Quotes About Animation

What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?" "Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices. "Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them. "And what do ye next, men?" "Lower away, and after him!" "And what tune is it ye pull to, men?" "A dead whale or a stove boat!

I first met Walt Disney 25 or 30 years ago.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

In 'Futurama,' the skin color is no longer yellow. They have actually evolved to cartoon skin tone. But they still have four fingers.

Beauty and the Beast seemed like it all was really brown. The whole thing was just so brown and orange and yellow, like Burger King or something. I don't think I would have liked Beauty and the Beast at any age.

The actual, original 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' I have vague memories of because I was pretty small, but I loved, loved, loved it. I have only those weird, visceral little-kid memories: I remember the extreme flat, two dimensional green that was their skin or the weird pizza with no sauce - it was just like yellow, drippy cheese.

I've been your yellow M&M for, oh, at least two decades or so, and I've done a lot of other animated stuff in between.

I think a lot of the Disney cartoons are scary when you watch them at a young age.

I was influenced by Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reiniger, with her twitchy, cutout animation, which I happened to see at a very young age, but also by the Warner Bros. cartoons, 'Tom and Jerry,' and of course Disney. And also by Fellini's 'Giulietta of the Spirits' and Kurosawa's 'Ran.' And by other American illustrators and painters.

As a young artist in New York, I thought about postwar Japan - the consumer culture and the loose, deboned feeling prevalent in the character and animation culture. Mixing all those up in order to portray Japanese culture and society was my work.

You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.

The thing about Pixar, they don't do the 'trend is your friend.' They're really about timeless story telling, and that's pretty great.

Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.

With the assumption that animation is a medium for children, I want to make movies that reaffirm the future, and let them know that this world is a world worth living in.

We believe it's the biggest advance in animation since Walt Disney started it all with the release of Snow White 50 years ago.

I love the work of Hayao Miyazaki. 'My Neighbor Totoro' and 'Castle in the Sky' are two of the great films that he's made that I just love.

When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.

There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.

Just like those little Viewmaster slides, there's a inherent magic that's captured in 3D that you can't get in drawn animation or in CG.

In all animation, if it's done quickly, you'll know it. And if you're very slow and careful with it, it's going to look a little more beautiful. It's just compressing time into seconds.

What's kind of wonderful about being the voice in an animated film is you're a small part of an enormous production. And in a way, you get to remain a little bit objective.

In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part.

'Cars' has been a godsend. I mean, I get paid to talk into a mic. Honestly, I had no idea it would become as big as it did. When I first got the part of Mater, it was actually a small part. I did the voicing for it, though, and the animators liked it so much they rewrote the original script so that Mater could be in it more.

I tended toward animated material that wasn't just for kids. I could tell as a kid watching those shows that I loved the jokes that I got but I also loved the jokes I didn't get because I felt that I was hanging out with a smarter, cooler audience.