Honestly, I don't go out of my way to see animated movies. I'm mostly influenced by.. the films I tend to like are the small films, small personal stories. With characters you can believe.

What made 'Ice Age' work is that it had its shiny candy coatings, but inside was a soft, creamy center.

I'm surrounded by a lot of live-action movie professionals, and I'm just taking their lead, as far as what to schedule to do next. I'm guessing the challenge is going to be not having two characters together, and shooting the live-action without having the animation. In animation, you get to get in between every frame and you work it all out together.

For me, part of the fascination with making animation is you go to a place; it's a complete immersion in someone else's fantasy.

We can't worry about competition. Besides, you aren't competing with anyone but yourself. They have nothing to do with whether you make a good movie or not.

If anything, it's a little intimidating because there's usually a lot of brilliant work and a lot of brilliant ideas out there that you wish you had thought of, or that you just admire for the originality of it or the difference from what you've been thinking of.

You look at Japan and Hayao Miyazaki's films are the biggest films ever made in Japan; domestically there and they play to critical acclaim around the world. He won't put more then 5 or 10 percent computer imagery in his movies. It's disappointing to me. It's a silly choice that some studios made to move out of animation. It's part of the unfortuneate preconception that I think the public has going into see animation.