Pixar Animation Head John Lasseter, whose father was a Chevrolet dealership parts manager, had long hoped to make a movie about automobiles and car-culture, but the project didn't find its form until, at his wife Nancy's urging, the family took an extended vacation six years ago.

"She thought, 'Be careful, John, one day you're going to wake up and your boys will have gone off to college and you would have missed it.' And she was right," Lasseter recalls. "So I decided to take the summer of 2000, after "Toy Story 2" was completed, off. We bought a used motor home, piled all five boys, Nancy and I in it, and we went right out to the Pacific Coast, put our feet in the Pacific Ocean and we turned East. We had two months with no plan to get to the Atlantic, put our feet in the Atlantic and turn around and come back."

That cross-country journey helped transform "Cars" from a basic concept -- a hotshot young car (Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen) on a NASCAR-like racing circuit -- into a movie with a theme, something about life's journey being its reward or, as Lasseter puts it, "You can have your career, you can have all this stuff, but it's about having family and friends around you to just share in your ups and downs of your life."

The personal nature of the project encouraged Lasseter to take on directing chores for the first time since 1999's "Toy Story 2." While the message may resonate with audiences, "Cars" still features plenty of Pixar's trademark technological innovation, this time tackling the difficulties of doing a movie populated only by objects normally considered to be inanimate.

"At Pixar, we always choose the subject matter of our films that really lend itself to our medium of 3-D computer animation," Lasseter says. "I love matching the technology with the imagery in a way, and I thought that you've seen a lot of animated cars through the history of animation, but I thought we could really bring them alive with the chrome bumpers, the metal flake paint, the rubber tires, the glass, in a way that no one has seen it before."

"Cars" is a big movie Lasseter, as its the first project released since Disney Animation and Pixar effectively merged back in January in a massive stock deal that had the potential to change the faces of both companies.

"The merger isn't going to change Pixar at all, because that was one of the parts of the deal and [Disney Chief] Bob Eiger recognizes how special Pixar is and its culture, and it's really protected," Lasseter insists.

In fact, Lasseter and his Pixar followers have been entrusted with changing the corporate culture at Disney, at least to some degree. Currently, Lasseter says he's spending two days a week down at Disney and he puts his goals simply.

He explains, "Disney has been sort of an executive-driven studio for a long time, and I believe in having the directors really, the stories come from them, whether it's something they wrote and they like and it comes from their heart, and surrounding them and being honest with them when things are working and not working, so that's our plan, is to take that aspect of what we have developed at Pixar and bringing it over and working with the great artists down there, and they are terrific artists."

"Cars" opens everywhere on Friday, June 9.