The man walking toward John Lasseter was Jim Blinn, one of the most respected graphics researchers alive, the inventor of bump mapping and of the shading refinement that still carries his name. Lasseter, twenty-nine, braced for an interrogation about the shadow algorithm or the modeling. Blinn asked whether the big lamp was the mother or the father.
That was the moment Lasseter knew it had worked. The smartest technical person in the room had watched two articulated desk lamps and come away thinking not about rendering but about a family. Lasseter has since called the parent lamp the father.
Two minutes and almost everything riding on them
He was standing in the Dallas Convention Center in August 1986 with two minutes of film. It had no dialogue, no actors, no story you could summarize without sounding faintly ridiculous. It was about two desk lamps and a rubber ball.
Lasseter had a Luxo-brand lamp on his own drawing table, the kind with a hinged arm and a hooded head that swivels. He had spent months teaching a digital copy of it to move like something alive — to hop, to lean, to perk up and slump. A second, smaller lamp joined it, built with the stubby proportions of a child. Lasseter had landed on those proportions after a visit from Spencer, the year-and-a-half-old son of Pixar colleague Tom Porter; the boy kept raising his arms over his head and still couldn’t quite touch the top of it, his body all head and stubby limbs, and after he left Lasseter found himself wondering what a baby lamp would look like.
In the finished short, the little lamp chases a ball, climbs on top of it, bounces until it flattens under him, and then nudges the deflated remains and looks up at the big lamp for a verdict. He gets a mild one, and slinks off. A moment later he comes bounding back into frame after a ball several times larger. The parent lamp watches him pass, then shakes its head, as if to say: there goes my afternoon.
A lamp that was also a light
Pixar in 1986 was six months old and barely solvent. Steve Jobs had bought the computer-graphics division out of Lucasfilm that February, and the company’s actual product was a $135,000 machine called the Pixar Image Computer, built to process medical scans and geophysical data. The animation was supposed to be a sideline — a way to show off what the hardware could do, and to keep Lasseter, a former Disney animator, busy.
Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, who ran the place, needed a technical reason to let Lasseter spend months on a cartoon. They found one in self-shadowing: the problem of getting an object to cast shadows correctly onto itself, not just onto the floor beneath it. A lamp whose head is a working light source, swinging around and throwing its own shadow across its own arm and base, was a near-perfect test case. The subject and the math fit together exactly. The team, including Eben Ostby’s procedural animation tools and the early version of the rendering software that would become RenderMan, built the short to exercise that capability.
There was an irony the marketing department preferred not to dwell on. Not a single frame of Luxo Jr. was rendered on the Pixar Image Computer it was meant to sell.
The arena that never heard the end of it
The film screened at SIGGRAPH, the annual computer-graphics conference, in front of an arena crowd of roughly six thousand engineers, researchers, and effects artists — the precise audience most likely to be unimpressed, because they knew exactly how the trick was done. The music under the action was not composed for it: it was an uncredited edit of three cues lifted from a British production-music album.
They never heard the end of it. The crowd was on its feet applauding before the final frame reached the screen. Computer animation up to that point had been a parade of chrome spheres and flying logos, technically dazzling and emotionally inert. This was a short film with characters, a relationship, and a small joke about parenthood, and it had been built one polygon at a time.
And then Blinn walked over, and instead of asking how the shadows were done, he asked about the lamp’s family.
What the question proved
Luxo Jr. went on, in 1987, to become the first entirely computer-generated film nominated for a competitive Academy Award, in the Best Animated Short category. It lost, that night, to a hand-drawn Belgian film called A Greek Tragedy. The loss has been almost entirely forgotten; the nomination has not.
The little lamp never left. It first hopped across a Pixar logo at the close of Toy Story in 1995, moved to the front of the picture with A Bug’s Life three years later, and has been flattening the I in the studio’s name ever since — a two-minute experiment in casting shadows that became the company’s signature, replayed in front of more people than have seen any other Pixar film.
What the short proved was narrower and larger than a software demo. The open question in computer animation had been whether a machine could ever do more than render surfaces convincingly — whether it could make an audience feel something about a thing that everyone in the room knew was a list of coordinates. Blinn’s question was the answer. He had stopped seeing the coordinates. He was asking about the lamp’s family, and he meant it.