Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and voice actor whose career is closely tied to Pixar Animation Studios. Born December 3, 1965, in Rockport, Massachusetts, he studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts before joining Pixar in 1990. He arrived when the company was developing computer animation for commercials and short films, and became one of the studio’s creative figures as it moved into feature filmmaking. Stanton was a writer on Toy Story (1995), Pixar’s first feature, and shared its screenplay credit with Joss Whedon, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow, while receiving story credit alongside John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft. The film follows cowboy doll Woody after the arrival of Buzz Lightyear unsettles his place as Andy’s favorite toy. Stanton also cowrote A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001). His directorial feature debut, Finding Nemo (2003), was codirected with Lee Unkrich and centered on Marlin, a clownfish who crosses the ocean to find his captured son, Nemo. Stanton voiced the character Crush, a sea turtle, in the film. Finding Nemo won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and Stanton later returned to its world as director and cowriter of Finding Dory (2016), about Dory’s search for her parents. Wall-E (2008), his next animated feature as director, opens on an abandoned Earth where the title waste collecting robot has spent centuries compacting trash. After meeting the probe EVE, Wall-E leaves the planet and reaches the starliner Axiom, where humans have lived in space. Stanton cowrote the film with Jim Reardon and Pete Docter. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. In 2012, Stanton made his live action directing debut with John Carter, adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels. Taylor Kitsch plays Civil War veteran John Carter, who is transported to Mars and becomes involved in conflict among its inhabitants. The costly Disney release was a commercial disappointment, although it has since attracted defenders. Beyond feature films, Stanton directed the Stranger Things first season episodes “The Flea and the Acrobat” and “The Monster” for Netflix. His Pixar work also includes voice appearances: he played Emperor Zurg in Toy Story 2. Across these projects, he has repeatedly worked with Pixar artists including Lasseter, Docter, and Unkrich, while moving from the studio’s early computer animated experiments to large scale live action filmmaking. In 2024, Pixar announced that Stanton would direct Toy Story 5, scheduled for 2026.