we lived and we turned east. . . . Our only plan was to put our feet in the Atlantic and come back. And we stayed off the interstates and just followed where we wanted to go. It was so special. Everybody thought we were going to be at each others' throats, but the opposite happened. We got so close as a family."

The moral of the story? Never overlook the healing potential of the gasoline-powered engine. Apt advice from the son of a Chevy parts dealer.

"I learned how beautiful this country is, how friendly everybody is," said the Pixar CCO. "For two months I never even thought about the next day . . . and when I came back from that journey, I knew what I wanted this movie to be about."

If your two biggest childhood fascinations were cars and cartoons, a movie like "Cars" would seem inevitable. Still, it took John Lasseter years to settle on an approach.