Hot wheeling it with Pixar's John Lasseter

John Lasseter loves embedding jokes in his animated movies that are way over the heads of kids.

Take his latest film, Cars. There are gags here that only gearheads will get.

Buena Vista Pictures •  The cars in Lasseter's life •  Five 'animated' voiceovers •  Stills from the movie •  Read reviews of 'Cars'

"One of the things that's really obscure, seriously obscure, is Flo's V-8 Cafe," he says with an amused laugh. "The design of the awnings are like the heads of a flat-head Ford V-8. The spark plugs are there and when the neon is on, they flash in the proper firing order of a flat-head Ford V-8. Those who know, will see it."

Fortunately for the rest of us, there is plenty of the comedy you'd expect from the creative force behind the Pixar animation studio, and the director of the phenomenally successful Toy Story films and A Bug's Life.

Lasseter, a Pixar executive vice president, is passionate about cars. So while it has taken him more than 10 years of making and overseeing computerized animated features on toys, bugs, monsters, fish and middle-aged superheroes, it was probably inevitable that he would get around to a movie about autos, or specifically, a stock car who learns some valuable life lessons on the way to a big race.

"I grew up in Los Angeles and my dad was a parts manager at a Chevrolet dealership," explains Lasseter, 49. "I grew up going to the dealerships all the time, especially when the new cars were introduced. I just loved that.

Remember? That was so cool. When I was in high school, I would work in the parts department. It was really right at the end of the heyday of the great American muscle car."

But his mother was an art teacher, and in his early teens Lasseter became fascinated with cartoons and animation. He was graduating from high school just as Disney was establishing a college animation program and he became the second student admitted. Each summer, he apprenticed at the Disney Studios, eventually joining the animation department staff, contributing to such films as The Fox and the Hound and Mickey's Christmas Carol. But it was a 1982 film called Tron, which first used computer animation for special effects, that really drew his attention.

Invited to visit the computer graphics shop of George Lucas' Lucasfilms, Lasseter left Disney to join the unit, which gradually morphed into Pixar. Since directing Toy Story in 1995, he has been involved with each of the boutique studio's movies, either directing or executive producing them. Over this time, Pixar's films, including Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles, have eclipsed Disney's and generated more than $1.45 billion at the domestic box office.

To Lasseter, though, they are all prelude to Cars, his most personal movie yet.

Its roots are in the workaholic zeal with which he approached each project in Pixar's early days, finishing one film and immediately starting another. During this period, he somehow found time to have four of his five sons, but not much else. And his wife cautioned him, "Be careful. One day you're going to wake up and your boys will have grown up and gone off to college and you will have missed it."

Recognizing that she was right, Lasseter abruptly took off an entire summer, bought a used motor home, packed up his family and took them on a bonding cross-country vacation.

Fortunately, he did not make a film called RV. But the trip did give him the idea for what would become Cars years later. "I came back from that journey and I knew what I wanted this story to be about," he says now. "That a character learns what I just learned, that the journey in life is the reward."

The movie, whose original working title was Route 66, is the tale of hotshot stock car named Lightning McQueen, who has to travel across the nation to a big race, but gets waylaid in the town of Radiator Springs, where he finds the true meaning of friendship and family.

Each Pixar feature has represented major advances in computer animation and Cars is no exception. "It was a bit of a challenge," he concedes. "I wanted to bring cars to life in a way that no one had seen them before. To get the chrome, the metal flake paint, the rubber tires' reflection on the glass, to make that all look so believable."

He resigned himself to the fact that he would have to sacrifice the usual adorability factor. "It's true, cars can't cuddle up next to each other, because they'll scratch each other."

Beyond the look of the automotive characters — McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), Sally Carrera (Bonnie Hunt) and Tow Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), to name a few — Lasseter notes that the larger challenge was "the level of detail. When we were out on Route 66 doing our research, we found that it was pretty amazing to see how the history of every town is told by just looking at it. That visual-rich detail — the faded paint, the rust, the cracks in the sidewalks with grass growing up, the dust and so on, that is so hard to achieve in computer animation. The computer likes to make things perfect and clean.

"The natural world that we're used to seeing has so much visual detail, but you get nothing for free with a computer," he explains. "When you add all that stuff up and you try to render the scene, it chokes the computer, it's just too much for it to handle. The big challenge was how to get that visual rich detail in a way that we could deal with. We brought the computers to their knees in this movie."

Still, Lasseter is quick to add that no amount of state-of-the-art technology can compensate for a weak script. "I've always believed in the simple fact that when the lights dim in the theater, the audiences just want to be entertained. It's the way I am in a theater," he says. "I'm giving you two hours, just take me away and entertain me, y'know? And that I take as a tremendous responsibility. That's the sole focus of what we do."

Pixar does it so well — winning Oscars for Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, the only two films Pixar has released since the category was established — that Lasseter can afford to be magnanimous with the others toiling in the field.

"I love all mediums of animation. The subject matters of the films you make tend to lend themselves to different techniques. Think of Wallace and Gromit. That couldn't be done in any other technique but clay," he says. "I think of what Tim Burton has been doing — amazing work with puppet animation, with Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride. You watch the films of Hayao Miyazaki — Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle — and you tell me that 2-D animation doesn't entertain audiences.

"I still believe that audiences want to see good movies. Period. That's why I always believed quality is the best business plan."