Angus MacLane

Angus MacLane (born April 13, 1975) is an American animator, filmmaker and voice actor, best known for his work at Pixar Animation Studios. He co-directed the film Finding Dory (2016) and made his solo feature directorial debut with the Toy Story spin-off film Lightyear (2022). MacLane is also a Lego enthusiast and created the CubeDudes building format and designed a LEGO WALL-E that has become an official set from The Lego Group.[10][11]

Angus MacLane was born on April 13, 1975, in Riverside County, California, but grew up in Portland, Oregon. He originally wanted to be a comic book artist but halfway through school switched to animation and hoped one day he could work at the Will Vinton Studios (now Laika) and would eventually go on to work for the studio before working for Pixar. In 1997, he received a bachelor of fine arts from Rhode Island School of Design.[12]

MacLane joined Pixar in 1997, starting as an animator on Geri's Game. He worked as an animator on every Pixar feature film from A Bug's Life (1998) through Toy Story 3 (2010). He also worked in the character development on Monsters, Inc. (2001) and The Incredibles (2004). His work on The Incredibles gained him an Annie for Outstanding Achievement in Character Animation.[13] After serving as Supervising Animator on One Man Band, MacLane started working on the story team for Andrew Stanton's WALL-E and later moved up to Directing Animator. After animating a small scene for a side character named BURN-E, MacLane wanted to know what might happen to the character. He originally wanted BURN-E's story arc part of the actual film, but Stanton ended up wanting him to develop it into a short which eventually became BURN-E, which can now be viewed on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of WALL-E. For a short amount of time, he worked on the animation for Up, and the animation on Toy Story 3.

After BURN-E, MacLane started to move further to directing and writing works in the studio with the Toy Story Toon: Small Fry and Pixar's first TV special Toy Story of Terror!, for which he won an Annie for Outstanding Achievement in Directing in an Animated TV/Broadcast Production.[14] In addition, MacLane co-directed Pixar's 2016 film Finding Dory and directed the 2022 film Lightyear. Following the commercial failure of Lightyear, MacLane was included among 75 Pixar employees laid off by The Walt Disney Company as part of an ongoing company-wide restructuring.[15][16]