Top 60 Genndy Tartakovsky Quotes

I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to have something that is your own idea get produced and then become successful.

Humor is the hardest thing to do. Action is so much easier, because you’re just trying to establish the mood, and a pacing, and a rhythm, and an energy. Where, in humor, comedy is so subjective.

Boarding for me, like in the days of ‘Dexter,’ was really hard, because I couldn’t draw as well, and I had people around me who drew really well, so it was hard.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that’s humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

‘Samurai’ is not an animated show like you would normally watch on TV. We tell the stories from a different perspective – backward, very nonlinear. It treats it more seriously as an art form.

I’m a very happy, optimistic person.

I have been very fortunate for the most part of my career when it comes to support and trust.

I try not to be in my head too much, I just try to do what feels right.

We use music, cinematic storytelling and very stylized backgrounds to create mood and atmosphere as ‘Samurai Jack’ travels an exotic landscape. The environment is a major character in each show.

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.

I’ve always been in love with samurais, that kind of classic idea about a hero who has a sword with an intense skill and is very stoic and doesn’t talk much.

TV is all about schedule and budget, and you’re always fighting that.

I grew up in the ’70s, early ’80s as a kid, and when we first immigrated to this country I went to a 7-Eleven and for the first time in my life I saw… back in the day they had this little spinning comic book rack, and there were comic books and I was basically drawn to them.

I’ve always thought that maybe I need to do a live-action movie, have it make a lot of money, and then come back and have a bigger budget for animation and do more with that.

In 2-D, the way you draw defines you, but in CG the computer takes away your identity.

I was an immigrant when I came, and one of my biggest things was I really wanted to fit in. I didn’t want to be, ‘Oh, look at that guy;’ I wanted to be part of the crowd. Which is a weird thing, because the more successful I got, the more out of the crowd I became.

Going as far back as ‘Dexter’s Lab,’ we’ve always had these sequences with no dialogue. The interesting thing is those sequences got the biggest reactions.

The computer tends to equalize everything, all the movies are slowly blending together, the way they look.

For me, doing all the TV stuff and having the experience directing, knowing what you want to make is 90% of it. The rest of it is just guiding everybody on that one path. But, figuring out the path is the difficult part.

Through the years, I’ve developed a style or a language that I like, even when it applies to action. All my action principles are very similar to my cartoony principles, because all the poses want to be really strong.

Akira Kurosawa, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock were the main inspirations for ‘Samurai Jack,’ along with a lot of ’70s cinema.

If you look back at Disney’s ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ or ‘Pocahontas,’ animated films were trying to get more and more real before CG really arrived.

I’m not sure comics sustain mortgage, and the house, and three kids.

Jim Gaffigan is someone I’ve always been a fan of.

I didn’t want ‘Hotel Transylvania’ to be the nail in the coffin for cartoony animation. Because if the movie failed, I could see people blaming that aspect of it. I was really nervous about that.

Stories are important, but I’m really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that’s true success.

I remember seeing my first Disney film when I was 13 or 14. It was ‘Jungle Book,’ and I remember really falling in love with it.

I remember arguing with my dad to let me dress up to go to a Halloween party in seventh grade, but I never in my childhood went trick-or-treating.

Jazz flute’s funny. And I’m a big Latin music fan, Tito Puente, Tina Cruz, all that stuff.

I don’t like darkness in everything. I like my superheroes in primary colors, and fun.

You can never guess what a kid’s going to find funny – besides, you know, an obvious fart joke here and there.

There are so many sitcoms, especially in animation, that we’ve almost forgotten what animation was about – movement and visuals.

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.

Being a hardcore old-school comic book lover, it took me a while to accept the need for comic book movies.

Storytelling has changed. Shows like ‘Adventure Time’ have taken storytelling in a different direction.

I’ve done a lot of dance sequences because I like them; I like to animate dancing because it’s fun and visual.

There were so many amazing comic books. Like I was around for the original Frank Miller/Chris Claremont ‘Wolverine’ miniseries.

Luckily, as a director I can just tell people what I need and I don’t need to tell them how to get it.

It makes things very easy when the people you are working for have trust and believe in you and actually really like and respect your work.

If you have a character who wins all the time – well, if you have a character that loses and wins, it makes him more alive. Bugs Bunny, for example, didn’t always win.

There was a show I loved as a kid: ‘The Blue Falcon & Dynomutt.’

I love to have contrast.

One of the things I hate about TV for kids is that it conescends to them.

I love the way the long scenes feel – one of the characteristics of ’70s filmmaking is that you don’t cut around a lot; you let things play out. I did that on ‘Samurai Jack,’ and it carried over into ‘Clone Wars.’

With features, you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on production and marketing, so everybody’s panicked because you literally have an opening weekend to succeed.

I used to work until two in the morning every night, then still get up at six. Now, I have to help my daughter with her homework, spend time with my wife.

I’m super comfortable with TV, especially in my situation where I pretty much have 100% freedom. That’s the ideal, and I’ve been fortunate in TV to have pretty much everything I’ve done be at least somewhat successful.

I was really fortunate in my career where I always had executives who were very like-minded.

Well I grew up following most of the major titles like ‘Fantastic Four,’ ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Avengers,’ etc. But I had also a lot of love for the smaller titles like ‘Master of Kung Fu,’ ‘Black Panther,’ ‘The Defenders,’ ‘Inhumans,’ and of course Power-Man and Iron Fist.’

For me, I rarely go and see 3D movies because I feel like, when you’re wearing glasses, you’re aware that you’re in the theatre. And the whole thing for me with the movie experience is to be lost in the movie.

I really loved that old UPA stuff, like ‘Gerald McBoing-Boing’ and ‘Mr. Magoo.’ They were simple yet effective ‘toons that talked to everyone, not just kids.

Jack’ came from… I had the same dream since I was 10, about the world being destroyed and run by mutants. I’d find a samurai sword, pick up the girl I had a crush on, and we’d go through the land, surviving. That was the initial spark to ‘Samurai Jack.’

The one amazing thing about ‘Jack’ is that I did it in 2001, you know, and it still survived. There’s something about it that’s connected with people.

Trying to be a leader, you’ve got to be really sure of what you’re doing and you’ve got to guide people the right way.

The magic of ‘Jack’ is that it’s unique, there’s not a lot of stuff like it.

I’m a true fan of animation, and it’s my livelihood.

Doing simple flip books, I used to get such a kick out of it, just drawings and nothing else.

I feel like animation’s stagnant. There’s not much that’s trying to push the artform, and so, for me, I’m way too critical about it.

I don’t want to do animation to mimic reality. I want to push reality.

For me, I’m not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it’s easier and better to express a story through visuals.