Steve Jobs

film. When Roy Disney led a board revolution at the company that his uncle Walt had founded, the new CEO, Michael Eisner, asked what role he wanted. Disney said that he would like to revive the company’s venerable but fading animation department. One of his first initiatives was to look at ways to computerize the process, and Pixar won the contract. It created a package of customized hardware and software known as CAPS, Computer Animation Production System. It was first used in 1988 for the final scene of
The Little Mermaid
, in which King Triton waves good-bye to Ariel. Disney bought dozens of Pixar Image Computers as CAPS became an integral part of its production.
    Animation
    The digital animation business at Pixar—the group that made little animated films—was originally just a sideline, its main purpose being to show off the hardware and software of the company. It was run by John Lasseter, a man whose childlike face and demeanor masked an artistic perfectionism that rivaled that of Jobs. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter grew up loving Saturday morning cartoon shows. In ninth grade, he wrote a report on the history of Disney Studios, and he decided then how he wished to spend his life.
    When he graduated from high school, Lasseter enrolled in the animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, foundedby Walt Disney. In his summers and spare time, he researched the Disney archives and worked as a guide on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. The latter experience taught him the value of timing and pacing in telling a story, an important but difficult concept to master when creating, frame by frame, animated footage. He won the Student Academy Award for the short he made in his junior year,
Lady and the Lamp
, which showed his debt to Disney films and foreshadowed his signature talent for infusing inanimate objects such as lamps with human personalities. After graduation he took the job for which he was destined: as an animator at Disney Studios.
    Except it didn’t work out. “Some of us younger guys wanted to bring
Star Wars
–level quality to the art of animation, but we were held in check,” Lasseter recalled. “I got disillusioned, then I got caught in a feud between two bosses, and the head animation guy fired me.” So in 1984 Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith were able to recruit him to work where
Star Wars
–level quality was being defined, Lucasfilm. It was not certain that George Lucas, already worried about the cost of his computer division, would really approve of hiring a full-time animator, so Lasseter was given the title “interface designer.”
    After Jobs came onto the scene, he and Lasseter began to share their passion for graphic design. “I was the only guy at Pixar who was an artist, so I bonded with Steve over his design sense,” Lasseter said. He was a gregarious, playful, and huggable man who wore flowery Hawaiian shirts, kept his office cluttered with vintage toys, and loved cheeseburgers. Jobs was a prickly, whip-thin vegetarian who favored austere and uncluttered surroundings. But they were actually well-suited for each other. Lasseter was an artist, so Jobs treated him deferentially, and Lasseter viewed Jobs, correctly, as a patron who could appreciate artistry and knew how it could be interwoven with technology and commerce.
    Jobs and Catmull decided that, in order to show off their hardware and software, Lasseter should produce another short animated film in 1986 for SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference. At the time, Lasseter was using the Luxo lamp on his desk as a model for graphic rendering, and he decided to turn Luxo into a lifelike character. A friend’s young child inspired him to add Luxo Jr., and he showed a few test frames to another animator, who urged him to make sure hetold a story. Lasseter said he was making only a short, but the animator reminded him that a story can be told even in a few seconds. Lasseter took the lesson to heart.
Luxo Jr.
ended up being just over two minutes; it told the tale of a parent lamp and a child lamp pushing a ball back and forth until the ball bursts, to the child’s dismay.
    Jobs was so excited that he took time off from the pressures at NeXT to fly down with Lasseter to SIGGRAPH, which was being held in Dallas that August. “It was so hot and muggy that when we’d walk outside the air hit us like a tennis racket,” Lasseter recalled. There were ten thousand people at the trade show, and Jobs loved it.