Don’t expect Pixar to lose its remote control

JOHN LASSETER holds the keys to the kingdom. He really does.

As part of the Disney-Pixar deal, the “Cars” director and Pixar executive vice president now has creative control not only over Disney’s feature animation division but also its theme parks.

Having worked on Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise ride as a young man, the Magic Kingdom is familiar territory to Lasseter.

Still, changes at the theme parks may take months to spot. The same can’t be said of feature animation, where some of Lasseter and Pixar’s suggestions already have taken hold.

Pixar’s notes on Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons” helped prompt a creative reboot for the film, its release date now rescheduled from late 2006 to March 2007. After hearing Pixar’s reaction, Disney walked away from a planned Elton John animated musical called “Gnomeo and Juliet” (Disney subsidiary Miramax is now handling the film).

Lasseter also successfully advocated closing down “Toy Story 3,” which Disney was making without Pixar’s consent when the parties were feuding over a distribution deal made moot by Disney’s Pixar deal.

Lasseter and Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs have long said that Pixar’s geographical distance from Hollywood gives it a creative edge: Because it’s not consumed with show business chitchat and posturing, it can focus solely on storytelling. But now that Lasseter spends as many as two days a week at Disney’s Burbank headquarters, will that physical, and psychological, division shrink?

“We still all live up here” in Northern California, Lasseter says. “All of my friends, other than the people I work with at Pixar, work in a way of life other than the entertainment industry.

“And Pixar will always stay here,” he says of the company’s Emeryville campus. “The entire deal between Disney and Pixar is set to keep Pixar separate, to keep Pixar what it is, to keep Pixar unique. We are not going to be assimilated into Disney.”

-- J.H.