For me, drawing is the greatest joy. Animation is never as good as when I'm sitting at that desk drawing. Even when it's up on the screen, it's never as wonderful as those moments when it's drawn, to me.

There's a weird thing about me and characters with hair, from Ariel or Pocahontas to Tarzan with his dreadlocks and now Rapunzel... it's like I'm trying to make up for some loss in my life, I don't know what that is.

I find that you're drawn to certain stories, and there's something about fairytales that have deep roots. They connect really deeply to you, and those are the stories that I find myself drawn to. I love characters that believe the impossible is possible.

If you are offered the opportunity to do something that you don’t know how to do – say yes, dive in and do it anyway.

I don't know how to animate on the computer, and I'm really grateful that I worked with a couple of other guys. We called it our triumvirate, John Kahrs and Clay Kaytis, who really understood computer animation but loved and embraced hand drawn, which is Disney's heritage.

I used to think that animation was about moving stuff. In order to make it really great, you bounce it, squash it, stretch it, make the eyes go big. But, as time went on, I started loving animating a character who had a kind of burning passion in her heart. Suddenly, animation became for me not so much about moving stuff as it was about moving the audience.

There's an image of Rapunzel free, flying in the air, as a sunburst, which says so much. This is a girl who has to get out and bless the world.