Love Quote by John Lasseter

Lasseter is admitting a kind of wholesome vulnerability that, in the Pixar era he helped define, became a technical and cultural flex. The line starts as a personal confession - “I love movies that make me cry” - but it quickly pivots into professional obsession: tears aren’t just catharsis, they’re proof of craft. For a director, crying is the audience’s involuntary standing ovation. You can fake laughter with timing; you can’t easily fake that throat-tightening surrender when a story hits something true.

The subtext is about engineering without sounding cynical. Lasseter frames emotion as “real” and internal (“in me”), pushing back on the idea that sentimentality is manipulation. Yet he immediately asks the maker’s question: “how did they do that?” That curiosity is the animator’s mindset applied to feeling - reverse-engineering the moment when character, music, pacing, and image lock into a single trigger. It’s admiration, yes, but also a blueprint: if you can map the mechanism of a cry, you can build one ethically, repeatedly, at scale.

Context matters here because Lasseter comes from an industrial art form: teams, pipelines, story reels, iteration. Pixar’s signature wasn’t just jokes and shiny rendering; it was the precision-guided emotional beat, often delivered through minimal dialogue and crystal-clear visual storytelling. His question points to a larger cultural shift: mainstream family films learning to treat adults’ emotions as fair game, not an embarrassing side effect. The tear, in Lasseter’s framing, is a data point - evidence that cinema can still reach past irony and hit the nerve.