At the time, sword and sorcery stories were quite popular. There were female warriors waving swords around as well, but the genre is populated entirely with people who have absolutely no responsibility to anyone, so I knew my story would have to be completely different from any of these.

I think 2-D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films. They became very conservative in the way they created them. It's too bad. I thought 2-D and 3-D could coexist happily.

If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can't do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That's rare in any era.

I'm not going to make movies that tell children, "You should despair and run away".

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

It’s disgusting. On trains, the number of those people doing that strange masturbation-like gesture is multiplying.

I find it pointless sitting in my house not working, though I like to go on extended vacations from time to time.