But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.
‘How To Train your Dragon 2’ is an amazing film. I think it’s an extraordinary film. The animation in it is fantastic.
Animation is very singular. Like, even the ‘Toy Story’ movies. People will go, ‘Oh, gosh, you’re so lucky, getting to play opposite Tom Hanks!’ And it’s, like, ‘It may have appeared to be that, but we were never in the room together.’
‘Toonami’ was a tremendous vehicle, delivering the art of Japanese animation to a massive audience that may have otherwise never experienced it. I feel an immense debt of gratitude to everyone involved with the show and to every fan who supported it.
Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the ’50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
When you do animation – well, straightforward animation, although it’s not straightforward – the voice for a character or something, they’re always singular experiences, really.
I don’t think I would want to do an animated movie because I’ve already made so many hours of animation that what’s the point? I’d want something new and weird to challenge me in a different way.
Animation has been ghettoized through the years by giving the impression we only do the same kind of stories.
The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.
I’m meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It’s more my problem than Hollywood’s. I’m not attuned to Hollywood.
Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at ‘The Simpsons’ – they never age, the baby never grows up – or ‘Peanuts’ – the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.
The nice thing about animation is that you can realise your inventions without understanding all the hard theory.
Yes, actually. Animation’s a very easy thing to watch on tour.
It’s not like the computer magically does it for you. Animation just takes forever.
When I was a kid, at Disneyland, they used to sell Animation Cels for $5.00 at a Fantasyland store. They were called Courvoisier Cels. I was too young to be aware of just how cool that really was.
I love classic animation, and I especially love classic cartoon music.
You’re going to get different kinds of animation for different kinds of audiences. Traditionally, adult animation has been for the young male audience. There’s no reason why that should be.
I’ve always been thinking in three dimensions, ever since I started working with computer animation in the early ’80s.
I think the No. 1 lesson I learned from ‘The Simpsons’ was just that animation could be as funny as live-action. That animation could be funnier than live-action. That animation didn’t have to just be for kids.
It’s weird – on almost every film I’ve worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.
We draw inspiration directly and indirectly from all sorts of things, like movies, documentaries, TV dramas, novels, non-fiction books, animation, science and nature shows, and our own life experiences.
You don’t have a face to work with, so your voice has to do all the work until you see the animation. So, a lot of it I had to pull back because it was too big.
I’m a true fan of animation, and it’s my livelihood.
I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends’ films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.
Back in the days before the Internet, there was no place to put a short film, so Mike Gribble and Spike Decker had this festival of animation. My student films got selected.
I’m interested in animation. I actually feel like I’ve learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.
A lot of people have helped me along the way. But you know the biggest thing for me was when computer animation came along.
I learned so much from my life as an actor, as a kid actor through being an adult actor, and then becoming a writer and producer and doing animation.
What I love most about animation is, it’s a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.
In live action, sometimes a mood or a feeling can go on for quite a while. Animation is a lot more effort. There are a lot more notes.
I was a film major with a concentration in animation.
I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.
All animation is a tremendous amount of work, but when you put ‘Star Wars’ on the top of something, there’s already this bar that people are going to put on it.
I’m really comfortable doing voice-overs, but it’s really fun to do animation. Those animation talents are hysterical. They’re so good, and they’re so amazingly quick on their feet.
I think Mike and I would absolutely love to do feature animation. Either another story, or it if worked out, one in the ‘Avatar’ world. We would be really excited.
Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There’s always cycles of good art.
My first movie I saw when I was a kid was ‘The Jungle Book.’ I was 5 years old, and I saw it in a movie theater. Seeing that movie really lit the fuse and ignited my passion for animation.
I love the idea of animation just because it removes the actor from the character, and you can be anything. I’ve been devouring ‘Adventure Time’ and ‘Archer.’ I’d love to get my hands dirty on either of those shows.
Animation is the only thing I ever wanted to do in my whole life. I have no desire for live-action or anything else.
My work is so unorthodox that from one panel to the next, the drawings are completely different… totally opposed to the way of working in something like animation, where every drawing has to look like the one before.
But probably for the last ten years or so, I’ve been fitting in animation work into my other projects.
Also, painting and animation are really solitary pursuits, so the collaborative aspects of music making and acting are pretty welcome sometimes.
On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back.
One reason for keeping Disney animation separate from Pixar was that by solving their own problems when they finished a film, Disney could say, ‘Nobody bailed us out; we did it.’ And it’s a very important social thing for them to do that.
The line between anime and regular animation is very difficult to cross, even for people who have been doing anime successfully for years.
Comics and animation have some of the deepest stories I’ve ever seen.
One of the big moments of my life was watching ‘Star Wars’ on its opening weekend in Hollywood. I was watching all these people enjoy this film, and I thought: animation can do this.
In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap – happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely.
I think with animation there’s a certain freedom that you’re given. You don’t have a thought at the back of your mind, that worry that you’ll have to cut and go back to the top of the scene. You’re not working with anyone else from the cast. It’s just you.
Animation translates well to a small screen. When you look at Walt Disney or Chuck Jones – you know, Bugs Bunny – there really isn’t any difference if you watch on a very big screen or a computer screen.
I had a job on a Spike TV show called ‘Fresh Baked Video Games.’ I was the animation producer/kind of a writer, but I couldn’t get anything through.
When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living.
Usually when I mention suspended animation, people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.
I get asked a lot if I’d want to get into live-action movies, and the answer, honestly, is ‘no.’ I’m an illustrator, and I think animation is an extension of that way of expressing myself. That’s not to say I’d never make a live-action movie, but I don’t strive for it.
If you look in the animal world, many, many organisms will enter into states of suspended animation.
Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
I was huge fan of most of the animated series growing up in the golden era of ’90s superhero animation. I didn’t care who was producing – it was much more about the specific heroes that I connected with.
And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.
