Final production notes

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

In 2004, Lasseter was honored by the Art Directors Guild with its prestigious Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery Award and received an honorary degree from the American Film Institute. He received the 2008 Winsor McCay Award from ASIFA-Hollywood for career achievement and contribution to the art of animation.

Under Lasseter’s supervision, Pixar’s animated features and short films have received a multitude of critical accolades and film industry honors. He received a Special Achievement Oscar^® in 1995 for his inspired leadership of the “Toy Story” team. His work on “Toy Story” also resulted in an Academy Award^® nomination for Best Original Screenplay, the first time an animated feature had been recognized in that category. “Finding Nemo,” released in 2003, became the highest-grossing animated feature of all time and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film.

As creative director of Pixar, Lasseter enjoyed the critical acclaim and box-office success of “The Incredibles” in 2004. The film was recognized with a record-breaking 16 Annie Award nominations and several “Best Of” awards by The Wall Street Journal, American Film Institute, National Board of Review and many others.

Lasseter also has written, directed and animated a number of highly renowned short films and television commercials for Pixar, including “Luxo Jr.,” “Red’s Dream,” “Tin Toy” and “Knick Knack,” which was produced as a 3D stereoscopic film. “Luxo Jr.” was a 1986 Academy Award^® nominee and “Tin Toy” became the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar^® when it received the 1988 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Prior to the formation of Pixar in 1986, Lasseter was a member of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm Ltd., where he designed and animated the computer-generated Stained Glass Knight character in the 1985 Steven Spielberg-produced film “Young Sherlock Holmes.”

Lasseter attended the inaugural year of the Character Animation program at California Institute of the Arts and received his B.F.A. in film there in 1979. While attending CalArts, Lasseter produced two animated films, both winners of the Student Academy Award^® for Animation: “Lady and the Lamp” in 1979 and “Nitemare” in 1980. His very first award came at the age of five when he won $15.00 from the Model Grocery Market in Whittier, California, for a crayon drawing of the Headless Horseman.
PETE DOCTER (Original Story, “Toy Story,” “Toy Story 2”) is the director of “Monsters, Inc.” and “Up,” Disney•Pixar’s tenth and most recently released feature film.

Starting at Pixar in 1990 as the studio’s third animator, Docter collaborated with John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton in developing the story and characters for “Toy Story,” Pixar’s first full-length animated feature film, for which he also served as supervising animator. He served as a storyboard artist on “A Bug’s Life,” and wrote initial story treatments for both “Toy Story 2” and “WALL•E.” 

Docter’s interest in animation began at the age of eight when he created his first flipbook. He studied character animation at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) in Valencia, California, where he produced a variety of short films which have shown in animation festivals around the world, and won a Student Academy Award^®.  Upon joining Pixar, he animated and directed several commercials, and has been nominated for four Academy Awards® including Best Animated Feature (“Monsters, Inc.”) and Best Original Screenplay (“WALL•E”).

Docter currently resides in Piedmont, Calif. with his wife and their two children.

Stanton made his directorial debut with the record-shattering “Finding Nemo,” an original story of his that he also co-wrote. The film garnered Stanton two Academy Award^® nominations (Best Original Screenplay and Best Animated Feature), and “Finding Nemo” was awarded an Oscar^® for Best Animated Feature of 2003, the first such honor Pixar received for a full-length feature.

Stanton was one of the four screenwriters to receive an Oscar^® nomination in 1996 for his contribution to “Toy Story,” and went on to receive credit as a screenwriter on every subsequent Pixar film. Additionally, he served as co-director on “A Bug’s Life” and was the executive producer of both “Monsters, Inc.” and the 2006 Academy Award^®-winning “Ratatouille.”

A native of Rockport, Massachusetts, Stanton earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Character Animation degree from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he completed two student films. In the 1980s, he launched his professional career in Los Angeles animating for Bill Kroyer’s Kroyer Films studio, and writing for Ralph Bakshi’s production of “Mighty Mouse, the New Adventures.”

Prior to joining Pixar, Unkrich worked for several years in television as an editor and director.

Unkrich graduated from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/Television in 1991, where he directed several award-winning short films.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Unkrich spent his youth acting at the Cleveland Playhouse. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three children.

Dr. Catmull has been honored with five Academy Awards^®, including a Technical Achievement Award, two Scientific and Engineering Awards, and one Academy Award of Merit for his work. In 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Catmull the Gordon E. Sawyer Award for his lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry. He also received the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award for his lifetime contributions in the computer graphics field, and the animation industry’s Ub Iwerks Award for technical advancements in the art or industry of animation.

Dr. Catmull is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Visual Effects Society and the University of California President’s Board on Science and Innovation. Dr. Catmull was honored with the Randy Pausch Prize from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center in 2008 and was selected as the recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s 2008 Computer Entrepreneur Award.

Dr. Catmull earned Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science and physics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah. In 2005, the University of Utah presented him with an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Engineering.

In 1980, Reeves joined the computer division of Lucasfilm as project leader of the systems group and a member of the computer graphics group. In 1982, Reeves moved on to work full time in the graphics division as project leader of the modeling and animation group. During this period, Reeves invented a new image synthesis technique called Particle Systems that has been used to model fire, fireworks, trees, grass and flowers. His research was used in the feature film “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and published by ACM SIGGRAPH in 1983 and 1985.

In 1986, Reeves left Lucasfilm, along with the majority of the computer division, to join Pixar Animation Studios as Head of Animation Research and Development. Between 1986 and 1991, he devoted his time to enhancing Pixar’s computer animation software to raise it to the level where it could be used to create a full-length feature animated film.

Reeves’ extensive short-film credits at Pixar include “The Adventures of Andre and Wally B,” “Red’s Dream,” the Academy Award^®-nominated “Luxo Jr.” and “Knick Knack.” In 1988, Reeves received an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for his work as technical director on “Tin Toy.”

In 1997, Reeves was awarded a Technical Academy Award^® for his invention of Particle Systems. In 1998, Reeves and three others garnered another Technical Academy Award for their development of the Marionette animation system, the body of software Pixar has used for modeling and animation since 1988.

Reeves studied mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1974. He then went to the University of Toronto, where he received a master’s degree in computer science in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1980. In 1986, Reeves and Alain Fournier published a paper presenting a simple computer graphics model of ocean waves that led to extremely realistic images. With co-authors David Salesin and Rob Cook, Reeves published a paper in 1987 detailing a new shadow algorithm to efficiently compute anti-aliased shadows.

Newman has been nominated for 17 Academy Awards,^® including two each for “Ragtime” (1981), “Monsters, Inc.” and “Toy Story.” He won his first Oscar^® in 2002 for the song “If I Didn’t Have You” from “Monsters Inc.” The song also earned him his second of five Grammy Awards^®. Newman’s song, “When She Loved Me,” written for “Toy Story 2,” won a Grammy for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or other Visual Media.

Newman’s other film scores include “The Natural,” “Avalon,” “Parenthood,” “Seabiscuit,” “Awakenings,” “The Paper,” “Pleasantville,” “Meet the Parents” and “Meet the Fockers.” He has also written songs for television, including the Emmy Award^®-winning “Monk” theme song “It’s a Jungle Out There.” The multi-talented Newman co-wrote the screenplay for “Three Amigos!” with Steve Martin and Lorne Michaels, and also wrote three songs for the film.

Born in 1943 into a famously musical family, Newman began his professional songwriting career at 17, knocking out tunes for a Los Angeles publishing house. His uncles Alfred, Lionel and Emil were all well-respected film composers and conductors. Randy’s father, Irving Newman, a prominent physician, wrote a song for Bing Crosby.

In 1968, Newman made his recording debut with the lushly orchestrated album “Randy Newman.” Before long, his extraordinary and evocative compositions were being covered by a wide range of top artists, from Pat Boone and Peggy Lee to Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett.

Critics raved about Newman’s 1970 sophomore effort “12 Songs,” and increasingly the public started to take notice of his sly, satirical songwriting in albums such as 1970’s “Live,” the 1972 classic “Sail Away,” and the acclaimed and provocative 1974 release “Good Old Boys.” His 1977 album, “Little Criminals,” included the left-field smash hit “Short People.”

In the 1980s, Newman divided his time between film composing and recording his own albums, including 1988’s “Land of Dreams,” another breakthrough work marked by some of his most personal and powerful music.

The ’90s saw the release of Newman’s comedic take on “Faust,” which included performances by Don Henley, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor; the compilation “Guilty: 30 Years of Randy Newman”; and a new 1999 album, “Bad Love.”