Angus MacLane was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied 2D animation in school and received a bachelor of fine arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Initially he wanted to be a comic book artist but midway through school switched to animation. He joined Pixar in 1997 and his first assignment was as an animator on Geri’s Game. Angus has the distinction of working on every Pixar feature film except the original Toy Story. This included animation on A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, For the Birds and Finding Nemo. In addition to his regular animation duties, he also helped with character development on Monsters, Inc. and The Incredibles. For his animation work on The Incredibles, he was awarded the Annie for Outstanding Achievement in Character Animation. Angus served as the Supervising Animator on Academy Award nominated One Man Band, but then switched gears to work on the story team for Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E. After animating a small scene in the film for an ancillary character named BURN-E, Angus wanted to know what might happen to the character, he eventually developed it into a short. BURN-E (written and directed by MacLane) debuted alongside the WALL-E DVD/Blu-ray.

Filmography

• Geri’s Game (1997) (animator)
• A Bug’s Life (1998) (additional animator)
• Toy Story 2 (1999) (animator, additional storyboard artist)
• For the Birds (2000) (animator)
• Monsters, Inc. (2001) (animator, character developer, additional storyboarding)
• Finding Nemo (2003) (animator)
• The Incredibles (2004) (animator, character developer)
• One Man Band (2005) (supervising animator)
• Cars (2006) (additional animator)
• Ratatouille (2007) (additional animator)
• WALL-E (2008) (directing animator, storyboard artist)
• BURN-E (2008) (director, story, voice of BURN-E)
• Up (2009) (animator)
• Toy Story 3 (2011) (animator)
• Small Fry (2011) (writer,director)

http://www.pixartalk.com/pixarians/angus-maclane/

Angus MacLane spoke on the show about being a part of the co-innovation efforts discussed with other guests on today’s show, but from the other side – he is one of the co-innovators that designed a kit ultimately produced by LEGO. As a director at Pixar, he is intimately familiar with WALL-E, and he designed a kit so that people can now build the lovable robot! Angus told us how difficult a process is – not just in terms of creating a very accurate model but also the very long and difficult process of accruing the necessary 10,000 votes for a design to be reviewed by LEGO.