Lasseter on animation and Miyazaki

John Lasseter, who heads Pixar Studios and directed Cars and Toy Story, recently did an interview on radio station KGO in Northern California. Following is a transcript of a portion (Marci is the host):

John: Japanese animation has been around for a long time. Japan is a huge producer of animation, one of the biggest in the world. But it doesn't get out of Japan very often. I got turned on to the work of one particular director, Hayao Miyazaki. He is amazing. His films have tremendously influenced me. As I've journeyed over there, I have gotten to meet him and to know him and become good friends. Disney got into an agreement to distribute his films in this country. I got to see his film "Spirited Away" right when it was finished and I was blown away by his movie. When I came back to the US, I went to Disney and said “We have got to release this movie in the United States. This is fantastic.” So I was the Executive Producer on the English language version of that movie. Everyone should go out and try to find all of Hayao Miyazaki's films. "My Neighbor Totoro", fantastic. "Kiki's Delivery Service." The most recent one was "Howl's Moving Castle", which was fantastic and "Spirited Away", which won an Academy award for best-animated feature film. These films are such an inspiration to me as an animated artist and they're fantastic. And if you ever get to Tokyo, they have a little museum, the Ghibli Museum, which is the best animation museum in the world.

Marci: And it's quite a contrast from CGI, the kind of computer-generated animation that you do at Pixar. It looks to me, and I'm no animation expert, but it looks to me like those are hand-painted.

John: Yes, they are. Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki, they still use hand drawn character animation. Even though I work in computer animation, it's really broken my heart to see a lot of studios in this country turn away from hand drawn animation. Because it's not about the technology, it’s not about the medium. It's about what you do with it. It's about the stories and the characters. I always show Miyazaki films and say, "Tell me that hand drawn animation is dead when you see Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle."