Angus MacLane
Angus MacLane is, born 1975.
Angus MacLane is an American animator, filmmaker and voice actor who made his career inside Pixar. He is best known for the short-film work he directed there before the features: BURN-E, which took a welding robot glimpsed in the background of WALL-E and gave it seven minutes of its own increasingly aggrieved storyline, and Small Fry, a Toy Story short about a fast-food kids-meal figurine. He voices the robot in both WALL-E and BURN-E, and he keeps turning up in the vocal ensemble on other shorts as well, a sunfish in Finding Dory, Captain Zip in Hawaiian Vacation, several characters at once in Small Fry.
He co-directed Finding Dory in 2016 and then made his solo feature debut with Lightyear in 2022, the Toy Story spin-off built around the in-universe film the toy was supposed to come from. He voices a trio of small parts in that too.
Away from the studio he is a serious Lego builder. He invented the CubeDudes format, blocky brick-built caricatures of familiar characters, and designed a Lego WALL-E that the Lego Group eventually released as an official set, which is a rarer crossover than a Pixar credit.
Movies (12)
Where to start with Angus MacLane
BURN·E is the place to start and it costs you seven minutes. It is the purest sample of his sensibility: a machine with a single job, an escalating series of obstacles, and no dialogue doing any of the work. Watch WALL·E either side of it, since the short is stitched into the timeline of the feature and the joke lands harder when you can place the moments they share.
Lightyear is the ambitious one and the most divisive, a straight-faced science-fiction picture wearing a toy-franchise badge, and it is more interesting than its reception suggested. Finding Dory is the safer, warmer film and the better introduction if you have children in the room. The Toy Story shorts, Small Fry and Hawaiian Vacation, are quick and cheerful, and Beyond Infinity: Buzz and the Journey to Lightyear is for anyone who wants the process rather than the picture.