If one were to imagine the office of a top Hollywood creative, the head of two animation studios that last year were responsible for more than $1.5bn at the global box office, it would probably not look like the one belonging to Pixar's John Lasseter. You'd expect glass walls and minimal furniture. A room to suggest power, wealth and industry. An LA room.
Lasseter's workplace is more San Francisco. It has fluffy toys spilling from every nook and cranny, and a custom-made action figure (a gift from Mattel, apparently) of its owner sitting proudly on a desk. It looks like a compact version of the Sunnyside Day Care playroom from Toy Story 3. If ever Pixar decides to mimic Disney (the company it currently forms part of) by opening its own theme park, there ought to be a spot based on this room. No doubt the ebullient Lasseter, who began his Disney career as a "skipper" on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, would want to show people around.
For now, the closest thing to Pixarworld is the company's Emeryville base outside San Francisco, within which Lasseter's office takes pride of place. It's a building full of quiet positivity. Imagine Ikea but with intriguing drawings, ideas and models adorning the walls, and a central hub where everyone working at the studio can meet (and eat) together. It's a supremely relaxed and informal environment, designed by Apple's Steve Jobs, an early Pixar backer, and it's where I've come with other bloggers and film writers to hear about what makes Pixar tick ahead of the release of Cars 2, the latest film from the studio behind Wall-E, Up and the Toy Story films.
Strange, some might say, there is even a Cars 2 given the failure of the first film to get critics' engines revving. Not so for Lasseter, a car nut who directed the first movie and for whom the sequel marks his first film in charge of the cameras for five years. He's keen to tell me about his inspiration in bringing Lightning McQueen and Mater the Towtruck back to the big screen.
"Cars 2 is a spy movie," he says. "I don't know if in the UK you ever saw the Man from Uncle? I was born in 1957 and it came out in 1964. I loved that show – I had all the toy guns from The Man from Uncle and I played it so much. It inserted in my DNA a love of spy movies. I have five sons and we are really into the three Bourne movies because they elevated the genre. I think a combination of those two influences was the inspiration for this.
"We also felt it would be fun to do a spy movie because in the Cars world there are no humans, so the gadgets and the spy are one and the same. But I never wanted to make a parody of a spy movie and talk down to the genre. The action is approached from the position that this is a true spy movie, but it's in this world where cars are alive."
The atmosphere at Pixar is markedly different to the high-profile Los Angeles premiere of Cars 2 I attended a few days' previously – a storm of screaming fans, Z-list celebrities and the odd bona fide star in the shape of the film's Owen Wilson and Emily Mortimer. Cars 2 producer and Pixar veteran Denise Ream says it's exactly this sort of hustle and bustle the studio wants to avoid.
"LA is too much of an industry town," she says. "There are definitely way more opportunities down there when you're first starting out. But after a while you get so sick of it because everywhere you go, that's all people talk about. I love my job but up here I feel there's more of a balance. [The premiere] was amazing and as someone who produced the movie it was great to see, but it was not my cup of tea and was a little overwhelming."
Mortimer, who voices the British car-spy Holley Shiftwell in Cars 2, has made the journey to Emeryville to meet the assembled press. Sitting on a couch in the central Pixar courtyard, our conversation is in stark contrast to the brief snippet I managed to grab from her on the red carpet in LA. "The vibe here is so mellow," she says. "You feel like you could pitch a tent and never go home."
"I'm completely messianic about this place, like some kind of cult. John Lasseter should be running the world," Mortimer laughs. "My little boy got to go into his office and opened this cupboard and an obscene amount of toy cars came out – he came home with a huge binliner full, and it's taken him about three weeks to calm down.
"The whole process is really different to a standard shoot. I'm not a theatre veteran but I have done a few plays and it may be similar to that, technically, because it's 'big acting'. It wasn't until I got the courage to really project and start gesticulating wildly that I began to get it.
"You're completely putting yourself in their hands. I get an almost masoch*stic pleasure out of the powerlessness of it … holding my nose and closing my eyes and jumping in to see what happens. It could be disastrous, or it could be fantastic. But you couldn't be in more reliable hands with Pixar and John, so it's quite a safe environment in which to not have any control."
Cars 2 isn't the greatest Pixar movie of all time, but I've seen more than enough of how this place works to suggest the studio will be back on form sooner rather than later. Brave, the company's first fairytale, arrives next year, and Monster's University, a sequel to Monster's Inc, is set for release a year later. In the meantime, Lasseter will return to his day job as chief creative officer of both Disney and Pixar, a role that has slowly begun to help restore the former to its glory days. There has been no "Pixarification" of Disney, he insists. Rather, it's been a case of bringing back values that should never have been dispensed with in the first place.
"The leadership at the time, they didn't grow up wanting to work for Disney, and wanting to be an animator," says Lasseter. "This was just their job. Cool cars and cool clothes and reservations at the hot restaurant. We came in, just – boom – scraped that layer off and inspired these artists and said this is what we want to do.
"One of my jobs coming back in was to say, 'No. I believe the audience in the world has not outgrown this, has not gotten so savvy that they no longer find this entertaining', which was the prevailing feeling. Because everybody lived down in cynical LA and we don't. That's one of the reasons I cherish being here."
If Pixar has benefited from being away from the Hollywood hub, there may be hope for Disney. Let's hope Lasseter's LA office looks much like the one in Emeryville.
