The next film technology with which Pixar is leading the way is 3D, which has seen a huge resurgence in the past 18 months. Pixar’s next release, Up, has been made in 3D — as will all its features from now on — and there will be 3D versions of the first two Toy Story films in advance of next year’s sequel.
“We’ve been interested in 3D for a very long time,” Lasseter says. “In 1989, Pixar made a short film called Knick Knack in 3D. I realized very early on that what you’re creating inside the computer is a three-dimensional environment. And I’ve always felt sad that you could only see a two-dimensional window into that three-dimensional space.
“We did quite a bit of research in holography, in lenticular imagery, to try to get a true three-dimensional view of the world and objects we were creating. I was doing a lot of amateur 3D photography — in 1988, when I got married to my wife Nancy, we took 3D wedding pictures. But there were no theaters you could see 3D in — you have to do a special setup with a silver screen and polarized projectors and all that stuff — and it was a pain that no one got to see [Knick Knack] in 3D.”
“Theaters started recognizing that with digital they could do 3D far more easily than with film. And what’s exciting about that right now is that you can’t get it at home. That’s why theater owners have been investing heavily in it.”
Bolt was made from the beginning as a 3D film. It’s also the first computer-animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, of which Lasseter was appointed chief creative officer in 2006, when Disney bought Pixar.
“There’s one technological advance in Bolt that Pixar’s never done before: there is a softness and an interesting quality to the backgrounds,” he says. “The artists at Disney said: ‘Is there a way in computer animation that we can make the backgrounds look more like they’ve been painted?’
“This new technology in Bolt makes the world believable — not really real, but believable. When you stop a frame and study the backgrounds, you realize wow, that’s pretty painterly — and you have never seen that before in computer animation. There is a beautiful, rich quality to Bolt that no one’s seen before in computer animation.”
With technology still advancing, what does Lasseter think Pixar will be able to do five or 10 years from now?
“It’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s getting to the point where the limitation is in the imagination of the filmmaker: if he can imagine it, chances are that he can make it. Which early on in computer animation was not the case.
“Clearly, the most difficult thing to create is a human being. That’s why, when we’ve created human characters such as those in The Incredibles, we’ve kept them fairly stylized. To create a character that’s totally believable and realistic is always going to be the challenge. But it depends on the story you’re trying to tell.”
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