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As their later successes would demonstrate, Lasseter and at least some of his contemporaries were indeed the true successors to Walt Disney and his collaborators. But in 1979 and the early 1980s, their efforts to shake the Disney company out of its creative lethargy succeeded only in alienating the Powers That Be.

In 1982 Lasseter was fired up by the possibilities he saw upon watching Disney’s live action adventure movie Tron, one of the first films to utilize the new CGI technology. (1982 was the year that I attended my first San Diego Comic Con, and one night while we were there, the late Mark Gruenwald, other Marvel employees and I went to a drive-in to watch the newly opened Tron. Yes, there were still drive-ins back then, though not many.) Lasseter wanted to use computers in animation, and pitched a version of Thomas Disch’s The Brave Little Toaster. “I’ve always loved animating inanimate objects, and this story had a lot of that,” Lasseter said in Fortune, so it would seem that the 30 second Toaster test clip (with hand-drawn characters but CGI backgrounds) that he worked up was the forebear of 2005’s Cars. (Or was it a thirty-second test clip adapting Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, as Charles Solomon contends in the New York Times piece?)

Lasseter was a visionary, but as the maxim goes, a prophet does not receive honor in his own country, which Disney was for him. In the process of pushing for this innovative project he had inadvertently alienated his superior, and so Lasseter was done in by office politics. Once Toaster was turned down, Lasseter was let go. (Eventually The Brave Little Toaster was made as a hand-drawn animated film outside the Disney studio and was released in 1987.)

“So, yeah, I was fired,” Lasseter said in Fortune. “But you have to understand. . .this was my identity. The only thing I’d ever wanted to do was work for Disney. I was so excited, and pushing, and I didn’t play the political game. I was devastated.” I can understand this. I’ve seen the reactions of comics professionals who, after years of prosperity in their chosen artform, abruptly find themselves out of work, often for no reason better than that a new regime has come to power. What happens to your sense of identity when your success suddenly comes to an end, your position in the business falls away, and your dreams seem to have reached a dead end? Fortune quotes Lasseter’s fellow Pixar director Andrew Stanton as saying, “He knows what it’s like to be reminded that you’re a subordinate, that you’re inferior, that you’re replaceable, and that it’s not about you.”

I’ve enjoyed watching how some of my friends in the comics business, whom I thought had been badly treated by one or more of the major companies, eventually achieved such success that they became major players at the Big Two. Lasseter followed a similar route. Unable to break through the Disney bureaucracy, Lasseter went over to Lucasfilm, the company founded by another filmmaker who had had a great influence on him. Even for Toaster, Lasseter hadn’t even considered using computers to animate characters, but his friends at Lucasfilm suggested he try it. “So that’s how I came to direct what turned out to be the very first character-animation cartoon done with a computer.”

And this led to a revolution in computer animation. I am again reminded of how, in a period when DC Comics had seemingly permanent dominance in the comics industry, Stan Lee, on the verge of quitting the medium, instead came up with the revolution that transformed his fortunes, Marvel’s, and the whole American comics business’s. Lucasfilm’s computer division became the independent company Pixar.

There are many cases of comics professionals who make their names in independent comics, and then go on to become stars at the Big Two, Marvel and DC. Similarly, Lasseter and his Pixar colleagues became increasingly successful in their independent operation, and eventually made a deal with Disney to do their first–actually, the world’s first–entirely computer-animated feature film, Toy Story.

At this joint in Lasseter’s tale I find a quotation that was quite revealing about corporate Disney’s mindset circa 1991. “What was interesting is that Disney kept pushing us to make the characters more edgy. That was the word that they kept using. We soon realized this was was not a movie we wanted to make–the characters were so Ôedgy’ they had become unlikable. The characters were yelling, they were cynical, they were always making fun of everybody, and I hated it.”

So, readers, does that description make you too think of the state of characterization at Marvel and DC here in the early 21st century?

Lasseter claims that “the Disney people” thought “we didn’t know what we were doing.” But Lasseter and Pixar stuck to their guns, and Toy Story, expressing their own creative vision, was an enormous success. “That taught us a big lesson,” Lasseter told Fortune. “From that point on, we trusted our instinct to make the movie we wanted to make. And that is when I started really giving our own people creative ownership over things, because I trusted their judgment more than the people at Disney.”

Solomon stated about Lasseter in the Times that “Much like the late Walt Disney, his trademarks are well-told, broadly appealing stories, technological advances, interesting characters and a quality that has been conspicuously absent from many recent American films: heart.” And if I had to sum up in one word what has been conspicuously absent from many (most?) recent Marvel and DC comics, now I know which word to choose. Not the mawkish sentimentality we sometimes get, but genuine heart. It’s the wisdom of Solomon indeed; thank you.

As it turned out, from the mid-1980s onward Pixar’s computer animated features outdid Disney’s own new animated features both commercially and creatively. The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) was a comedic delight, Lilo and Stitch (2002) was entertaining and commercially successful, and Brother Bear (2003) had an intriguing mythic subtext (see “Comics in Context” #19). But Atlantis: the Lost Empire (2001), Treasure Planet (2002), and Home on the Range (2004) (see “Comics in Context” #41) were disasters. Disney’s Tarzan in 1999 (see “Comics in Context” #133) was its last animated feature that looks destined to take a rightful place among its classics. Disney Animation was in sharp decline.

In another archetypal example of corporate thickheadedness, Disney–and other major studios–decided that the problem wasn’t, say, a lack of “heart” in the films, but the fact that they were hand-drawn. Ignoring the considerable popularity of such contemporary hand-drawn animation as Mr. Hembeck’s beloved SpongeBob (who, it has been said, is a bigger icon to today’s kids than Mickey Mouse himself) and the anime that has taken over much of Cartoon Network, Disney (and DreamWorks Animation, et al) decided that kids only want to see computer animation.

And so Disney deep-sixed its own hand-drawn animation operations in a classic example of shortsighted corporate thinking. Did it never occur to anyone at Disney that maybe they should just put all the traditional animation equipment in storage since someday company executives might want to do hand-drawn animation again?

I suppose not. This reminds me of the opening of Marvel’s big 2006 event series Civil War, in which the New Warriors get blown up. Wasn’t it only a decade ago that New Warriors was one of Marvel’s high profile titles? Does it ever occur to whatever editorial administration is current at DC or Marvel that just because they think a longrunning character is disposable doesn’t mean that someone might not come along who has a great idea for using the character. (Here’s an example: after thirty years of commercial failure, now Jack Kirby’s Eternals are hot because Neil Gaiman wanted to write them.) Doesn’t it occur to anyone that maybe killing off Namorita, a brainchild of Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, along with the other New warriors might not be a good idea? That someday someone might do a successful Sub-Mariner series and want to use her, as John Byrne did in the 1990s?

So Disney decided to switch to doing only computer animated films, and the result was last year’s Chicken Little (see “Comics in Context” #110), after which the company’s new leadership realized that the sky really was falling on Disney animation. Under former Disney head Michael Eisner, Disney had failed to renew its agreement to distribute (and own) Pixar’s feature films.

Following Eisner’s overthrow, his successor Robert Iger forged the deal whereby Disney not only bought Pixar but put Lasseter in charge of animation at both studios. Fortune editor Brent Schlender asserted in his article that “For Iger, the deal is a bet-the-house gamble to save Disney animation from creative oblivion.”

It had become clear that Lasseter and Pixar had become the true successor to Walt Disney and his colleagues in animation. Finally corporate Disney’s own failures in animation forced them to realize it, too. So now Lasseter and Pixar are Disney: they have taken over.

In the Fortune piece Dick Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, describes the atmosphere when he introduced Lasseter to the Disney animators after the deal was announced: “It was almost like a homecoming.” Having once been fired from Disney Animation, Lasseter returns in triumph as its new leader. Schlender compares the turn of events to a “storybook” plot, in which “Protagonist follows his heart, perseveres, gets the happy ending. ”

It’s as if this were a version of the tale of the Prodigal Son, in which it was the father, not the son, who was in the wrong.

In his Times profile, Solomon even quotes an animator as saying, “To a lot of animators, John is kind of a King Arthur figure who represents the classic storytelling Disney was known for when Walt was alive,” This man is alluding to the legend that someday King Arthur will return when his country needs him again (as comics aficionados know from Mike W. Barr and Brian Bolland’s Camelot 3000). Can Lasseter live up to this sort of expectation that he is Walt reincarnated? Even Walt Disney had his commercial failures, but did not have to face executives who would take his creative freedom away from him.

Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that you can’t go home again. Whether and how long Lasseter can retain creative freedom within Disney’s corporate environment remains to be seen. But for now, Lasseter has come home.

And where’s the parallel with comics here? Disney Animation, for now, once more has a visionary in charge who many hope will be able to revive the spirit, energy and imagination of classic Disney animation. Marvel and DC each also need such a visionary to guide them, but haven’t found one yet.

DRIVE WEST, YOUNG CAR

In his New Yorker review (June 19, 2006) Anthony Lane sneered that the makers of Cars “set half of it in the landscape of Stagecoach and pitch it squarely at the kind of ten-year-old male who locks himself in the bathroom and devours his dad’s copy of Mustang Monthly.” Thus Lane characterizes not only the audience that likes Cars but also Lasseter and his collaborators on the movie, who make no secret of their fascination with automobiles, as immature boys who masturbate over machines.

At least in the course of insulting all these people, Lane stumbled over an important point. The fictional setting of Cars, Radiator Springs, with its desert vistas and immense rock formations, is an obvious allusion to the real Monument Valley, the setting of director John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and others among his classic Westerns. One of the great, recurring themes of the Western film, from Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) to George Roy Hill’s and William Goldman’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) (which also starred Paul Newman) is the inevitable passage of time, in which people who once had an important place find themselves left behind, outmoded, as the world changes around them. The West becomes a metaphor for all of America, and the changes in the West metaphors for the changes in American society over the generations. Each of these films asks what has been lost in the course of this necessary evolution over time.

There are other movies that are not set in the West but which likewise pursue this theme, often founded upon technological change as a plot device, like Harold Lloyd’s Speedy (1928), about the last horse-drawn trolley in New york city, and Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) (both films, perhaps significantly, made at the end of the silent movie era, after which their stars’ careers went into decline), and Orson Welles’s film of Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), in which the fall of an aristocratic upper class parallels the rise of the automobile.

But the West seems to provide the primary metaphor in films for a changing

America. Hence, the primary character in Lasseter’s Toy Story is a cowboy hero, Woody, who must contend with changing times as personified by science fiction hero Buzz Lightyear. If the Western genre was the dominant source of mythic adventure in American popular culture for the first half of the 20th century, it has been supplanted by fantasy and science fiction in the last half of the century, and into the present, as the grosses for films ranging from Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings demonstrate.

Another significant archetypal concept is that of the lost paradise. Even the Star Wars movies, imitating fairy tales, are set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” The traditional Western gives the impression of being set in a simpler, more innocent time, when heroes standing up for good could defeat villains; in Westerns about changing times, such clear cut moral triumphs seem less possible as modernity arrives.

In movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the turn of the century–the 1890s and early 1900s, which the older members of the audience could still remember–becomes a simpler, more innocent period, that is necessarily lost but still the subject of wistful nostalgia. In Walt Disney’s oeuvre, you can see the same nostalgic idealization of this period in Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Mary Poppins (1964), and, of course, in Main Street at Disneyland and Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

On television The Twilight Zone repeatedly extolled the virtues of turn-of-the-century small town America, but showed that recapturing this lost past was impossible (as in “No Time like the Past”) or even that this preference for the past over the present amounted to a death wish (“A Stop at Willoughby”).

Of course, The original Twilight Zone was produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which creator Rod Serling and his writers clearly did not regard as a golden age while they were living through it. However, for the Baby Boom generation, the 1950s seems to have taken over the role of the 1890s and early 1900s. Like the period preceding World War I, the 1950s is perceived as a period of sexual repression compared to today’s more liberated times. But the 1950s has also come to represent this period of lost innocence, perhaps because it is the time of the Boomers’ early childhood, and doubtless because it precedes the crises and tumult that the Boomers have subsequently witnessed, from the Cuban Missile Crisis and President Kennedy’s assassination onwards. Lisa Schwarzbaum was quite perceptive in commenting that Cars crossed Lost Horizon with the television series Happy Days, which was set in an idealized 1950s. Even the seemingly dark portrayal of the 1950s, in George Clooney’s film Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) actually depicts a seemingly simpler time in which heroes (Edward R. Murrow) could defeat villains (Joseph McCarthy).

Animation historian Michael Barrier wrote, “There is sentimentality aplenty in Cars. Lasseter was born in 1957, too late to remember the days the film rhapsodizes aboutÑthe days when people went for a drive, in long-gone makes like the Hudson Hornet, instead of just driving to get someplace. We are always most nostalgic about what we are too young to have experienced firsthand. (The film’s Žminence grise, “Doc Hudson,” won his trophy races in 1951-53, a few years before Lasseter was born.)” This doesn’t really matter. The idealized 1950s of Cars and Toy Story is no more or less real than the idealized turn of the century of Meet Me in St. Louis or the idealized Old West of classic Westerns. It is a fantasy about virtues and values that are deemed to be insufficiently present in the present day.

Walt Disney himself set this fantasy world at the turn of the century. He even seemed to recognize it as a fantasy. Disneyphiles know that the buildings on Main Street have smaller dimensions than their real life equivalents would be, in order to give theme park visitors the subliminal impression of a child’s perception of this world of the past. Main Street is the gateway to Disneyland’s other, more explicit realms celebrating American and European myths: children’s fairy tales (Fantasyland), the Old West (Frontierland), the unexplored areas of the globe (Adventureland), and a science-fictional future (Tomorrowland). The implication is that Main Street’s America is a fantasy, too.

The main street in Lasseter’s 1950s town of Radiator Springs is his equivalent of Walt Disney’s Main Street. Since they were born generations apart, Disney and Lasseter set their idealized towns in different time periods. Neither Disney’s 1890s nor Lasseter’s 1950s are real, but they represent values that were real to their creators.

Roger Ebert rightly observed in his review that Cars “has a little something profound lurking around the edges. In this case, it’s a sense of loss.” (June 9, 2006). Like so many films dealing with the West, Cars projects that sense of loss onto the changing world around its characters. But the real sense of loss is within the characters and the audience themselves: their sense that they are missing something in their lives.

THE TURNING POINT

Cars seems to have hit a nerve with various of its reviewers. Anthony Lane refers to Cars‘ thesis that there’s more to life than winning races, and observes that “if you quoted it to an actual Nascar driver he would laugh heartily and leave tire marks on the back of your head.” David Edelstein of New York Magazine refers to that same maxim and asks, “Are you yawning yet?” Auteurist film critics look to find the director’s personality expressed through his film. Some reviewers just don’t want to see Lasseter’s personality in a movie, it seems. Referring to Lasseter’s reputation of being a nice man, Edelstein even contends that “niceness can be a drag on an

animator’s antic spirit.” Manohla Dargis in The New York Times wrote that “both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney” (June 9, 2006, http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/movies/09cars.html). She has seemingly decided that, even though Cars was finished months before Disney bought Pixar, the movie demonstrates that Pixar is in danger of selling its creative soul: “here’s hoping that as this onetime scrapper becomes increasingly entrenched and establishment, it keeps its geeks-and-freaks flag flying.”

Other writers have observed that in its opening weekend Cars did not equal the amount of money that Pixar’s Finding Nemo and The Incredibles earned in their initial weekends, and that hence Wall Street and Hollywood will consider Cars a disappointment. (But hasn’t it done extremely well considering how many other animated films, trying to compete with Pixar’s past success, have already been released this year?) Disney and Pixar have to contend with the reality of such financial expectations. In the long run, I wonder if this will matter, since I expect Cars will join the list of Pixar’s evergreen classics, continuing to make money through DVDs and merchandising when most of this year’s competing animated films will fade from memory.

I keep thinking of the irony that Cars is being judged as to whether it won the “race” of topping previous Pixar releases’ opening weekends, when that sort of thinking is just what the movie opposes. The movie contends that the “journey” in life is more important than coming in first. By extension, Cars‘ quality as a film is what ultimately matters most, and will ensure its success in the long run.

Cars has an astonishingly unusual climax for a Hollywood film. The protagonist, Lightning McQueen, could win the big race. But then his amoral rival Chick Hicks knocks another car, the King, a respected veteran, off the track, severely damaging him. McQueen stops just short of the finish line, consciously refusing to win the race. He then goes back and helps the King, pushing him over the finish line, so that the King can end his last race with dignity. The onlookers in the grandstands are moved by McQueen’s act of self-sacrifice and deference to his elder. Hicks easily wins the race, but soon discovers that his victory is meaningless; the audience within the film has turned against him.

(I can think of a parallel in another racing movie: in Blake Edwards’ underrated 1965 epic comedy The Great Race, the hero, played by Tony Curtis, likewise stops just short of the finish line to prove his love to the heroine, played by Natalie Wood. The villain, Professor Fate, played by Jack Lemmon, thus easily wins, but when he realizes that the Curtis character let him win, explodes in anger at the emptiness of his triumph.)

The audience within the movie recognizes that McQueen is the real hero of the race, and a major racing sponsor offers McQueen a highly profitable deal. Seeing this I thought: ah, here is McQueen getting his reward. But Lasseter and company surprised me: McQueen turns the deal down, instead choosing loyalty to the declasse sponsors who had supported him from the beginning.

It’s thus little surprise that in America’s highly competitive society, some reviewers reject Cars‘ stance towards conventional ideas of success.

In interviews Lasseter has repeatedly stated that Cars was largely inspired by an event in his own life, when his wife persuaded him to take a break from his intensive responsibilities at Pixar. So Lasseter and his family went on a two-month-long road trip. “When I came back from the trip, I was closer to my family than ever and I reattached to what was important in life.”

“Suddenly, I knew what the film needed to be about,” he said. “I discovered that the journey in life is the reward. Our lead car, Lightning McQueen, is focused on being the fastest. He doesn’t care about anything except winning the championship. He was the perfect character to be forced to slow down, the way I had on my motor home trip.” (http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/leo_n_holzer/archive/2006/06/23/3334.aspx)

Cars is ultimately about this kind of turning point that I have observed in numerous people’s lives: when they realize that pursuing conventional forms of success like wealth and fame and position aren’t enough for them, when they decide to move away from the big city, or to settle down, marry, and raise a family, or to follow their dreams before it is too late, or to reconnect with friends and relatives they had lost touch with. This is a surprisingly adult theme for a family animated film, but perhaps today’s children, whose schedules are famously booked solid in and out of school, can empathize.You don’t have to be hitting middle age to reach this point. I have a friend who isn’t even thirty yet, but got fed up with the rat race, moved to the country, and found a house for herself. Perhaps the reviewers who feel Cars doesn’t have enough emotional resonance haven’t reached this point in their lives. Perhaps someday they’ll discover that Cars is a wiser film than they had realized.Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson