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He doesn't have a hookup to the Internet in his home. He doesn't have cable TV. "That's just inviting problems," he explains. He loves his parents and they're welcome to visit, but "we can't really have our son, Christopher, stay at my parents' house" because occasionally they don't watch their language. By the way, Christopher is 3 years old. "I pray my son will go the right way," says his gentle, worried dad.

Sound like a cave-dwelling Christian, hiding from the evil world? No, Matthew Luhn is a computer whiz who goes out daily into the entertainment world to make films that will reach millions of children. Probably yours. If you laughed at the Barbie tour guide in Toy Story 2, or marveled at toys sneaking across a freeway, Luhn is the guy to thank. He contributed to the first Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. as well, and you can currently see his ingenuity on display in Disney and Pixar's Finding Nemo, the story of a young clownfish who is abducted and bound for an aquarium shop. Luhn gets credit for coming up with the film's exciting ending. Plot puzzlers are his specialty, and he finds this work gratifying. "At least there's one thing I can do that not a lot of people can do," he says.

Meeting God again
But ten years ago Luhn was sitting on a curb in Burbank wondering what the puzzle of his life was all about. He was 19 years old and already attracting professional attention; his homemade animation shorts had won him admission to the prestigious California Institute for the Arts, and brought him to the attention of Disney, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. After his freshman year, he was hired to work on The Simpsons, which doesn't happen to many college kids.

But something was happening with his girlfriend. They had dated since high school, but recently she had become more serious about her Christian faith.

Luhn was Jewish and had even made a trip to Israel after his bar mitzvah. His family treated the faith with respect, but not as a priority. His girlfriend's deepening commitment to Christ was straining their relationship. "I was upset," Luhn says. "How could she love some invisible being more than me?"

At last the girl's pastor asked to meet with him. It was an hour that shook Luhn's life. "He showed me all the Old Testament prophecies of who the Messiah would be, lined up next to the New Testament fulfillments. It just hit me: If this is true, will I be wandering in the dark all my life?"

Luhn took a year to read the Bible and research other faiths. Though drawn to Christianity, he feared that it violated the principle of monotheism instilled by his Jewish upbringing.

On a long hike one day he wrestled with this question: "Will I be rejecting God by believing in Jesus?" At last, he "broke down" and declared, "I have to trust you and believe in Jesus."

"That was the turning point of my life," Luhn says. "I couldn't be who I was before. I used to use cuss words to get an easy laugh, but not anymore. I was going to have to learn to pray."

Luhn visited a nearby church with a dwindling congregation, and spoke with the pastor after the service. They agreed to meet the following Sunday.

	"You can have the best computer-animated fur in the world, but if the story's no good, nobody cares."

"I went to church the next Sunday and the place was packed, and there were flowers everywhere," Luhn says. Then he realized that it was the funeral of the pastor he was planning to meet. The pastor's widow stood up and told the congregation that her husband had been feeling discouraged, but in the past week he'd found renewed joy in his calling. "He was excited because he'd met a young man who had just come to know the Lord, and wanted to start a new life."

Drawing the lines
Luhn returned to his hometown in the Bay area and joined Redwood Chapel, a large evangelical church where a friend's dad is pastor. He began an enthusiastic, long-term involvement in children's ministries, orchestrating sound-and-light spectacles for Vacation Bible School, and organizing "Kids' Praise" worship services. "I do a lot of sermons, visiting other churches and talking to kids," Luhn says. "I use a board and draw, because kids pay attention when you draw."

Drawing was how Luhn initially made his name. After a year with The Simpsons and then a second year at CalArts, Luhn was hired by Pixar as one of the first 12 computer animators on Toy Story. With Toy Story 2 he stepped up to the position of "Story Artist." Luhn explains that when a director has an idea for a film, he selects five or six people to help him "create the story." (Though Pixar has 600 employees, there are only four directors and 30 story artists.) The team spends a full year brainstorming ideas. They develop characters' personalities and work out plot details.

The next two years are spent trying ideas out on "storyboards." When the film is complete in storyboard, it's ready to go to the animators. "I can spend an eight-hour day coming up with an idea, but it will take two weeks to animate it."

The powers of computer animation continue to grow. Sullivan, the lead character of Monsters, Inc., is an enormous shaggy beast whose long fur moves so realistically that the likeliest explanation seems they cast a real monster in the role. How do they do that? "I have no idea," Luhn says. "The guys who do that—some of them used to work at NASA. Sullivan ends up having a million hairs over his whole body, and they're all programmed to move in a certain way, but not to do so evenly—it's bizarre."

Telling the story
But no matter how showy the technical fireworks, "Our motto is, 'The story is king,'" Luhn says. "You can have the best computer-animated fur in the world, but if the story's no good, nobody cares." Toy Story 2 had a challenging theme, that of a cowboy doll realizing that he will one day be forgotten by the boy who loves him, but choosing that future heartbreak over sterile adulation in a toy museum. Long-suffering love which endures despite rejection is a pretty serious theme in comparison with most kids' fare. "There's a way to communicate deep things to kids," Luhn says. "In our meetings, we very much get into the psyche of the characters."

By the same token, he is vigilant against offering kids harmful material. "I can't believe some people do that!" he exclaims. "What are they thinking?" Many of his colleagues, Luhn says, are young and childless, and don't have much regular exposure to children. They naturally create material that is entertaining to themselves, but sometimes that's "where the crudity comes from." Luhn, Christopher's watchful dad, can lasso the project back to the world real kids inhabit.

"I'm vocal, but friendly," he says. "I don't want to come across as 'Please fire me,' but I make my views known."

Ten years ago he was more brash in his convictions and laid the gospel on friends and family with unrelenting fervor: "I felt like I'd had a dream that my house was on fire with everyone in it, and I was telling them how to get out!" But he found out many people had heard it all before, and didn't want to hear it again. "When I became a Christian it puzzled my parents," he says. "It put me in the category of every Christian weirdo they'd ever seen in a movie."

Now he works making movies, helping craft stories that harmonize with his convictions—getting toys safely across the freeway, getting kids safely through a theater. The story is king. And Luhn knows that kids who recognize a good story are prepared one day to hear an even better story, about an even more important rescue—about a King who knows them, loves them, and would seek them through all the seven seas.

A Christian Reader original article. Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author, most recently, of Gender: Men, Women, Sex, Feminism (Conciliar Press).

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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