John Lasseter Accused of Sexual Assault

[Semaj]

The cancellation of American Dog is gut-wrenching.

Chris Sanders had more than earned his right to make a second Disney film, seeing as how Lilo & Stitch is still, to this day, one of Disney's last triumphs in hand-drawn animation. Of course, when news broke out that Sanders was fired, it was just a given that "Lasseter knew best".

Yet...all traces of American Dog were gone from The Art of Bolt book, and Bolt is such a BLAND film. Chris Sanders could have made another million-dollar franchise for Disney, but instead wound up making TWO million-dollar franchises for rival DreamWorks.

If Sanders has more to say regarding this, I'd love to hear it!

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Some articles are referring to Jorgen Klubien as simply a "former employee". He as mentioned elsewhere, he was way more than that. He was one of Lasseter's closest friends at CalArts, and used to share an apartment together. Klubien says they were as close as brothers, or at least that's how he saw it himself back then. Lasseter was invited to his family in Denmark, where he celebrated Christmas with them (and was attracted to Klubien younger sister). Later, when Klubien refused to leave Pixar willingly, he was simply fired.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-righ ... 58076.html

Cartoon Brew has a link to a 2014 interview with Klubien where this is mentioned (Google translator or something should make it possible to read): https://www.b.dk/interview/joergen-klub ... dobbeltliv

[PatrickvD]

Lasseter really is the surprise villain from his own movies.

I wonder if more info will come out on the death of hand drawn animation under Lasseter. I want the opinions and voice of veteran animators now. Seeing as how this all goes deeper than previously thought.

[estefan]

I don't know if Chris Sanders will come back to make movies at Disney, at least not yet. He's currently directing a live-action adaptation of Jack London's "The Call of the Wild" for 20th Century Fox, which is set for release on Christmas 2019. He also seems to have a good working relationship at DreamWorks.

Sanders still voices Stitch whenever Disney uses the character, so I don't think he harbours too much ill will towards the company as a whole. He was even allowed to use one of his American Dog characters for his independent comic strip. Disney NEVER lets that happen, as usually even unused characters end up being owned by Disney and kept in their vaults.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Considering that extremely few, if any, former Disney and Pixar employees reveal something in public unless they are anonymous, it makes me suspect that they need to sign a contract or something. Still, it would be interesting to hear the opinion and experiences of a famous animator.

(Regarding what is Disney's property, I don't know how it all works when someone has invented a character that has never been used. But if I got it right, Sanders is using his one-eyed cat on his blog only, which is available for everybody for free, and he is therefore not making any money on it.)

[magicalwands]

He was even allowed to use one of his American Dog characters for his independent comic strip. Disney NEVER lets that happen, as usually even unused characters end up being owned by Disney and kept in their vaults.

I recall Lasseter convincing Disney to sign a super rare agreement for Sanders to get American Dog back. This was right before he was let go.

[Disney Duster]

If that's true, I wish they would do American Dog.

I can't believe Lasster seemed to push Glen Keane to the point of leaving Rapunzel. But didn't he give Glen the choice to make it hand-drawn or CGI? Glen said they did too much work making the CGI the way he wanted it to go back to it being hand drawn. It seemed to me he really did want the CGI by that point, but maybe I'm wrong and he still really wished it was hand-drawn?

[JeanGreyForever]

Glen didn't leave Rapunzel because of an issue over hand-drawn versus CGI. As you pointed out, he was even given the option of going back to hand-drawn but he wanted to stick with CGI. However, the story was deemed unworkable. The 1/3 of the film was apparently the best Lasseter had ever seen but the middle section had issues with the film getting stagnant from Rapunzel being trapped in the tower for so long. If I remember correctly, Glen got a co-director to help him iron out the issues, but then he suffered a heart attack which others attributed to Lasseter. After his heart attack, he stepped down from the project although he was still involved with Tangled to an extent.

[Sotiris]

When Lasseter took over WDAS, he gave Glen the option to switch to hand-drawn. Glen didn't take it because he wanted to pursue the painterly CG technique he spent years developing based on Fragonard's work. Lasseter commented that the opening scene of the film that was finished before he came on board was one of the best he had ever seen. Later, Lasseter deemed this technique "too distracting" for audiences and forced him to go with conventional CG. Lasseter was unsatisfied with the rest of the film and had Glen retool it for a prolonged period of time. When it still wasn't to Lasseter's satisfaction, Lasseter assigned Dean Wellins to be his co-director on the film. Him and Glen worked on another iteration of the story but Lasseter still wasn't satisfied. Shortly after that Glen suffered a heart attack and had to take a six-month sick leave. When he came back the film had been given to two other directors who reworked it from the ground up and made it unrecognizable. They even removed the dog character that was based on Glen's own dog. Glen was particularly disappointed by that. He stayed on as animation supervisor and made hundreds, if not thousands, of draw-overs to help the CG crew improve their animation. It is said that Glen had a hand on every frame of finished film. That's how it all went down to the best of my recollection.

[PatrickvD]

My issue right now is that I’m not sure if we can trust certain stories that have come out in the past. Such as Lasseter giving Glen Keane the option to choose either hand drawn or CG for Rapunzel. Or Lasseter going out of his way to give Chris Sanders the rights to his American Dog characters. Both of these stories make Lasseter seem like a super nice guy. Which he isn’t.

Everything that reached the media regarding Lasseter was carefully filtered to make sure it painted him as the new Walt Disney.

Another thing I remember well is when Lasseter took over he wanted to silence the staff at WDAS relatively quickly because under David Stainton creative decisions were constantly being leaked to animation bloggers and the media in general. He may have made staff sign agreements regarding this. Im now thinking this simply helped him create this savior-like persona, as he was in full control of the flow of information. Isn’t that what dictators do first thing? Silence their opposers?

To think I once thought Lasseter would be good for Disney.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

I tried to find an article I remember reading shortly after Disney bought Pixar, but I can't find it again. Anonymous sources at Disney were not happy that Pixar suddenly had all power at the Disney studio as well. They accused many for kissing their butt because Pixar was financially successful, and bosses at Disney wanted their own studio to use the same formula. So the employees were forced to adopt many of the procedures developed at Pixar. They said something like "we have traditions here at Disney too". Catmull and Lasseter were unavailable for comments.

Either way, Disney had big plans regarding their animation studio already before the Pixar deal. More than one article was being written about their ambitions. A lot has already been mentioned in the Tangled discussion, but articles like these is why so many were excited about the upcoming movies. Which we never got to see.

https://www.awn.com/animationworld/chic ... -animation

The plan with American Dog is to try to achieve exactly what we did on Lilo [with the backgrounds being so pervasive] and completely thwart what the computer wants to bring to the party. I love what it can do as far as characters the sensibility; the subtlety of emotion is unbelievable. But my art director Paul Felix and I made the decision to make it look like it was painted. And the computer is much, much harder on that because it wants to straighten lines and it wants to lay things down in very solid planes. And Paul can draw a layout and you just want to live in it. Its like the best of a Disney background could possibly offer, but when you put a grid over those layouts, they wont line up theres a million things going on that dont make sense to the computer, and thats what were trying to deal with.

We went so far as to see how much we can take this before it breaks. We took our main character, Henry, who is completely CG hes as sharp as a tack and very round and covered with fur and looks very, very real and place him right in the middle of an Edward Hopper painting. So we scanned a suburban Hopper painting and had Henry walk right through it. And it is a painting it is all implied dimension. What we found was it didnt break. It did what I suspected, which is it lit up. The hard part is retaining that painterly softness when you move around the environment, whether its a diner or a car or a train station.

Paul is at the forefront of [helping bring this into the computer], because he knows what makes a painting a painting; its not just how a brush stroke looks because weve gone way beyond that since Tarzan. It has to do with how light and paint interact with each other that luminosity, the layering, which makes a huge difference. And the weird thing is, as long as you have good contact and a shadow that locks them in, you buy it.

With Rapunzel Keane is trying to bring drawing into CG by applying basic design principles. He admits that its a big leap forward for both character performance and environment. For inspiration, Keane and his animators are referencing a painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing, applying a certain richness that they have never attained in animation before.

A fairy tale world has to feel romantic and lush. So [we were able to duplicate] the shot with the girl on the swing in 3D. Theres been a couple of moments on this picture that are really unusual. Ive never been on a film where just showing an image of a tree on the screen causes everyone to applaud in a theater. These are huge steps but in seemingly mundane ways. To be able to do a dimensional tree where the leaves turn, but it still feels like it has calories if you look at it too long. Very painterly.

Kyle Strawitz really helped me start to believe that the things I wanted to see were possible that you could move in a Disney painterly world. He took the house from Snow White and built it and painted it so that it looked like a flat painting that suddenly started to move, and it had dimension and kept all of the soft, round curves of the brushstrokes of watercolor. Kyle helped us get that Fragonard look of that girl on the swing We are using subsurface scattering and global illumination and all of the latest techniques to pull off convincing human characters and rich environments.

Keane also promises that hes going back to Rapunzels literary origins to do a traditional, character-driven fairy tale that speaks to a modern audience. Its a story of the need for each person to become who they are supposed to be and for a parent to set them free so they can become that. It will be a musical and a comedy and have a lot of heart and sincerity. I think thats what Disney needs to do right now. No one else can do it. We should not be embarrassed or making excuses for doing a fairy tale. And making it our way would be a new way.

This is not Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. This will evolve into what it should be in its own style. Its hard to say what impact it will have on future fairy tales that we do, but this film is very reflective of me.

[Sotiris]

An anonymous user from Cartoon Brew claiming to be a former Pixar employee had this to say.

At last the whole of John's abusive character is being reported upon. His sexual misconduct issues are abhorrent, but so are the vindictive, career damaging abuses he has heaped upon the many talented people whose skills he was jealous of. A toxic tyranny ran rampant at Pixar with John at the head and Andrew Stanton by his side. These two despotic figures created an environment that was designed to feed their bloated egos at nearly everyone else's expense.

Source: https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-righ ... 3874723438

[Semaj]

My issue right now is that I’m not sure if we can trust certain stories that have come out in the past. Such as Lasseter giving Glen Keane the option to choose either hand drawn or CG for Rapunzel. Or Lasseter going out of his way to give Chris Sanders the rights to his American Dog characters. Both of these stories make Lasseter seem like a super nice guy. Which he isn’t.

I don't doubt that Glen Keane had an interest in CGI for Tangled, but there still reeks of suspision that Disney's animators were otherwise coerced into using only CGI.

Three common factors were at play:

1) The underperformance of The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh seem to have been intentional. Both were given dubious release dates, where they were too easily CRUSHED by the competition. The CGI films that were given better release dates before each film; The Christmas Carol before TPATF and Cars 2 before WTP, did comparatively much better. The two hand-drawns' underperformances gave Disney a convenient excuse to quietly drop the medium again.

2) Disney's hand-drawn animators who tried adapting to the new CGI slate did not last long. Glen Keane left Disney not long after Tangled was finished, and more recently John Musker retired after finishing Moana. Even Nik Ranieri's efforts to transition into CGI didn't prevent him from eventually being laid off.

3) Frozen was originally conceived as a hand-drawn film. But due to the aforementioned underperformances, went all CGI instead.

Of course, Disney dug their own grave when they decided to shut down their hand-drawn films after Home on the Range, in a misguided attempt to catch up with Pixar's success.

[Disney Duster]

Since Chris Sanders voices Stitch and got to keep his one-eyed cat, I think that story about letting him keep American Dog rights is true.

But even though Glen Keane liked the painterly CG, I guess it probably was Lasseter who made him have a heart attack!

[Rumpelstiltskin]

If anyone are interested in the original plotline for the movie that turned into Cars: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-hill ... 90538.html Lasseter changed a lot of the plot and decided to use a new main character, Lightning McQueen, instead, since the article claim he found the original storyline too whimsical and fairy tale-like.

Animator Dave Mullins says that Lasseter takes others' ideas and make them his own, but if that came out the way he intended it is hard to say (also, when you watch the video, Lasseter seems like a great father towards his kids and show us their adopted stray cats, which makes the recent revelations even more surprising, even if there were critical voices about him years before that): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HN3-l_f-U&t=603s

(Just found out that Wikipedia already has included the part about the original idea for Cars).

[Kyle]

"I've been avoiding you"

Nice foreshadowing, lol.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

While we wait (and I wonder if Disney will wait till exactly 21. May), there is another thing that has not been adressed yet as far as I know. We only heard about the story after Lasseter left a memo to the staff where he apologized for his behavior. But then he had already decided to take a six months break (or someone decided it for him). There is still nothing about why he wrote the memo and left for six months. Yes, it was because of his behavior, but he has behaved like that for years, so what was different this time? What exactly happened between the last time he entered the studio careless and cheerful (which could have been two days of two weeks earlier for all we know), and when he wrote the memo? He must have been summoned to the principal's office, but which principal and who had the person spoken with prior to that? Since the Lasseter thing was an open secret at the studio, it can't exactly have been any new info we are talking about, but rather a new situation.

[Semaj]

I'm guessing the rise of the MeToo movement prompted, if not Lasseter himself, someone close to him to take preemptive action.

Did anyone specifically out Lasseter last November?

[Sotiris]

^The management was informed that The Hollywood Reporter was doing an exposé on Lasseter and tried to soften the blow by putting him on a leave of absence and having him release a statement before the article came out.

[Rumpelstiltskin]

Thanks. Found it here in an article by Kim Masters:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... ps-1057113

Lasseter's statement arrived as THR was preparing a story detailing alleged misconduct by the executive at Disney/Pixar.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-righ ... 54881.html

Lasseter’s hastily announced sabbatical was made just minutes before The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters published a second piece detailing specific allegations of sexual misconduct against Lasseter.

Someone must given the management a tip about how the bubble was about to burst. But was it The Hollywood Reporter that approached Pixar employees, or was it a group of employees that contacted The Hollywood Reporter? In the wake of Weinstein, Cosby and all the other scandals, I assume it was some employees that finally saw a chance to come out with their story and expose Pixar. But that's just guessing of course.

Also The Variety had a lengthy article published the same day, where they quite from employees that wants to stay anonymous: http://variety.com/2017/film/news/john- ... 202620960/ The article seems too detailed too be just hastily written the same day the bombed was dropped, as there are interviews with different employees, so it looks that both Variety and Hollywood Reporter was about to tell the world. And former Disney artist Minkyu Lee was the first to step forward under his full name.

And Jorgen Klubien is apparently not surprised: https://disqus.com/by/jorgenklubien/