The most fun is to inhabit the world where cartoon physics is king. And that just means that things move with kind of an energy and exaggeration and appeal that is different from what we see in our world. We're bound by, at least, Newton's Laws of physics here and in animation we're not. So, director's can be extremely eccentric, you can sculpt motion in animation in a way that you just can't do any other way. In any other performance medium.

Animation has always been about technology. You can't have animation without technology.

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.

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.

On these feature films there are people on the staff who can draw 100 times better then I can, and animate better then I can, and light better then I can, write comedy better then I can. I basically am in the middle of kind of a creative typhoon and I'm just kind of talking the film up on to the screen. Minute to minute, meeting by meeting, day by day.

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.

Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.