Big Hero 6 Proves It: Pixar’s Gurus Have Brought the Magic Back to Disney Animation

John Lasseter is tearing up. His eyes are shining and his lashes are moist. He reaches out a warm hand to cover mine and looks deep into my eyes as he talks. He's feeling things, powerful things, and it's impossible not to feel them too. From any other studio executive, this would come across as insincere, even manipulative, but Lasseter, chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar, is quite possibly the most earnest, emotional, enthusiastic man working in Hollywood. So check your cynical heart at the door of his toy-crammed office. His emotions—and his tears—are real.

It's not that Lasseter is given to histrionics. He's simply caught up in explaining why the success of Frozen—which is now the highest-grossing animated film of all time and which won Disney its first Oscar for best animated feature—means so much to him and to everyone here at Disney's Burbank, California, headquarters. “I love and care so deeply about the people here,” Lasseter says, “and I love Walt Disney so much, and how he entertained me. I wanted to keep this studio going.”

It's been eight years since Disney bought Pixar, eight years since CEO Bob Iger put Lasseter and Pixar president Ed Catmull in charge of Disney's flailing animation division. Back then, it had gone a dozen years without a hit—a stunning losing streak for the most iconic animation studio in the world. When Lasseter and Catmull came aboard, they were encouraged to consider shuttering Disney Animation altogether and replacing it with the ascendant Pixar. But Dumbo is Lasseter's favorite movie of all time. As a child, Catmull spent countless hours imagining himself in the worlds of Pinocchio and Peter Pan. It was Disney that inspired their careers in the first place. “There was so much pressure on us to close these doors,” Lasseter says. “Ed and I absolutely could not do that.”

“YOUR CONNECTION WITH THE AUDIENCE IS EMOTIONAL. THEY CAN'T BE TOLD TO FEEL A CERTAIN WAY. THEY HAVE TO DISCOVER IT THEMSELVES.”

Instead, they took on an enormous challenge—not replacing Disney but rescuing it, running it as its own studio completely separate from Pixar. Today it's safe to say that they succeeded, restoring Disney's creative mojo and enabling it to pull ahead of its competitors. They saved a foundering business, yes, but theirs isn't just a corporate accomplishment—it's a cultural victory. After a dark decade, Lasseter and Catmull have made Disney Animation great again.

The latest proof of their impact hits theaters November 7. Big Hero 6 is the seventh Disney Animation feature film since Lasseter and Catmull took over and the first derived from a Marvel Comics property. (Disney bought Marvel in 2009.) The movie, about a team of young scientists who create their own superhero alter egos to fight evil, may not turn into the international avalanche that Frozen became—there are no princesses and no Idina Menzel showstoppers—but it's their most ambitious, action-packed yet. The film is set in San Fransokyo, a strikingly detailed mashup of a Japanese megacity and an exaggerated-scale San Francisco: The crossbars at the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge's towers are upturned at the ends like classic Japanese torii gates. Its world is so elaborate that it could contain Disney Animation's last three computer-animated films (Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, and Tangled) with room to spare; its sets and action sequences are dazzling.

But the crux of the story is the relationship between Hiro, a precocious roboticist, and Baymax, an inflatable nurse robot intent on taking care of him. That dynamic is the heart of Big Hero 6. And the emotional core of a movie is what Lasseter pursues. Anybody can make films that dazzle you with technical wizardry or crack you up with biting humor. But that's not enough for Lasseter. More than anything, the world's most emotional executive wants to make movies that you connect with, movies that make you feel.

Once upon a time, around the turn of the century, in the sunny town of Burbank, there was a great old animation company that was no longer great. Its films were various kinds of bad, but they all had some things in common: They didn't resonate with audiences, they didn't introduce unforgettable characters, and they didn't sell tickets or DVDs. Dinosaur was a grim live-action-animation hybrid; Atlantis: The Lost Empire a futuristic-historic underwater disaster; Brother Bear a predictable, snoozy, faux-mystical Inuit sibling saga; Treasure Planet featured pirates sailing through space; and hoary barnyard tale Home on the Range starred a sassy burping cow voiced by Roseanne Barr. They were, to a one, forgettable—assuming you bothered to see them in the first place.

Meanwhile, halfway up the California coast, a new animation house was on fire. Pixar, a CG-only studio in Emeryville, seemed to spin nothing but gold: For every Brother Bear that Disney produced, Pixar had a Finding Nemo, garnering massive critical and commercial success (not to mention Oscars). It was a new golden age of animation—one that Disney, for the first time in its history, wasn't leading or even participating in.

And yet it wasn't immediately obvious what separated Pixar's great movies from Disney's lackluster ones. It certainly wasn't a question of resources or personnel; about the same number of Disney staff worked on 2004's Home on the Range as on The Lion King a decade earlier. But Disney's movies just seemed to lack … heart. Take Home on the Range. From its predictable opening song to its by-the-numbers plot about a cow that's lost her home and her friends, the movie was a dusty ride through stock archetypes and one-note sidekicks. In contrast, Pixar's The Incredibles, which came out the same year, immediately introduced audiences to a unique and relatable protagonist as he struggles to attach a microphone to his spandex supersuit. “Is this on?” he asks, tapping the mic. “I mean, I can break through walls, I just can't get this on.” Mr. Incredible may be a superhero, but he's just like us. That epitomizes Pixar's approach to storytelling. “The connection you make with your audience is an emotional connection,” Lasseter says. “The audience can't be told to feel a certain way. They have to discover it themselves.”

Ed Catmull (left) and John Lasseter in Lasseter’s Burbank office. (This is how it always looks.) Art Streiber

At Pixar, Lasseter and Catmull had built an entire company around creating this kind of response, with a set of policies and procedures designed to maximize a movie's emotional impact. Once Lasseter green-lit an idea, the director who had pitched it developed the story with the help of the Braintrust, a group of Pixar's directors, writers, and story heads—a long and bumpy road that could only be survived by a director's personal engagement and deep investment in the film.

Disney's development process was the opposite of emotional. Like most movie studios, it had for decades employed a C-suite of what's somewhat generously known as “creative executives”—cookie-cutter MBA types who tasked underlings with turning vague premises into magic. “When I started here in 1978,” says Frozen director Chris Buck, “the studio was run by Walt Disney's son-in-law, Ron Miller. Nice guy, but he wasn't a filmmaker and he wasn't an artist.”

Somehow, though, as Disney Animation's films became less successful, the executives exerted more power. They made decisions about what movies would be developed—based on market research, tea leaves, their own opinions—and assigned directors and producers to those projects, none of which became hits. “It was a broken system,” says Big Hero 6 director Don Hall, who has been at Disney since 1995. Adds Buck: “I can't pinpoint where we lost our way, but it was affected by the fact that the people in charge weren't necessarily lovers of the art form.”

From Left: Big Hero 6 producer Roy Conli and director Don Hall and Chris Williams. Art Streiber

The result was a process that seemed designed to alienate Disney artists from their work. Executives, Big Hero 6 producer Roy Conli recalls, would reel off notes requiring weeks of revisions, then backtrack. They would subject films to “bake-offs,” wherein they would screen two or three films in rapid succession and give the next available release slot to the one they deemed to be in the best shape. Needless to say, this did not encourage collaboration. The directors had lost their compass, Lasseter says: “They were no longer thinking about what makes the movie better.”

In September 2005 Disney's new CEO, Bob Iger, saw vivid proof of what those years of mismanagement had wrought when he attended the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland. During a celebratory parade, he noticed that all of the Disney characters rolling by on massive floats—Ariel, Aladdin—had been created decades earlier. The only recent characters were from films that Disney had funded and distributed for Pixar, like Toy Story's Woody and Buzz Lightyear. “It was pretty easy to see that we had a real problem,” Iger says. “It was staring me in the face.”

So was the solution. Iger didn't even know if Pixar was for sale, but he knew that if anyone could make Disney Animation great again, it was Lasseter and Catmull. When all was said and done (and “all” amounted to more than $7 billion), Catmull would be president of both Pixar and Disney Animation, and Lasseter would be chief creative officer. A dream Lasseter had pursued since childhood was finally coming true.

A rideable narrow-gauge steam train wends around Lasseter's backyard in Sonoma, California. His pool has a lazy river that runs through a cave dripping with crystals and stalactites. Inside his house, model trains chug through tunnels and over bridges halfway up the walls of his dining room and living room. Lasseter is also fond of ice cream sundaes, roller coasters, zoos, parks—the stuff of childhood. “I kept wanting to have more babies so I could keep doing that stuff all my life,” he says. (He has five sons.) His face is wide and rosy, more Ernie than Bert. Frameless glasses sit on his nose, their two horizontal ovals floating in front of his blue eyes. On this July afternoon, he's wearing loose jeans and one of his signature Hawaiian shirts, this one more subdued than usual: a black background with midcentury-modern geometric green fronds. (He has more than 1,000 Hawaiian shirts and wears one every day, choosing it based on what that day's work entails; he even has a shirt made for each of the films he works on, densely packed with characters and sets.)

His office in Disney's “magic hat” building in Burbank (known as such because of the massive replica of the sorcerer's hat from Fantasia towering over the entrance) is as busy as one of his shirts. Not more than an inch of wall or shelf space is empty; toys are lined up like soldiers of happiness, ready for playtime deployment. Princesses and villains stand shoulder to shoulder, some boxed, some free, packed together to maximize space for more of their brethren. There are Mickeys and Tinker Bells, the teacup Chip and his teapot mom, Mrs. Potts, from Beauty and the Beast, a shelf of characters from Wreck-It Ralph, stuffed Bolts and Olafs and Svens, a fleet of toy planes and cars and trains. It's an apt setting for someone who played with Hot Wheels and G.I. Joes long into his teenage years. This is a man who loves his toys.

Lasseter grew up in Whittier, California, not far from Burbank. He was obsessed with cartoons and dreamed of working for Disney from the time he wrote a book report on Bob Thomas' The Art of Animation as a high school freshman—in fact, he attended the college that Disney founded, California Institute of the Arts, enrolling in the inaugural class of its character animation program. He quickly found that he had a knack for emotional storytelling. His short film Lady and the Lamp explored the inner life of a desk lamp; Nitemare detailed a young boy's anxieties as the objects in his room spring to life; both won Student Academy Awards.

Catching Up With Buzz

Disney Animation cranked out classics in the '90s but slipped badly in the new millennium—just as Pixar was soaring. From the box office to awards, Pixar reigned supreme, while Disney struggled. It wasn't until Frozen, in 2013, that Disney snagged a best animated feature Oscar—12 years and seven Pixar wins after the award's 2001 debut. Here's Disney's road to redemption. —LYDIA BELANGER

% – Rotten Tomatoes score X/X – Oscar nominations/wins

Everett Collection

In 1979, the year he graduated, Lasseter got a job at Disney. He had been looking forward to working there for half his life, but soon after starting, the young animator's elation began to fade. “The people who were creatively in charge were second-tier animators, in charge through attrition, not talent,” he says. Indeed, they were openly hostile to it. “You want to get ahead in this company?” someone said to him. “You sit and you do in-betweens”—grunt work, filling in the gaps of other animators' creations—“for 20 years, and then you can get ahead.” Lasseter immediately lost interest in the project he was working on and the studio he'd aspired to work for since he was a kid.

But it wasn't all bad: While at Disney, Lasseter saw an early computer-animation test for Tron and it blew him away. “It was very simplistic, but a door opened up in my head and there was this incredible world beyond it,” he says. “I kept thinking, ‘This was what Walt was waiting for.’” Lasseter started an animation test—hand-drawn characters in computer-generated backgrounds—and began developing an idea for a computer-animated feature about forgotten appliances at a summer cabin waiting for their owner to return. Lasseter pitched the idea to the top brass. It was rejected. “The only reason we'd do computer animation,” Lasseter was told, “is if it was cheaper or faster.” Immediately after the meeting, he was summoned to the office of the manager of the animation department and told he was out of a job.

Lasseter was mortified. “My entire self-identity, even as a little kid, was based on this dream of working at Disney,” he says. “It just was so crushing to be fired from the place of your dreams.” He didn't tell anyone that he'd been let go—not even his wife, Nancy. Instead, he said that he'd quit to pursue computer animation. (It wasn't until Disney bought Pixar, more than 20 years later, that Lasseter finally admitted the truth.)

“My favorite part about Baymax is that you’re not sure how straightforward he’s being. there are no cues at all.” —Paul Felix, production designer

Lasseter had met Catmull earlier that year, 1983; Catmull, who was running Lucasfilm's nascent computer division, was midway through his 20-year quest to create the first computer-animated feature. Catmull had been impressed by Lasseter's enthusiasm. So when the two met again as Lasseter was wrapping up at Disney, Catmull invited the young animator to help him make that dream come true.

Lucasfilm's first computer-animated short was essentially a showcase for the latest animation system they'd built. The creative team had already come up with a setting and an android-like protagonist, but Lasseter pointed out that the movie needed an emotional center, something for the audience to connect with. He suggested adding a bee, whose stinger would give the android motivation. The result, The Adventures of André and Wally B., became the first computerized character animation shown at Siggraph's annual computer graphics conference; the audience was so captivated that people barely noticed that some of the animation was unfinished.

As Catmull explained in his engaging autobiographical management book, Creativity, Inc., written with Amy Wallace, it was his first encounter with a phenomenon he would observe throughout his career, a lesson Lasseter had already learned at CalArts: “Visual polish frequently doesn't matter if you are getting the story right.” This idea would guide the philosophy of their animation studio, Pixar, and they would come to draw on it again more than 20 years later to resurrect Disney Animation.

Building A Better Baymax

Sure, Big Hero 6’s Baymax is a high-flying, crime-fighting badass. But he’s also a nurse. To get that odd combo just right, Disney’s animators deliberated over every detail. The resulting character delivers both humor and heart.

The day that Disney director Don Hall was due to present his ideas for new projects to Lasseter, he pinned storyboards on the walls around Story Room 1, a windowless conference room at Disney Animation. Hall had been inspired by the company's recent purchase of Marvel and included a handful of pitches based on Marvel properties—some suggested by Marvel and some that Hall, a comic fan since childhood, had picked himself. One by one, Hall presented his boards to Lasseter, starting with the concept he considered the front-runner and moving down the list from there. Project after project, Hall described how he might develop each story; Lasseter stayed mostly quiet. Finally, they got to Big Hero 6, which was little more than a “lonely half-board,” as Hall describes it, based on an obscure comic that Marvel had first published in the late '90s. Hall had pinned up a couple of its covers and a brief synopsis that outlined his pitch: a 14-year-old supergenius who loses his brother, and the robot who becomes his surrogate sibling. Finally, Lasseter spoke. “That one,” he said. He was taken with the idea that a robot could become a brother to the main character, and care for him, and teach him. “It had potential for a tremendous amount of heart,” Lasseter says.

“There is something with John's decisionmaking,” says Big Hero 6's other director, Chris Williams. “Sometimes he makes a choice that's surprising—but then in retrospect you'll think, ‘Of course.’”

When Lasseter returned to Disney in 2006, the situation was pretty much the same as when he'd left more than 20 years before: The creative staff wanted to make magical movies, but the executives had little interest in the art form. Most of them thought of Disney as a stepping-stone in their career. “None of them grew up wanting to create animation. None of them,” he says. “Those are the people we let go.”

Bit by bit, Lasseter and Catmull set about replicating Pixar's heart-creation machine. The first step was building a culture of collaboration. Before Lasseter and Catmull arrived, the Disney group would gather to give feedback after screenings, but it was an anemic effort. “It just felt like everybody held back a little bit,” Hall says. “People weren't as honest.” So Catmull set a mandate that everyone speak openly and issued a proclamation that every employee's opinion was welcome, no matter their experience or position. The changes didn't take hold immediately. “Trust sounds good, but takes a while to earn,” Catmull says. “It took two years to fully understand what it meant and develop the story skills.”

Slowly, through that combination of creative freedom and individual ownership, the spirit at Disney Animation grew and began to shine through in the studio's films. “This job is different from some others where what you do is separate from who you are,” Williams says. “We're drawing from our own life experience.” You could see it in the animation of 2008's Bolt, the first film Lasseter and Catmull touched: The characters were more visually appealing, more believable, funnier than the characters in Disney's previous film, Meet the Robinsons. And crucially, the acting was more nuanced: The characters didn't feel like caricatures. To make The Princess and the Frog, released in 2009, Lasseter and Catmull brought back 2-D hand-drawn animation, and yet the story—featuring a young black heroine in New Orleans more focused on her ambitions than her suitor—felt fresh.

It was Tangled, in 2010, that signaled that a true shift was under way. The film upended the age-old tale of Rapunzel, making her motivated by self-reliance to escape her prison rather than by the love of a man. The animation was beautiful, but it was the humor and the definition of the secondary characters, like the crime-fighting horse, Maximus, that made the movie feel so different from the studio's many flops. Tangled performed admirably, doing better worldwide than Bolt and Princess combined. The success of 2012's Wreck-It Ralph, about a videogame villain who breaks out of his home game, showed that Tangled was no fluke. It also showed that Lasseter and Catmull's Disney would go in new and surprising directions, beyond princesses and hilarious sidekicks. (Of course, Frozen proved that princesses and hilarious sidekicks could be better than ever.) Then again, the spirit behind them was pure Disney. These films came from directors steeped in Disney's traditions, eager to infuse their movies with the company's singular family-friendly magic.

The emotional heart of each new Disney movie flowed from the focus on protagonists with intense motivation to change their circumstances—whether it was Wreck-It Ralph's desire to transcend the role of villain or Rapunzel's efforts to get out of that tower. That theme is especially pronounced for Elsa in Frozen. In an earlier iteration of the film, Elsa was truly evil, using her icy powers to destroy her hometown, but Lasseter and others in Disney's Story Trust (based on Pixar's Braintrust) pushed back in their intensive meetings. “Sometimes you come out very tired,” Frozen director Jennifer Lee says of the notes sessions, “but you never come out of it feeling like you don't know what to do or where to go.” Lasseter thought that Elsa shouldn't be a villain but a victim of an affliction, living in fear of hurting someone she loves—her sister. He was reminded of his son Sam, who at age 10 was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. After the diagnosis, he was sad for a long time, not able to understand why he had been chosen for such a fate. Elsa, Lasseter suggested, was similarly innocent.

Lasseter brings those instincts to every film he works on. “When John's working closely with us, movies get better,” Williams says. Each and every filmmaker at Disney Animation cites specific examples of Lasseter suggestions, big and small, that ended up in films. It was Lasseter who came up with Elsa's body language at the end of her blockbuster “Let It Go” performance: letting her hair down, tossing her head, and strutting across the screen. In Big Hero 6, the robot Baymax edges out from between a bed and a dresser, and his inflatable butt knocks over some books—another Lasseter touch. “I've never met anyone more patient than him, except my grandma,” Hall says.

“When John is with you his focus is all on you,” Buck says. “He's not thinking about his last meeting. He's focused on how to make whatever we're doing the best we can.” It's a great payoff for the Disney lifers, who finally have a boss who cares as much as they do about telling powerful stories and knows how to do it. “We were asking, ‘Who's going to be our John Lasseter?’” Williams says. “Turns out John Lasseter was our John Lasseter.”

The caffeine patch, a community hub created by Lasseter and Catmull in the center of Disney Animation HQ, is buzzing. The entire area has been redecorated in the spirit of Big Hero 6. Cherry blossom fronds stick out from a pillar; a San Fransokyo newspaper dispenser is nestled next to a trash can. The coffee cart has been made over to look like a sushi bar, with red lanterns and dangling cloth signs lettered in Japanese. The walls are plastered with graphic posters created for San Fransokyo, touting Daikichi Ramen, Samurai Speedway, and Comic Café. A massive Baymax in his winged fighting suit is standing sentry against one corner, ready to take flight.

It's a preview of an aesthetic that will be very familiar very soon. Already, Baymax action figures are rolling off production lines, ready to star in a million recess and playdate scenarios. Somewhere, a designer is building a life-size Baymax that tourists can squeeze in their Disneyland selfies. But Disney's marketing juggernaut doesn't have to work too hard to make Baymax likable; after two years of story development largely dedicated to making him emotionally irresistible, he's perfectly engineered to steal hearts.

And Disney these days is just as alluring. Its development pipeline has attracted not only the scrutiny of animation geeks but also their optimism. And for good reason. Next up, in spring 2016, will come Zootopia, an animal action adventure starring a rabbit and a fox. Then, if the rumors are true, there's a new movie in the works called Moana, set in the South Pacific.

The emergent pattern is a mix of original stories and fairy tales. But seeing as Disney's larger umbrella also includes the Marvel and Star Wars universes—and how Catmull and Lasseter continue to tap their employees' passion and build Disney Animation's confidence and creativity—the possibilities are endless. “It's an odd thing to say,” Hall says, “but I just had this belief that this place was once great and it would be great again.” And now it is.

Lasseter's biggest personal impact at Disney isn't the trust he's nurtured, the directors he's mentored, or the systems he and Catmull have implemented; it's his own enthusiasm, his love for the form, which has reanimated Disney. From tiny tweaks to big decisions, Lasseter turned the studio into an extension of his office—all character and story. There, sitting among his toys, Lasseter is welling up again. He and Catmull saved the studio from collapse. They helped the employees make a hit. They rescued a beloved cultural institution, ensuring generations of kids will experience the same magic that entranced Lasseter as a child, the magic that made him who he is. “It's important for the world to have this,” he says, his hand over his heart.