10 Hollywood Legends You've Probably Never Heard Of
2. The Animator
Many assumed that the brash stock car protagonist of Pixar’s ‘Cars’ franchise, Lightning McQueen, was named after movie icon and racing driver Steve McQueen. The truth was far more personal to the tight-knit crew of people working on Pixar’s projects: the charismatic hero was named for their friend, supervising animator Glenn McQueen, who had died of cancer in late 2002.
One of the most celebrated figures in late period animation, McQueen, was only forty-one years old when he passed away, yet in only a few short years had risen to the peak of his profession. Smart, perceptive, creative and articulate, he was pretty much headhunted from his job as head of the 3D production department at the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab to move to the west coast and join Pixar’s fledgeling set-up.
Already working on commercials and films sequences but feeling that his lab’s approach to 3D animation was heading in the wrong direction, McQueen agreed to the jump based purely on his professional admiration for John Lasseter and his fascination with what might be possible with his upcoming project… a entire computer-animated feature film starring a bunch of kids toys…
The rest was movie history. McQueen was instrumental in supervising the animation for characters on all of Pixar’s early smash hits: the first two Toy Story flicks, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo. Because every movie that the company generated was such a cohesive team effort, the films that made the company’s reputation also made his.
To this day, McQueen’s work attracts admirers all over the film industry. He’s still considered one of the finest animators in that rarefied field, and no less a personage than Lasseter himself declared McQueen “the heart and soul of our animation department.”
Uncannily blessed with the exact same look and energetic, slightly goofball wit that would make Chris Pratt a huge star a decade later, it’s clear that McQueen was deeply missed at Pixar both professionally and personally.
Not only was Lightning McQueen named for him, but if you’re wondering where else you’ve seen that name before? Finding Nemo, the film McQueen was working on when he died, is dedicated to him, and the new Canadian studio that Pixar opened in 2010 was named after him, too.