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.
Chris WedgeIf 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.
Chris WedgeWhat made 'Ice Age' work is that it had its shiny candy coatings, but inside was a soft, creamy center.
Chris WedgeI've been working in computer animation for 25 years. I'm obviously a devotee of the technology. I just think it's the one aspect of the medium that's going to continue to revolutionize the filmmaking. It's constantly changing and it's constantly opening up new possibilities. The technology is evolving where 2-D animation was ultimately limited by how long you could pay how many people to make a movie. I mean computers, not that it's in anyway a labor saving device, but it promises to open up exciting new technical possibilites.
Chris WedgeThe 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.
Chris WedgeI'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.
Chris Wedge