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There's a beautiful profile of John Lasseter written by the man himself in the recent edition of Fortune Magazine:

"I finally realized that I wasn't the only one with this geeky love for animation. We could come out of the closet now. And all of us had the same dream: to work at Disney one day. [His classmates included Tim Burton (director of "Corpse Bride" and others), Brad Bird ("The Incredibles"), and John Musker ("Aladdin").]

I couldn't think of anything better than working at Disneyland during the summer breaks from Cal Arts. At first I was a sweeper in Tomorrowland the summer that Space Mountain opened [1977], and then I transferred to be a ride operator on the Jungle Cruise ride. No one really believes this, but the Jungle Cruise taught me a lot of what I know about comedy and comic timing.

Something just clicked - the combination of having your captive audience in the boat and this script of corny jokes. Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.

Another key thing that made me who I am happened that same summer. It was the year "Star Wars" came out. I went down opening weekend to Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood with a friend from school, and I remember standing in line for about six hours. We finally got inside, and when that movie started you were swept away. By the end I was just shaking. I looked around the audience, and it was families, it was teenagers, it was old people--everybody was there, and everybody was just having so much fun.

When Walt Disney was making his films he trusted his instincts and made films for himself, but they appealed to everybody, not just kids. "Snow White," the first full-length animated feature film, was the No. 1 movie in 1938, and it entertained the broadest possible audience. So when I sat there and saw "Star Wars," I was thinking that animation could do this too."

To read this wonderful article, please follow this link over to CNNMoney.com...