Directors Chair- Andrew Stanton

18-07-2008 16:09

Animation director Andrew Stanton is a major driving force behind studio Pixar working on movies such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

This week sees the release of the latest Pixar project WALL-E, which Stanton has directed.

Born in Rockport Massachusetts Stanton studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts before going on to work as an animator at Kroyer Films in the eighties.

In 1990 he became just the second animator, behind John Lasseter, at the newly formed Pixar Animation Studio and went on to be a writer and character designer on their first picture Toy Story in 1995.

Mixing traditional animation with new techniques, in particular CGI animation, the film was praised for it's technical innovation going on to gross over $354 million at the international box office.

As well as writing the screenplay Stanton joined Lasseter in the director's chair for the 1998 release A Bug's Life. A parody of Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper it grossed over $363 million, easily surpassing the competition from Dreamworks' movie Antz.

For both Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc Stanton had many roles including working on the scripts, providing additional voices and was executive producer on the latter.