Words matter. These are the best Animators Quotes from famous people such as Andy Serkis, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Bakshi, John Musker, Henry Selick, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve been told that some guy wrote something like, ‘Andy Serkis does everything, animators do nothing.’ Of course I never in a million years said that, wouldn’t ever say that. It’s not within my understanding of filmmaking to ever say anything like that.
The animators are absolutely extraordinary. It’s mind-boggling.
I animated 20 years at Terry Toons. It’s important to know that animators like pizza and a raise once in a while, and you’ve got to treat them with love.
Too many of Disney animators, and a lot try to emulate Disney, are trying to hit what they call quality levels. They’re boring mannerisms.
I saw ‘Sleeping Beauty’ when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring these things to life.
I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators – people like myself – love it so much that we’re always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.
I was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.
People used to want to be filmmakers and animators; now they want to make apps.
People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don’t have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there’s this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.
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 mean, we make a 15-minute show that’s incredibly silly, even though all of our scenic designers, puppet builders. animators, everybody that works on the show take their work very seriously. So somebody saying that we’d even be in contention for a very respectable award is really nice.
As far as doing a TV special, I would have to be in control of it. I’d want my own team of animators to work on it.
I was at Disney for about four years, so I made good friends there. It was a time of not a lot of creativity. It was the end of the first great era, with a few of the original animators. They called them the Nine Old Men. I learned a lot from them, but it wasn’t going to be a future home for me.
Sometimes you’re talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.
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.
I just want to make sure that I give the animators everything they need, so they have plenty of choices to match their animation.
I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.
I’m always impressed with the work of animators. You have to be able to draw the scenes in between movements. I’m impressed with the way they can do that – I don’t think I could.
We use shorts at the studio extensively to develop talent. I always love to give opportunities for young story people, animators, layout people something like that to take the next step up in their career and try things out.
There’s always kids who become stop motion animators. I get stuff all the time. They put it on YouTube. It’s exciting to see.
My livelihood depends on the art of animators.
Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.
My respect for animation has gone way up. It’s a truckload of work. I have to sit with my animators the same way I’d sit with my actors and cast them.
There is an animated version of ‘Lazer Team,’ with all the action sequences, that exists. It’s a pre-visual fidelity, and the voice acting is terrible because it’s one of our animators doing it. But we could sit there and watch what the scene is supposed to look like while we’re doing individual shots.
The ‘Aladdin’ thing – that’s not work; that’s just fun. Three days in the recording studio going mad, then the animators do all the work. Not a bad way to cash a large check, my friend.
I think living things can recognize the movement of other living things, and all the best animators in the world can’t quite capture that something.
In performance capture roles, it’s not a committee of animators that author the role, it’s the actor. I think that’s a significant thing for people to understand.
The animators working with these 3D models, they’re artists, right? They’re great at what they do. They’re artful in how they move characters about.
In animation, the directors are part of a huge team of animators who all have opinions, too. It’s a much more democratic process. Also, the animation executives oversee things more.
The era of ‘The Jungle Book’ was when the animators were at the top of their game and their sense of character was great.
If you take a regular animated film, that’s being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.
One day, I was taken into a room with 25 animators, all working on Sadness. They asked me a lot of questions, and they got something of the way I move into the character.
My respect for animators and animation directors has gone way, way up and it is just not something you can phone in.
I’m in the early stages of a film called ‘Freezing Time’ about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.
In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they’re working on. They work collaboratively.