To direct a genuinely animated film, you’re really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.
I remember when I first came around, the computer-generated stuff was pretty wicked. I was like, ‘Wow!’ but I feel like then for the longest time, we saw so much of it, after a while, you might as well just be watching an animated movie.
As a kid, I just loved cartoons. And as the credits went by, I’d study those names and then try to figure how I could get hired to do what Mel Blanc and Daws Butler did. Create all of these great voices for animated characters.
It is so gratifying for me the degree to which the Minions have been embraced. It’s almost unprecedented in the CG animated world. It’s amazing. That’s really all a creator hopes for, that their characters grow beyond them. It’s like Darth Vader and Batman. They’ve gotten bigger than their creators.
My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some ’70s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement.
In some ways, ‘The Little Mermaid’ was old-fashioned. Rendered in the hand-drawn style, it was the last Disney animated feature to use cels and Xeroxing. Pixar and its CGI imitators soon made that rigorous process obsolete.
Some of the top grossing movies now are children’s animated features, they’re making more money than action movies. And you’d never find a Hollywood A-lister years ago doing voice-overs for those films and they do now. You know why? Because everybody’s got a price.
‘Inside Out’ – that was a really good movie. That’s the first animated movie I saw since ‘The Lego Movie.’
As a mother, I’ve seen a lot of animated movies, and, I’ve got to say, there’s so much crap out there for children.
Historically, there’s been a degree of sameness to animated films.
I was raised a socialist by two very socialist parents, and I still feel very animated about socialist principles.
I believe in 3D for certain kinds of films. I certainly believe in using 3D for all things in animation because animation has such clarity and so much depth of focus. It worked great with ‘Avatar’ because 70 percent of that film is animated.
The best way for a beginner to write for animation is to closely watch animated films, then read the screenplays for them afterwards.
Seth MacFarlane, he’s kind of an entertainment Everyman. He loves musicals, he loves joke-driven comedies, and animated stuff. He likes comedy-comedy.
Animated editorial cartoons are completely different from static editorial cartoons.
I haven’t had Botox because my face is a bit lopsided and I depend on keeping everything animated so that people don’t notice.
There’s something known as the Uncanny Valley where things look a little too real and you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at. It becomes weird like it did in ‘The Polar Express,’ where the eyes seem so realistic, and yet you know it’s animated.
I’ve always been very animated.
I think God must have had something in mind for me that was not on my radar when I first started out in New York. Back then, doing animated voices meant your career was done – it was looked down upon.
I read Pamela Colloff’s oral history about the campus shooting, ’96 Minutes,’ when it was first published, and my wheels immediately starting turning toward making a film and making it an animated re-telling.
I’d love to play Moon Knight. I don’t know if anybody’s doing a Moon Knight animated series any time soon.
‘The Jungle Book.’ It’s one of the best animated films ever. I saw it when I was small at a cinema in Tehran.
I founded an educational software company called Knowledge Revolution. We had the first fully animated physics lab on the computer. You could take ropes, pulleys, balls and anything else you’d use in your physics textbook and the program would allow you to build anything you can think of in a physics lab.
‘When Marnie Was There’ was the first animated film I’ve ever done.
The hardest thing to do with an animated movie is to not make it feel synthetic: to feel like it’s handmade, where you can sense the human hand in it.
He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.
I have agreed to lend my voice to Nature’s Guard, an animated series which hopefully will go into production in the near future. The characters are all animals. My voice will be for a character named Longtail.
I’ve always loved animation and animated films.
We’ve rewritten entire scenes and had them animated twelve hours before the show goes on the air. It’s not fun.
The surprising thing was, it’s actually easier working on animation than working on a comic strip, because Garfield is animated in my head.
My mother had no interest in cartoons. I remember thinking, ‘I am never going to grow into that person.’ Which is so ironic – now I get to work on ‘Family Guy’ and ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Futurama’, all of these great animated series! TV was my passion.
Doing voices in animated movies has been one of my dreams. You get to go and act, and you don’t have to put on makeup.
Postmodernism came nowhere close in quality to Modernism at its apogee, not least because that later style wholly lacked the social impetus that animated the designs most emblematic of the Modern Movement.
I think that ‘Family Guy’ is hysterical. It’s edgy and hip – and they can do whatever they want to do because it’s animated and they’re not limited by budget.
Whenever you do an animated project or a voice-over project it’s inevitable that part of your personality comes into play.
The cost of an animated film really comes down to man hours. If you gather together world-class talent, then the question becomes how do you deploy that talent in a way that minimizes waste.
Sometimes I feel I’m being animated, but it comes off differently. Unfortunately, I was cursed with these sleepy eyes.
Today a new sun rises for me; everything lives, everything is animated, everything seems to speak to me of my passion, everything invites me to cherish it.
The DC Universe animated made-for-videos are a great, specific opportunity to offer fans something that they might not have gotten otherwise; it’s also proven to be a great business for Warner Video and Warner Premiere.
With ‘Futurama,’ I was just worried that somebody would beat us to it; it seemed so obvious that there should be an animated science fiction show set in the future. And one of the reasons why it’s not, I learned, is that it’s really, really difficult.
One of the things that set us apart early on, as opposed to other animated shows, was the fact that ‘Bojack’ was continuous and serialized.
When you think about it, ‘Avatar’ is almost completely an animated movie.
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.
I do a lot of voice over for Japanese anime titles as well as live-action stuff and original stuff from the States. ‘Legion of Super Heroes,’ ‘New Wolverine: The X – Men’ animated series, ‘Afro Samurai’ and some live-action stuff, TV shows here and there – I like to mix it up.
As a species, we are most animated when our days and nights on Earth are touched by the natural world. We can find immeasurable joy in the birth of a child, a great work of art, or falling in love.
I do enjoy animated movies.
The entire economy relies on the suspension of disbelief. So does a fairy story or an animated cartoon. This means that no matter how soberly the financial experts dress, no matter how dry their language, the economy they worship can only ever be as plausible as an episode of ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’
For whatever reason, I think we have one type of animated movie and it’s so wrong. I want to do a drama, I want to do an action, a comedy. In live-action, there are all sorts of movies. There’s independent movies, big movies, action movies, funny movies, and for us we have one movie.
The idea of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ as an animated series made perfect sense to me.
I’m narrating the television series Biography. I’m still involved in my music – I have a new album out. I have an animated project in development. I’m writing a lot of things and you never know if one of them is going to become a six or seven year project.
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.
The animated books pay the lowest rates at the Big Two and you can forget about royalties.
I’m the least animated person I know. Even on stage, I just walk across it.
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.
The problem is, when you’re making an animated movie, the studio has an illusion in their minds – and it’s really not true – that because it’s a drawing, it can be changed at any time.
I don’t have a lot of stage antics. I don’t try to get attention through my animated body movements.
In ‘Bojack,’ at least at first, we had to couch some of the sadder or weirder or introspective stuff we were doing in the costume of a typical adult animated comedy. With ‘Undone,’ it felt like we’d outgrown that expectation.
