Back in July, Disney announced that it was going to be honoring Steve Jobs with a Disney Legend Award. The award is the media conglomerate’s highest and most coveted honor, and is reserved for extraordinary visionaries and artists.
Well the award ceremony was held yesterday, in the D23 Expo Arena at the Anaheim Convention Center. And when Pixar founder John Lasseter took the stage to accept the Legend award on Steve Jobs’ behalf, he gave quite the speech….
Here’s video of Lasseter’s speech (via MacRumors):
The clip is only about 8 minutes long, and it’s really worth watching if you have the time.
Here’s the full presentation (via TUAW).
Steve Jobs is so well known for his work at Apple, that his work at Pixar often gets overshadowed. Here’s a cool story Lasseter shares of Jobs’ genius:
“We were having dinner one day, in the middle of the hardest part of making ‘Toy Story’, and he started looking off again in the distance and he said: You know John, when we make the computers at Apple. He said the lifespan of that computer is what, 3 years? He said in 5 years it’s a door stop. Ya know, that’s how technology goes. But he said ‘if you do your job right what you create and what Pixar creates can last forever.”
When a tiny computer graphics group wanted to break away from Lucas Films in 1986 to form an animation studio, Jobs put up $10 million to make it happen. Half went to Lucas for tech rights and half went into Pixar’s bank account.
Here’s Jobs with Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ed Catmull.
Pixar went on to produce a number of the highest-grossing animated films of all time, and was eventually purchased by Disney in 2006. The deal made Jobs Disney’s single largest shareholder, a title now held by his wife Laurene.
Steve shared the spotlight yesterday with a host of Disney legends, including Collin Cambell of the prestigious Disney Imagineering team and actors John Goodman and Billy Crystal, who recently co-starred in Pixar’s Monsters Inc.