Quotes About Animation

I have a very low tolerance for animation. I'm used to the perfect integrity you get from drawing your own comics. There's something about that that animation always loses.

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.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

I get a lot of credit for Tron. They called us scene choreographers back then because the animation unit wouldn't let us be called animators because we were working on computers. And we were some of the first people ever to make 3-D computer animation.

Having animation as this time-based medium made a lot of sense for me, and then stop motion was even more fun because it was so hands-on and physical in a way that I really liked.

In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.

On an animated movie, I'm learning as I go. There are so many details in animation. Doing the voices was the easy-part. Doing live-action, you have to be on the set, every day.

Animation requires a great deal of concentration, and I preferred to work alone because then I'm not deterred by somebody asking me if I want coffee, or the phone ringing or something.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

Making movies wasn't really an immediate thought, where I was raised. I was going to be a lawyer, and I thought I would just draw. So, I was sketching all the time and I realized that I needed some outlet, and then I found animation.

In animation and comics, the viewer breezes past the drawings. But with picture books, each page is going to be stared at and touched and read over and over. Maybe even chewed on a little. Everything needs to be thoughtful and economical, thirty-two little masterpieces.

The way I formed my studio and how I organize things actually came out of the model of the Japanese animation studio and the manga industry. The manga industry is gigantic in Japan.

When in doubt, resort to animation.

A gem of a short film has a sense of pure joy in animation that is different from anything you see in a feature film.

I always loved cartoons but the process seemed so difficult. Then I told myself, "Nothing good comes easy." So, I took a plunge and started my first animation stint in 2003.

Shark Tale feels borrowed, sampled and dittoed from the collective funniness of the past 10 years in studio-made animation.

Animation had been used only for things like King Kong and the destruction of cities, which was very popular in the 1950s. I got tired of destroying cities. I destroyed New York, I destroyed San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Rome, and Washington. I was looking for a new outlet, and I came across the Sinbad legends.

With animation because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules.

The scary thing is that sometimes you are wrapping up animation on a sequence and you don't know how the movie ends or begins. You just have to bluff and move forward.

I find that I have improved in my craft and I have improved considerably in my ability to critique other people's artwork. I forgot to mention that my course of study at the Art Institute is BSC in Media Arts and Animation.

Traditionally, animation has been dominated by men in the past. I don't know why it attracted guys.

Films are made the same today, as they've ever been made, in certain respects. The scriptwriting, the pre-production, the storyboarding, and the designing are all the same. The technique of animation has changed, in the sense that rather than drawing it by hand, we use a computer as a tool. The computer has become a pencil to draw or paint the images that we see in a film.

I like making comics and animation because it takes such a long time. I'm not a runner of the 100 meter. I like marathons. The longer it takes, the better I feel.

A lot of the issues I faced in junior high was what got me into animation. It was easier to sit on the side and draw cartoons than to engage with people.

I've never felt really creative or intuitive using software. I like paper and pens and paint. I need to angle real lights on my artwork and work with my hands and build props. Computers just take all that fun out of it [animation drawing].

Certainly the animation technology is growing like crazy. All media technology is.

I guess the biggest challenge to doing any kind of animation voice work is that you only have your voice to tell the story.

In the world of animation, you can be anything you wanna be. If you're a fat woman, you can play a skinny princess. If you're short wimpy guy, you can play a tall gladiator. If you're a white man, you can play an Arabian prince. And if you're a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.

We've got to stay on our [animation] game, make sure we still remember how to animate.

A character like Wonder Woman is so iconic and yet, over the course of her history, there have been lots of subtle changes. We couldn't stray too far from the comic book look, but you do have a certain amount of leeway in terms of how you interpret those elements for animation.

The process of producing a project is one long string of delight and anxiety, but I think the real thrill of animation would have to be drawing the pictures.

I think hand-drawn animation can be something really special. If the character design is quite simple it has the ability to allow people to easily relate to the characters in a special manner.

The quality and success of Disney was actually bad for us animators because everyone on the planet thought that animation was only for kids and only in a certain domain. The big film festivals never thought much about animated films.

Animation can explain whatever the mind of man can conceive. This facility makes it the most versatile and explicit means of communication yet devised for quick mass appreciation.

I went to the archives to see what Dumbo work there was, not for current film, but just for my love of animation. And I couldn't believe all the artwork the guys had done to find this universal empathy to Dumbo. There was one drawing where they used his ears as a sign: "Eat at Joes!" These guys were continually searching and digging to see what that is.

It [voicing animation] is very freeing. Nobody in the cast is doing their voice. No one is talking like they normally talk and it's because, all of a sudden, you're freed from the physical limitations of how you look, which is amazing.

The first animation thing I did was the first Transformers, the one that was animated many years ago. And I had heard that Orson Welles was doing a voice on it.

When I got out of college I worked for DC comics. I worked on staff there and I also freelanced for them for about a decade. I spent two years on staff as an editor right out of college. I'm from Los Angeles and I came back here after a couple of years in New York, to go to Graduate School at USC. I wasn't thinking specifically about animation although while I'd worked at DC.

We've always liked music in movies, you know, just 'cause it helps tell the story. It can be emotional. It can be funny. It can be so many different things. And it just and it gives you variety from and again, there's a certain stylization that happens with music. Animation and music seem to go together well.

I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

Even in hand drawn animation, humans are widely considered to be the most difficult to execute, because everybody has a feeling for how they move.

America is behind Europe and Japan in terms of accepting adult ideas in animation.