Ahead of the release of Big Hero 6, Disney & Pixar guru looks back at his passion for animation, and of course worldwide mega-hit Frozen

John Lasseter wears a Hawaiian shirt with Big Hero 6 prints. The characters — a Japanese boy and a white, pneumatic robot called Baymax — were fashioned in the style of Japanese anime.

John Lasseter in his office at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California.

“It’s the shirt we’ve made for our new movie. I like Japanese cartoons; I like the work of Hayao Miyazaki,” said the chief creative officer of Disney and Pixar Animation Studios in an interview with Southeast Asian press earlier this month.

“But what I love the most is making movies. I love entertaining audiences. Moviegoing has become kind of flat, meaning there’s no growth, but not in your part of the world. It’s exciting,” he added.

Lasseter, 57, grew up wanting nothing else but to work at Disney. He finally did, first as a young animator in the 1980s, but he was soon fired from the company of his dreams. All for the best — he went on to found Pixar, captaining the creative animation studio to strings of hits and critical adulation. In 2006, Disney, in a brilliant move, bought Pixar and invited Lasseter back, this time as its chief creative officer, tasked to oversee all animated productions of both Disney Animation and Pixar Animation.

The result has reinvigorated Disney. In the 2000s, Disney churned out animated films such as Treasure Planet, Home On The Range, Chicken Little and Bolt — well-meaning but middling films that hardly anyone remembers. After success with Pixar films such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, Lasseter’s return to Disney Animation Studios prompted a shift in gear, with films like The Princess And The Frog (a modest financial success, but a critics’ favourite), Tangled, where things clearly picked up, and, of course, Frozen, a global sensation that became the highest-grossing animated film of all time, with over US$1 billion (33 billion baht) in box office revenue — not to mention the phenomenon of young girls the world over belting out Let It Go as their collective, never-ending anthem.

Big Hero 6, a confluence of Marvel material and Japanese-inspired stories, follows a boy and his robot in the fictitious San Fransokyo. It opens in Thailand next week. Next year, Pixar will release two films: Inside Out, a cerebral adventure that occurs in the head of an adolescent girl, and The Good Dinosaur, a production pushed from its originally slated 2014 release.

Lasseter’s stewardship has proved crucial to Disney’s turnaround. The 91-year-old studio, boosted by the much-younger Pixar’s creative drive, has reclaimed its former glory, culminating in the mega-hit Frozen.

“I brought two fundamental things to Disney,” Lasseter said. “One is a way of working, the other is the type of stories to tell. The way of working is really the philosophy we have back at Pixar, which is how we put creativity first. What we did was surround ourselves with fellow filmmakers and storytellers — what we call the ‘brain thrust’. And in that room, we have no hierarchy to the comments and notes, meaning my notes aren’t more important than anybody else’s. Whatever note makes the better movie, we use it. We brought this way of working down to Disney. Historically, Disney is an executive-driven studio with layers and layers of executives, and people at the top are way more important than down.

“We came and got rid of these development executives, lifted up the filmmakers and storytellers. It took two years to really to formulate this honesty around the table.”

More importantly, however, are the movies made at Disney Animation after 2006 — and the way they were made. Disney has always been good at telling girls’ stories. What Lasseter did was sharpen and update that trope into something relevant and popular.

“[While at Pixar] I kept looking at Disney and didn’t understand why they were going away from the classic Disney fairy tales,” said Lasseter. “They felt that the world had grown too cynical for that kind of storytelling, and I disagreed with them. The thing is, you can’t tell the same stories that Walt Disney did in the 1950s. It has to be told for today’s audiences.

“And part of it is the role of women and having strong female characters. Every woman I know is a strong female character, and none of these women are waiting around for guys to come and save them. The first was Princess And The Frog (2009), a retelling of [the Brothers Grimm fairy tale] The Frog Prince, but we made the female the lead — it wasn’t about the man, but about Tiana and her dream. Then Rapunzel was updated in Tangled (2010). We wanted her to drive the story — she wanted to get out of that tower. Then at Pixar we did Brave (2012), which is about a strong female who goes against tradition.

“And of course Frozen (2013), which is a story of sisterly love. Telling a story to today’s audiences is the key. And we want to tell stories that everyone can relate to, not just America or Europe, but everyone.”

Storytelling and the visualisation of ideas are Lasseter’s priorities — how to tell a story not just through dialogue, which can become lost in translation, but through visuals. The main characters of Inside Out, for example, are five emotions a person feels, and each is colour-coded (i.e. Anger, voiced by comedian Lewis Black, is red).

In crafting the structure of a film, though, Lasseter believes that coming up with an ending is probably the most challenging. When the ending works, the whole movie works.

“We trust our instincts. It takes us a long time to get our stories right. We know it when a story goes wrong. And we know when it’s working; when it clicks, we know it. The ending of a film for me is what we have to grasp. A big one is Frozen — when Anna gives up her life for her sister, and that is an act of true love, not a true-love kiss. When we got that, we worked backward. We reworked the whole story to support that ending.”

Lasseter acknowledged, too, that the Frozen phenomenon had a lot to do with Let It Go. The song’s success was also a sign of an attempt at updating the old-school Broadway-style musical at which Disney was so proficient in the past with a more contemporary sensibility. Elsa, the snow queen who sings the song, is a complex girl-woman character who struck chords with young females for her mix of bravery, alienation and devotion to her sister.

The process of bringing that song into the movie also has a deep personal resonance with Lasseter.

“In Frozen, we worked with Bobby and Kristen Lopez, and Let It Go was pivotal in the development of the story,” he said. “Originally we started with Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, and in that story, the queen was the villain. We were working on the song and the story, but it wasn’t quite right. Then I thought of one of my five sons, Sam. When he was 10 he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. It was devastating for my wife, because Sam was then a little guy. [At the hospital] they came in every 15 minutes to take his blood, and Sam turned to his mom and said, ‘When are they going to stop poking me with needles?’. She said never. Sam turned sad and said, ‘Why me, why did I get this?’.

“And I kept thinking of Elsa. She was born with this ability to freeze objects, and she’s asking the same questions, ‘Why me? Why did I get this?’. To me, how can that person be a villain? Right at that point, seriously, Bobby wrote that song and played it for me. I was so blown away. It answered what the story needed. Originally it was a song about her being a villain. But no, it’s a character empowerment.”

With Big Hero 6, the journey of Disney continues. And with Pixar’s two movies next year, Lasseter’s upping the stakes. It’s no exaggeration to say that, besides the Japanese school of animation, Lasseter and his studios hold the future of animated films as a global culture.

“I never stopped loving cartoons. As a boy, when everybody went on to girls and cars, I was still into cartoons,” he said. “As a freshman, I read a book by Bob Thomas, Art Of Animation, which is about how Walt Disney made animation, and it dawned to me that people could make cartoons for a living. I thought that was what I wanted to do. In my second year at [California Institute of the Arts], Star Wars came out, and it entertained people in a way no other movie had done before. I wanted to do the same, but with animation.”