Time & Perspective Quote by John Lasseter

There is a particular ache in Lasseter's excitement here: the feeling of touching the future and realizing you are holding it alone. He frames Disney not as a corporation but as a restless artist with an unfinished agenda, always chasing "more dimension" in a medium literally built from flatness. By invoking Walt as a kind of absent judge, Lasseter gives his own obsession moral authority. This isnt just new tech; its a fulfillment of a founding promise.

The line "This is what Walt was waiting for!" is savvy mythmaking. It retrofits computer animation into the Disney origin story, turning a potentially threatening disruption into a family heirloom. That move matters because it reveals how innovation survives in legacy institutions: you dont just bring a breakthrough, you bring a narrative that makes it feel inevitable, even ordained.

Then the mood flips: "nobody at the studio... was even halfway interested". The phrasing is almost comically blunt, but the subtext is darker. Studios, especially successful ones, are engineered to protect what already works. The people paid to make magic can become curators of a style, not explorers of a frontier. Lasseter is describing a cultural lag, not an intelligence gap: a system where risk looks like heresy until it looks like profit.

Contextually, this is the pre-Pixar, pre-Toy Story moment when CG was still a curiosity and hand-drawn animation had the prestige. Lasseter is capturing the classic innovators dilemma, but with an animator's poignancy: seeing a new dimension and finding the room still painted in two.