- Hi, I am John Lasseter. - I am Eben Ostby.
And I am Bill Reeves.
André and Wally B. was the first short film us three did together.
It was made while we were still part of Lucasfilm.
We were the computer department of Lucasfilm. the film was made for SIGGRAPH 1984.
In this short film we wanted
to animate three dimensional characters.
At that time I was working at Disney Studios as an animator.
I was hired to create and animate these characters.
First they had this idea of an android called André
who wakes up in the forest one morning and walks...
...along a beautidul canyon.
My work was limited by the fact that
everything in there had to have simple geometric shapes.
Spheres, cones, cylindres. There's not much to work with.
But it was feasible, except with the body.
I used early versions of Mickey Mouse as an inspiration.
the body needed more flexibility
to be able to do pantomimic movements.
This is why Ed Catmull invented...
- What did he call it? - The tear shape.
We transfered this new idea into the computer
to make this shape flexible and moldable in many ways.
I played around with the tear model
and animated it as if it were a water ballon.
Computer animation have never been so over the top before.
Motion blur almost overtaxed our computer system more than once.
Nobody had expected me to animate a character that was able to
get from one side of the screen to the other so quickly,
or that an arm would be twisted more than 360 degrees in one frame.
In one frame, yeah. Well, that's animation alright.
Looking back it's great that John didn't animate robots, isn't it?
- Who knows were we would stand today? - Who knows?
I am glad he didn't.