Top 33 Animator Quotes

Luckily, I went to school at CalArts, and then ended up here at Disney, starting in the Animation Building and working my way up. I started as an animator, and then did character designing and storyboarding, and eventually, directing.

All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.

When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what’s happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what’s happening.

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it’s known today, and I’ve been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

Literally overnight, I became an animator… and one that was well-known.

I’ve always wanted to be an animator. That’s an ultimate art form, right there.

At one point, I was hell-bent on being a Disney animator, and sort of got over that in college and wanted to do my own stuff. You know, towards the end of college I had actually planned to go to the Boston Conservatory of Music for musical theater.

It’s a different way of getting across an emotion. You’re trying to get it across to the animator because the animator is inspired by the voicetrack in terms of how to animate the character.

My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.

‘In-between’ is sort of – an animator does the key poses. He’ll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.

I’m a big fan of pantomime storytelling, being an animator.

Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.

You need pencil miles to be a great artist, animator, or filmmaker, and the sooner you start making mistakes, the quicker you learn.

Mike Judge is very specific about how people look in his projects, and I think it’s because he’s an animator.

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There’s a solitary aspect to animating… It’s ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

I am an animator. I feel like I’m the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I’m rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.

I’ve always drawn, for example, and I did consider when I was younger, it was either do I become an actor or do I become an animator cartoonist at that point. Do I work at Disneyworld or something and do animated cells or something?

I’m writing a movie script about vampires with an animator called Michael Booth.

Disney was not a good animator, he didn’t draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.

To have a film where there’s an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that’s one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it’s not very pleasant to draw evil figures.

If I hadn’t gone into acting, then I would have perhaps become an animator.

When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn’t draw well enough.

Short films really helped me develop as a story teller, animator, and as a director.

In college, I was a cartoonist at ‘The Daily Northwestern.’ So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that ‘Star Wars’ came out.

I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.

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.

I love being able to bring an animator’s vision to life and give the breath to the voice of a character.

I was an animator for a while early on, but a 2D animator.

Honestly, every person, every individual has a process, and my philosophy, whether it’s an actor or an animator, is you try to understand the process that person has so you can get the most out of them, but I think you have to sort of manipulate that process with honesty.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I’m not very verbal – I definitely do it through pictures.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

This new generation of animators was trained in CG. They know all the fundamentals of any 2D animator, but a lot of them learned on these CG rigs. You give them a good rig, and they can make that thing sing.