After graduation, Lasseter, too, went the Disney route, then decided the studio was not for him. But he hooked up with Pixar, which was then at Lucasfilm. You struck out on your own.

Disney was the only game in town, so when I left, my options were to quit animation or try to do it myself. I took some money that I had saved and did a test film that had several ideas for animated movies in rudimentary form. One of them was "Family Dog"; that caught Steven Spielberg's eye. He paid me to develop the storyboards. But I wanted to do the "Family Dog" stories as theatrical shorts, and he said there was no market for them. So the idea sat dormant for a couple of years until his TV series, "Amazing Stories," came along. I had written a live-action episode that he had really liked. When he invited me to come down to talk about other things, I brought with me another "Family Dog" I had done, in the interim, in storyboard form. He asked if I could do 22 minutes' worth and I said yeah. "Amazing Stories" had a big enough budget to do it right. We just had to plan way in advance. Fortunately, Steven was powerful enough to get a 44-episode commitment (the ratings weren't good enough for them to do two seasons otherwise), and one of the last episodes that came through was "Family Dog." It was a tremendous opportunity. And it was the only episode of the series that was not produced through Universal -- they gave us the money and the schedule and said, "Go, do it."

But you didn't stick with "Family Dog" when it was developed as a series.

"Family Dog" is told from the dog's point of view, and he's not like Garfield -- he doesn't tell you what he feels, you have to pick it up from his movement. I didn't think you could do the movement well shipping the work overseas. The producers thought they could solve the budget and scheduling problems; I didn't see how.

I think they thought I was against TV animation; they must have been shocked when I showed up on "The Simpsons" a month later. But "The Simpsons" could be done well on a TV schedule -- it's visually more crude, more soundtrack-based, and it doesn't have to be any more than it is. It's just fine.

How did you become the go-to guy whenever there was a Krusty the Clown episode?

Krusty is Matt Groening's creation, but I love Krusty. Matt and I both come from Oregon; I actually know what clown he was basing Krusty on. Krusty is a complete perversion of this really rather wholesome guy. And he is my favorite Simpsons character -- he's tremendously tormented but at the same time he's at peace with some of the worst sides of himself. For several seasons I'd animate at least one Krusty scene. I had my hand in as a consultant. I was part of the process on every episode. But I'd actually request to animate Krusty's scenes because he cracked me up. Like the Halloween episode where Bart can control everything happening in Springfield and he makes Krusty work nonstop, without sleep -- and Krusty says, "All thanks to one little boy WHO WON'T LET ME STOP!" Sideshow Bob is another one; I can't analyze it any more than to say these two characters are hilarious.

Was working on your own project again, "The Iron Giant," like working on "Family Dog"?

Even though on "The Iron Giant" we were with a very large studio, Warner Bros., we were kind of a rogue outfit, with an unbelievable amount of freedom. They paid for it, and it went through them, and we were using all of their facilities and three-quarters of their crew. But earlier they had tried, as everyone tries, not only to imitate the kind of films that Disney makes and the way they make them, but the actual management structure, too. They tried to micromanage "Quest for Camelot" like Disney micromanages its features, and it didn't work for them. It went over budget and no one was really pleased with how it came out. When we came through, they hammered us to make our budget lower, but as long as we stayed within those parameters and showed them we could do it, they left us alone to an unbelievable degree. And I think that's why the film works as well as it does, however well that is. If we had an idea, we could put it into play -- we didn't have to go up the salmon run of vice presidents.

Was the theme of regeneration in Ted Hughes' book part of the hook for you?

Yeah. One of the things that was good in the book was that the Iron Giant goes all to pieces. There is a wonderful section where the hand crawls up and picks up the eye and turns the eye around to find the arm. It is wonderful but it is slow, and it would have used up a good five minutes of screen time, which is incredibly precious in an animated film, because animated films are so short. But Tim McCanlies, the screenwriter, urged me to have something like that, and we put it in there, in a quicker version, from the beginning. The book was Ted Hughes' way of dealing with his wife's death and trying to tell his kids that things go on. I thought that was very important to have in the movie. To me the key mythological parts have to do with men and machines, and the boy getting to be like a father to the giant and the giant being the child.

And the idea that there can be a soul to a machine ...

Yeah, that there can be. Not to get too film-school pretentious about it, but there's something in this film about our relationship to our own mechanical sophistication. We're constantly at odds with our own inventiveness. Every technological leap we take, it's never just a plus. It's always, "This could cure cancer, and it could also make you have five eyes." So we have to deal with our technological sophistication versus our spiritual sophistication -- and technology always seems to be ahead of where we are spiritually. The machine in the movie ends up representing our own inventive side of ourselves and begs the question: Is it a good thing, or is it a dangerous thing?

Is that theme part of why you kept a rural setting?

That, and having a machine walking around the countryside was also more visually interesting to me than having him walk around a city.

You also retain the Iron Giant lumbering through the ocean.

At the beginning of the book, he drops off a cliff, then emerges from the water without having any explanation of his origins. I like that Hughes didn't explain his origins, but I didn't like him just coming out of the sea. I didn't want any of those movie-audience questions -- like I ask when I'm in the audience -- such as, "How come he didn't rust?" "Is he from a civilization? Why don't they take a submarine down and find it?" Immediately, in an odd way, if he comes from space, it's easier to convince an audience that this could happen. And it becomes a bigger story. It's about what's outside ourselves. When we think of water, we think of going in; when we think of space, we think of going out. But I let him crash into the sea, because I thought that was cool, too, and for a moment you think that he's a lighthouse, until the two lights split and you realize it's something with two eyes.

The choice of setting the film in the '50s -- was that to make it a homage to '50s sci-fi?

There's a little "Invaders From Mars," a little "The Day the Earth Stood Still." But I also wanted that time period because it presented a wholesome surface, yet beneath the wholesome surface was this incredible paranoia. We were all going to die in a freak-out.

There's also a beatnik, Dean, representing the cool side of the '50s.

"Kent Mansley," the national security agent -- he's representing the Ward Cleaver side, and Dean is representing the rebel side. To me that's America in a nutshell.

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