John Lasseter Deserved It (And More)
Pixar has always fascinated me. Considering Toy Story came out a year and half after I did, it’s a given, growing up in the Disney household I did, that their films played a major role in my life. Their storytelling is brilliant, and their consistency unparalleled. Even given their recent tendency to make sequels — Their first 10 movies had one, while seven of their next eleven were sequels — they still almost put out universally great work.
Pixar is one of the great animation studios of all time. They’re up there with Studio Ghibli and the mothership Walt Disney Animation Studios in their glory days, but even then, their animation has always been cutting-edge, while the same can’t be said for some of Disney’s lesser efforts. But from 2011–2017 something was off in Pixar, and despite some great movies in this time, there were much darker and deeper issues.
The creative genius behind early Pixar centers around the “Brain trust,” four founding members of Pixar who made up the core creative team: Joe Ranft, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and John Lasseter. Ranft died in 2006 while co-directing Cars with Lasseter. Stanton and Docter remain the two leads at Pixar, overseeing the production of each film while continuing to make their own films, with Docter now installed as Chief Creative Officer of Pixar. Lasseter, who after directing Toy Story, a bug’s life, Toy Story 2, and Cars, and being installed as Chief Creative Officer of Disney Animation well as Pixar in 2006, had to step down in late 2017 following accusations of sexual harassment.
As a huge Pixar fan as well as a big fan of John Lasseter, this was obviously disappointing. But the incident, horrible and disgusting as it was, didn’t matter to me nearly as much as what it revealed: The company I love more than anything in the world, the greatest film production company of all time was a pretty nasty place for a woman to work.
Of course, that’s just one studio. Animation is a boys’ club in general. It’s a problem. A quick search of the phrase “Animated films directed by women” mostly shows a bunch of obscure short films and Brave, Pixar’s lone-female directed work. Well, it was supposed to be, at least. The movie famously replaced Brenda Chapman with Mark Andrews in the middle of production, citing “creative differences.”
Maybe Mark Andrews is a better director, maybe his choices were stronger. These things are certainly possible, plausible even. Sometimes, films just need a lot of work. The Good Dinosaur had a pretty troubled production, replacing its director and starting and stopping production a few times, only to release as one Pixar’s lesser efforts when the dust all settled. These things happen a ton in Hollywood, and the stories that lead to directors being fired usually don’t amount to much. But I don’t buy it.
With a guy like Lasseter, who would not only inappropriately comment on his female employees’ physical appearances, but also make unwanted advances on female employees, is in charge of your company, and you, the lone female at the top, are removed from a project, it’s probably not because Andrews was better. Their talent levels are not relevant. This was, after all, simultaneous with Cars 2’s production cycle, which shows that Pixar’s quality control was at an all-time low.
Brenda Chapman, to this point, had the most impressive resume of any female animator, ever. I’d say she still holds that title. Starting as a storyboarder/animator at the Mouse House, she was courted away by Jeff Katzenberg in the late ’90s to direct Dreamworks’s first hand-drawn film, The Prince of Egypt, which remains, at least to me, the best movie musical there is based on the book of Exodus. She left Disney during their renaissance, her last Disney credit was Hunchback, and they still had a lot of good films in them before Atlantis came out a half-decade later. But there was better opportunity elsewhere.
She then remained with Dreamworks, working as an artist on Chicken Run, Road to El Dorado, and Sinbad, a movie so bad Dreamworks almost went bankrupt, and their only choice was to can their hand-drawn film department.
Chapman then gets in at Pixar. This is the bigs. This was right after Nemo and going into The Incredibles. Can you imagine any film company having a stronger 3-film run than Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles?
So Chapman joins Pixar and is immediately A-team. Let’s look at her Pixar resumé, prior to Brave. Cars, Wall•E, Up, Toy Story 3, Cars 2. Her credits alternate between Storyboard Artist and Senior Creative Team. Senior Creative Team seems like a vague title, but nothing is vague at Pixar. This is the woman who worked on Disney films during the studio’s most consistent period, she helped turn Dreamworks into what it was. Senior Creative Team is actually a pretty prestigious credit in these instances, and she deserved all the prestige she could get.
Anyway, let’s talk about Brave in its released form. Troubled production notwithstanding, it’s not a classic. This is Pixar’s first female-led film. Sure, The Incredibles was as close as we had gotten to that point, and though Helen has a great story in it, the movie is more Bob’s than hers. But this is their twelfth film, and remains one of two (Out of 21 as of Toy Story 4) with a female protagonist. For what it’s worth, it’s not very good.
Maybe this is a marketing problem. Brave’s campaign showed a badass archer princess going on adventures. The reality is that it’s a quieter film, focused more on the relationship between Merida and her parents. She’s still a cool character, still a good archer, but she doesn’t really go on a grand quest. The fantasy elements of Brave feel half-baked and the climax of the story leaves a lot to be desired. It is a fine film, sure, and as beautiful as any Pixar classic, but coming off of the disaster of Cars 2, it wasn’t a huge vote of confidence in Pixar at the time.
So anyway, Mark Andrews — if he was, indeed, brought in to fix Brave — didn’t at all fix Brave. What’s there is fine, but the last three non-sequels produced by Pixar prior to Brave were, in order, Ratatouille, Wall•E, and Up. No wonder Brave was a disappointment. Still, viewed in isolation in 2019, it’s still one of the worst Pixar films. So if Andrews didn’t fix Brave into a stone cold classic, what did he do?
If it was his idea to turn Merida’s little brothers into bears, for that matter, if it was his idea to turn the mother into a bear, then he failed. The compelling thing about Brave is Merida’s relationship with her parents, and while it’s interesting that it was her fault her mom becomes a bear, in a “Be careful what you wish for” kind of a way, for it to be the crux of the plot is ultimately a bit unsatisfying. I simply don’t find it interesting that the king’s main drive in the film is a hatred of bears. The truth is probably in the middle. He probably fixed some things, made some things worse, but overall, I doubt Brave, with its many delays, was really fixable at that point.
Given that the cited reason for Chapman’s ousting and Andrews’ subsequent appointment as director was “Creative differences between Chapman and Lasseter,” and the more-recent issue with Toy Story 4’s production, it seems impossible that Lasseter’s misogyny doesn’t play a part in Chapman’s replacement. Of course, Chapman and Andrews share credit, and Chapman did go on record saying she felt that the movie was ultimately still hers, but her firing was devastating. This isn’t some random animator they took a chance on by tossing a directing gig her way. This was the Annie Award-nominated director of The Prince of Egypt, a big wheel who moved from Disney at their creative peak to Dreamworks at their creative peak to Pixar at their creative peak. Even if Pixar did have a systemic oppression of female talent, she had to be a big deal, and they had to give her a movie because — and this is the most important part — the public knew she was a big deal. So they can’t just, you know, not give her a movie.
I talk so much here about Brave and its troubled production to shed light on the problem at hand. Pixar is a boys’ club. The best Pixar movies, Toy Story, Inside Out, Coco, Finding Nemo to name a few, were directed by John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Andrew Stanton, respectively. These are four white guys who have all been at Pixar since Toy Story 1, or earlier. Unkrich has climbed the ladder and become one of the head honchos in the last decade or so after starting out as an editor. Looking even at the short film directorial credits, there’s not a lot of representation until about 2006 when some non-white and female directors start getting some credits. This is a problem within Pixar, but it is also a symptom of the world of animation as a whole, and if you want to take a step back even farther, film.
Of course, this problem is something they, Hollywood, are actively working on, though not as quickly as we’d hope. The best action is to hire the talent, but the talent requires schooling, mentorship, and experience, which requires someone be interested in the subject to the point where they pursue it. Growing up, I knew a lot of boys interested in animation, and though I knew a ton of female artists, animation it didn’t come up with them as much. I wonder why. I’m not making a chicken and egg argument, I’m saying that it is intimidating, and devastatingly difficult to break into a world where you don’t see your kind represented, and in the world of animation, the only ones not intimidated, are white men. There’s not no women in Pixar, their head producer for years and years was Darla Anderson, who apparently would play practical jokes on the guys so much that Andrew Stanton named the worst Pixar character ever after her. But one important woman in a sea of men does not fix this problem.
Back to Brave, I think in a perfect world it would be easy to accept that Lasseter and Chapman simply did have creative differences. If he thought Andrews would help pick up the pieces in the midst of a messy divorce, that’s no grave sin. But it’s not that simple. I’m not here to theorize that Lasseter has a problem with women in charge, though that’s certainly not the worst thing I can theorize about what happened. It’s irresponsible to assume anything happened, really, but let’s look at the behavior that Lasseter was known to exhibit before his 2017 ousting at Pixar.
Smacks on the ass, kisses on the cheek, unwanted hugs, inappropriate behavior while drinking, which was exaggerated at company parties and events. If you’ve ever watched the special features on Toy Story or a bug’s life DVDs, you know that Pixar has parties. The accusations painted the picture pretty clearly of a misogynistic, old-fashioned, gross man, and while one could argue that his behavior “didn’t reach the heights” of a Les Moonves, or a Harvey Weinstein, you’d of course be right, but you’d also miss the point. John Lasseter is a type of man that grew up getting what he wants. He probably was emulating the behaviors of past men that were influential in his life. But he gets his way.
I like to think that Lasseter wasn’t trying to be so dismissive of or harmful to the women he worked with, and I don’t think he intended to make them feel vulnerable or unsafe. I think he grew up in a world where that’s simply what men did, and unlike other, more mature and less disgusting men, he couldn’t adapt. I’m being too generous, perhaps, to John Lasseter. My years of admiration are doing their best to blind my disgust of his actions. But I’m happy he left Disney, and while he was incalculably valuable in turning Pixar into the animation powerhouse it is today, it was time for a purging of his terrible behavior. I heard one account describe him as a 5-year-old who loved to play with toys that grew up to be a man in charge of multiple companies, but still with a 5-year-old’s brain.
I don’t know any of John Lasseter’s victims, the accounts were anonymous and brief, unlike those of Weinstein, Moonves, and even Donald Trump, so it’s hard to get a great grasp of what went down. From what we can ascertain, he was a pretty gross dude. He did harmful, disgusting, and awful things, To be frank, I don’t think he was treated harshly enough. I think Pixar’s still-shimmering image points to the fact that overall, it wasn’t that big of a story, when it should have been. One of the many tragic things to come out of the Me Too movement is that in all the scuffle, with all the stories, it’s hard to pay attention to any individual story, and stuff gets lost.
His behavior sounds like stuff that I too have been guilty of, at least at some point in my life. The portrait of John as a man-child, whose power, wealth and influence greatly exceeded his maturity seems apt, because unwanted physical touch and uninvited comments about colleagues’ appearances is how I acted in middle school and early high school. I did some shitty stuff, I think at points we all do, but I’ve changed. We grow up, adapt, and our behavior tends to grow up with us. Sometimes it takes others to point out our issues, and to keep us accountable, other times, it’s something you do out of your own instinct that horrifies yourself so deeply it manages to scare you straight. Either way, it’s our job as we grow up to learn how to keep boundaries and respect others. John Lasseter never learned.
This is in no way a defense of John Lasseter. It is the opposite. I’m saying he didn’t grow up. He refused to accept that what he did in middle school in his school-yard flirtations was a problem, or, at least, refused to stop doing them after realizing they were problematic. He made the people in his life afraid to call him out on his bullshit, most likely out of fear for their jobs. There is no reason a person in a position of power like this should be tolerated. So, after a brief suspension and a while where the board had to decide what to do, John Lasseter was out of Disney by mid-2018, and while he is a bit young to retire, everyone thought it was probably best to never deal with him again.
Enter David Ellison. Earlier this year, John Lasseter was hired at Skydance Animation, a subsidiary of Skydance, a production house that to this point has mostly made Tom Cruise-style action films. David Ellison, Skydance’s Founder/CEO, stood by his choice when pressed on the matter. He made it clear he was going to be keeping a watchful eye on Lasseter, and said he is canned if anything happens, and if anything from the past that Lasseter hasn’t already copped to, bubbles back up to the surface.
Frankly, I don’t think any good will come of this, nor do I have a lot of interest in Skydance animation. I don’t want John Lasseter’s life ruined. If we were friends, and his behavior has indeed evolved as he claims, then I’d consider forgiving him the way my friends forgive me for some my most terrible behaviors. Given the behavioral contingencies of his contract, Lasseter now has a responsibility to treat women better, and is canned if he doesn’t. Wouldn’t it be better if that was simply implied? “Decent behavior” should be the bare minimum.
On a professional level, there is no reason to put him in a place of this much power. His behavior, at best, is that of a 12-year-old experiencing his first sexual urges. At worst? Well, again, I’m not assuming anything. There is no excuse for this behavior coming from an executive of a major film studio, and while I am all for second chances on an interpersonal level, I think time is up for this guy professionally.
Read Emma Thompson’s (Mercifully short) impassioned piece on why she can’t work with him, and then decide for yourself if you want to support this guy any further. He did some great work, and if you’d like, you can appreciate it, I know I’ll continue to. But I have no room for Lasseter’s second chance.
I want to write about Toy Story. I want to talk about how it’s the greatest film ever made. I will talk about my love for John Lasseter’s films, and his company, and his people. But I just felt this was the necessary thing before I get to all the warm fuzzies.
