Andrew Ayers Stanton (born December 3, 1965) is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. He is best known as the director and co-writer of the Pixar animated films Finding Nemo (2003), WALL-E (2008), Finding Dory (2016), and Toy Story 5 (2026). He also directed the live-action films John Carter (2012) and In the Blink of an Eye (2026). For Pixar, Stanton was additionally co-writer on the first five Toy Story films (1995–2026), A Bug's Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and has had a degree of involvement in each of the company's feature films.
Finding Nemo and WALL-E earned Stanton two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. He was also nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, for Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and Toy Story (1995), and for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Toy Story 3 (2010). WALL-E has also been inducted into the National Film Registry. Stanton has directed episodes of various television series since 2017, including episodes of 3 Body Problem, Better Call Saul, Legion and Stranger Things.
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Early and personal life
Stanton was born in Rockport, Massachusetts. His father, Ron Stanton, was the founder of a company that worked on radars for the United States Department of Defense. His mother, Gloria Stanton, pursued an acting career before becoming a homemaker. Both of Stanton's parents were natives of nearby Wellesley.
Stanton acted in high school and directed sketch comedy shot on Super 8 film. He portrayed Barnaby Tucker in a 1980 high school production of Hello, Dolly!, which later became a source of inspiration for WALL-E. Stanton studied for a year at the University of Hartford before transferring to the character animation program at the California Institute of the Arts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from CalArts in 1987.
In 1989, Stanton married his high school sweetheart Julie, two weeks after she graduated from Georgetown University. The couple subsequently settled in Los Angeles, where they raised two children, Ben and Audrey. Stanton is a Christian.
Stanton revealed in 2012 that he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when he was in the middle of writing John Carter.
Stanton is an Arsenal F.C. fan, and included a scene mimicking their famous offside trap among other Arsenal references in John Carter.
Career
Stanton began his career in animation in the late 1980s. He worked as an animator for Kroyer Films, and one of his early gigs involved animating sperm for a sex-ed film with Martin Short called The Making of Me, originally produced for Disney's Wonders of Life pavilion. Stanton was one of several CalArts graduates hired by John Kricfalusi to work on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures at Ralph Bakshi's studio.
After being rejected by Disney three times, Stanton was hired by Pixar's animation group in 1990 as its second animator (John Lasseter being the first) and ninth employee. Back then Pixar was not yet an animation studio, and their animation group was dedicated to making television commercials as a step towards their goal of making the first computer-animated feature.
Stanton, Lasseter and Pete Docter drafted the original treatment for Toy Story, which bore little resemblance with the eventually finished film. After production of the film was shut down in late November 1993 following a disastrous test screening, Stanton retreated into a windowless office and extensively reworked the script with help from Joss Whedon. The resulting screenplay was nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, the first nomination in that category for an animated film. Following his work on Toy Story, Stanton would go on to direct Finding Nemo (2003), WALL-E (2008), and Finding Dory (2016) for Pixar.
In an interview with World Magazine's Megan Basham, Stanton explained his singular vision for WALL-E: What really interested me was the idea of the most human thing in the universe being a machine because it has more interest in finding out what the point of living is than actual people. The greatest commandment Christ gives us is to love, but that's not always our priority. So I came up with this premise that could demonstrate what I was trying to say—that irrational love defeats the world's programming. You've got these two robots that are trying to go above their basest directives, literally their programming, to experience love.
Stanton made his live-action directorial debut with the Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation John Carter (2012). The film was a commercial failure.
Stanton co-wrote Toy Story 4, which was released on June 21, 2019. Initially, when he pitched the idea to director Josh Cooley, Cooley was concerned feeling like Toy Story 3 was the perfect ending. Stanton reportedly told Cooley "Toy Story 3 was a good ending--but it's not the ending." He explained that it was not the ending of Woody's story but rather the ending of Woody's time with Andy. Stanton reportedly started writing Toy Story 4 in secret while the third film was still in production.
Filmography
Collaborations (acting)
Andrew Stanton has cast certain actors in more than one of the films he has directed.
Award and nominations
Preservation
Two of Stanton's short films, A Story and Somewhere in the Arctic..., were preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.
