From HarryMcCracken.com (1989)

John Lasseter: “…And I was interested in doing things with lamps. I had done some student films with them, and they were kind of fun.

I started working on doing lamps. I modeled one Luxo lamp, and then a friend of mine came over with his baby. And then I went back to working on the lamp, and wondered what the lamp would look like as a baby. I scaled different parts of it down: the springs are the same diameter, but they’re much shorter. The same with the rods. The shade is small but the bulb is the same size. The reason the bulb is the same size is because that’s something you buy at the hardware store; it doesn’t grow.

So I animated it, and the story developed as I went, and we premiered it at SIGGRAPH. I love showing the filmsat SIGGRAPH because you get such a great reaction. The reaction to Luxo Jr. was phenomenal; people had never seen anything quite like that before, and it got a really wonderful ovation.

The thing I wanted to do in Luxo Jr. was make the characters and story the most important thing, not the fact that it was done with computer graphics. As you see in the film show at SIGGRAPH, a lot of times it’s computer graphics for computer graphics nerds. People get excited about it purely because it was generated with a computer.”

I wanted people who had never even seen a computer before to look at it and enjoy it as a film. I did a couple of things: I locked the camera down, didn’t move it.

And a cute version with a fellow Pixar employee …