Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Jennifer Yuh Nelson

I want a space for people to feel safe and be creative. Actors want it, too. They want to feel like they're listened to, and they're safe to experiment.

Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!

Every movie goes through that U-shape where you start with 'Oh that's a great idea. I love it.' Everything's possible and then you face 'Oh, we can't do that, and that's impossible, and that's a bad choice.' You go the practicality of it. And then you come up to 'Great.' But that middle part is when you don't have results yet.

I'm not aggressive by nature and it was tough for me to make the transition to directing.

I like to draw, and my drawings are what yell and scream for me.

I'm not necessarily a huge fan of YA movies. I haven't watched a lot of them.

I'm a very soft-spoken person. I don't throw furniture. I don't throw tantrums.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

I like action. It's not typical, but it's a passion.

I don't think about the gender thing very much. But when I speak at schools, I've had female students say to me afterwards, "I never envisioned myself being a director, since I've never seen women do it." But after seeing me, they can picture themselves directing, so maybe we'll see more female directors.

My producer for the first 'Kung Fu Panda' movie, Melissa Cobb, is an amazing woman. She's supersmart and helps push everyone - male, female, anyone - to do their best.

The great thing about computer animation is that all of those environments exist as three-dimensional worlds, so these VR worlds already exist.

If you have a movie that doesn't strive to go to a certain emotional point, you can do anything and it will be fine and funny. But if you have something pretty emotional at its core, you have to make it right. You don't want it overwrought or unearned. Everything has to be moving towards this one thing.

I've been asked about the glass ceiling a lot, and I don't think of myself as some kind of crusader going around smashing glass. I don't feel like I had to - and that is a very, very strong flag showing the people around me made it, so I didn't have to.

I've been watching things like 'Master of the Flying Guillotine' since I was 5.

I think in the experience of growing up and realizing who you are, what your place in the world is can be quite scary.

Growing up, my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head, that I couldn't afford to actually do.

When you make a movie, it's just so personal and then you put it out in front of people and it becomes something else.

I only think in live action.

It's really helpful to have somebody to bounce off of and that will say, 'Yeah, that's a horrible idea. You shouldn't do it.'

I'm a hard-core geek.

Qing Cheng Mountain was a direct influence on the mysterious final shot of 'Kung Fu Panda 2.'

When we were first creating the look of 'Kung Fu Panda,' we wanted to pay tribute to the beautiful tradition and culture of China.

It's important to listen to the actor who is there on the stage and living it.

When people feel safe, they can come up with ideas.

If the actor doesn't feel it's right, that's when you say, 'OK, let's find something else.' It's then that you get the natural moment.

I always want to do a big finale.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

There aren't a lot of female story artists, and it's baffling to me. There are a lot of kids in school that are female and I wonder, 'Where did they all go?' People have brought it up, asking me, 'What did you do?' I don't really know. I puttered along, did my thing and gender has really never been an issue.

You have to figure out how you can step forward and affect your own life. I think that sense of empowerment is actually really positive, specifically for the young generation because they've been bystanders in their own lives for a while.

I walk into a room, and people see me as a director, not a woman.

I like action movies, and I prefer to watch a bad Hong Kong action movie to just about anything else.

Going into live action, the perception I had was that to be a director, you had to be loud, you had be physically fit, wear cool hats, have a beard, and yell, 'Action!' really loud. And I'm none of those things.

I couldn't imagine screaming 'Action!' on an outdoor set over a wind machine or whatever.

I think the idea of a distant, far off dystopia, where the world is completely different from what we have now, is good, but it's been done. Especially in YA movies.

I don't believe in overcooking the actors too much. Especially when it's a real performance that I'm looking for.

One of my favorite things about the Kung Fu Panda 3 is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that's the mistake. Because we're never going for full realism - for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren't going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real.

You have to make sure that people are still motivated and happy and creatively challenged so that it can all be stitched together. The voice acting starts after a lot of the storyboards are done.

Aside from that i’m an introvert and i’m a quiet person. The benefit of that is I listen. It’s not like my mouth is open and I broadcast everything and i’m drowning everyone out. When I’m listening to the incredible artists I work with and i’m hearing their specialised advice on what they would do with something then we can, all together, as a big collaborative group, all work together to achieve something together.

You're right, we both have been working on these films [Kung Fu Panda] forever and we know these characters so well that literally we will react to the same note in the same way. We will have the same answer most of the time.

If you only do what you can do, you'll never be more than you are now.I never thought i'd be where I am now, but the fact that I am is pretty cool.

Tigress is my alternate personality, especially with children. I love animation because you get to do things you don't normally get to.

When you see all of the pandas in this movie [Kung Fu Panda 3], they are rolling because that is exactly what they do. Not only were we able to watch the pandas play but we had free range to walk around and get a feel for the architecture and get a sense of where they lived ,so there's a lot of firsthand exploration.

I think we had to push forward to make sure it was different, do something that we had never done before and yet still have the consistency to stay in the same world. This was our chance to do all the things we didn't get a chance to do before. We've been working on these movies [Kung Fu Panda] for twelve years and we have to keep things exciting for us in order for us to devote that many years of our lives to do this.

As I said, i'm very quiet, i don't go around saying "I'm awesome!" but when I brought in my portfolio into DreamWorks and showed them what I could do, my art style is a lot wilder than I am.

Po's [Kung Fu Panda] unending enthusiasm is something we wish we could have. We can't help but root for him because of his geek energy.

It's like being the general of an army [directing a film]. You send people out to die.

We went to a remote Panda Base which was insane because inside there were several cribs which held about twenty baby pandas. They were all different sizes and they were all lying there in a long row. It was so cute, I could hardly stand it. I wanted to take them all home with me.

We go for our own reality. I remember some of our guys saying it is way harder to make stylized art directed explosions of jade rather than a regular explosion of shrapnel.

I think the best thing I have is the introvert's ability to listen when you're working on something as complicated as this and you have to really be aware of everyone's specialized skills.

I think more than being a woman is the fact that i'm an introvert. In the environment I work in people forget that i'm a woman which is wonderful it just shows what a wonderful environment i work in, no one treats me differently. They don't think that because i'm a woman i'll make decisions differently.

The story in that particular spot was an ancient history story, and we wanted to give it a historical feeling, which was why we used a historical calligraphy scroll come to life.

We actually tried to put in [Kung Fu Panda 3] all the things we wanted to put into the first two films. We're all the same people who've been working on the other films and we all had things we couldn't do, and had to leave on the table. We just couldn't achieve them before. This time we have multiple new environments and different styles of animation.

We have those new environments [during Kung Fu Panda 3] that give a scale to the movie, that are the spirit realm and the panda village. The spirit realm, having no gravity, having this massive space, allowed us to do huge action shots. All that we just couldn't do before. We just couldn't get the scale, we'd have to cheat them. This time we found ourselves more free.

8 year old young girl came up to me when I went to speak at an elementary school, and she gave me a drawing. It was great and she said "I want to be just like you when I grow up and direct movies". And that just made me choke up. It was so cute, and the reason why she's looking at me is I look like her.

The hidden village was something we found when we went to research in China we climbed a mountain in the Sichuan province where the panda sanctuary is based, and we climbed to this beautiful, mist-covered, almost primordial place and when we turned these corners these moss covered old buildings would come into view, revealing themselves and it was so beautiful and so unlike anything we'd seen that we literally took those moments and put them into the film [Kung Fu Panda 3].

I think it's because Po [from Kung Fu Panda] is such a geek, and he is so relatable. He is so excited by life and is excited to learn new things. I think that accessibility is something that we all can relate to, there are so many things we wish we could do but don't have the means to achieve it.

Sometimes, you just have to go in there and bowl people over with your sheer force of will.

Lots of people support me and I forget. But sometimes things happen and I remember, and they say I encourage them, it makes me feel very happy.

As quiet as I am I find it amazing I can stand in front of hundreds of people now and make a speech because i've had to do it so much. I've so much support from the people around me that I can achieve something like that, crazy introvert that I am, I never would have thought that would happen.