Top 155 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Animators

To me, that's where memories are very interesting because what happens when we start losing memories? What happens when you can't take your memories with you? Who are we without our memories, without our past?

I guess for major film industry players a film is a money making devise, so using formulas assures them that their investment will have returns. A lot of big studio films are created by formulas and committees, stripping away any individuality or personality from the work so that they could appeal to most everyone on there planet but to no one in particular.

The world doesn't learn about God by watching Christian movies. The world learns about God by watching Christians.

If you are offered the opportunity to do something that you don’t know how to do – say yes, dive in and do it anyway.

Evangelion is like a puzzle, you know. Any person can see it and give his/her own answer. In other words, we're offering viewers to think by themselves, so that each person can imagine his/her own world. We will never offer the answers, even in the theatrical version. As for many Evangelion viewers, they may expect us to provide the 'all-about Eva' manuals, but there is no such thing. Don't expect to get answers by someone. Don't expect to be catered to all the time. We all have to find our own answers.

You don't expect everyone out there watching to believe that this cartoon is real, that this drawing has really come to life. But on some level, you do. You try to cast a spell. You want the world to feel real. It's a nerdy pursuit.

I do think it's good to remember that childish things are made for children, and that, however pleasantly lurid the promise of a return to the clarity of childhood may be, an infatuation with the childish reveals only that one has failed to grow past it.

I don't know what I'd do with my life if it wasn't for animation.' I guess I would be an artist, or do something with animals. I have a passion for animals. Maybe I would've become a veternarian.

I grew up on Shane movie and my mother loves it and I've watched it hundreds of times.

You’re not supposed to animate drawings. You’re supposed to animate feelings.

If you endeavor to achieve, it will happen given enough resolve. It may not be immediate, and often your greater dreams are something you will not achieve within your own lifetime. The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death.

In the States, you have the First Amendment. People feel the freedom to speak and the right to be heard. And they kind of push the message: "It's a free country." Everybody has the right to say whatever they want to say. But in the Middle East, culture is your guide. You have to ask, is it culturally okay to say something like that? Is it culturally okay, for example, to show a woman giving birth? As Arabs watching such a scene in an American film it's okay, but when it comes to the Arabic context, we're like, "How dare you?" So it's how you present it.

I really admire visual storytelling that shows you what's happening, instead of tells you what's happening. I think it really forces the filmmaking to be very clear.

Your side of the boat is sinking!

Ohana means family - no one gets left behind and no one is ever forgotten.

As technology advances, the rendering time remains constant.

Actually, I don't really draw that well. It's just that I don't stop trying as quickly. I keep at it. I happen to have high standards and I try to meet them. I have to struggle like hell to make a drawing look good.

I didn’t even know I could write music, but somehow Walt did. He tapped my hidden talents.

To my crew: Please be reasonable and do it my way. The Captain

Everything in the world has a spirit which is released by its sound.

How sweet to move at summer's eve By Clyde's meandering stream, When Sol in joy is seen to leave The earth with crimson beam; When islands that wandered far Above his sea couch lie, And here and there some gem-like star Re-opes its sparkling eye.

I'd love to start some movements. What I'm tired of is irony, and sarcasm, and music/movies/what have you, not having the guts to mean anything.

You have to leave the window open for better classes to come along as you go. You can't grow too proud of your script. You have to let the thing shape itself. It guarantees the best classes will always be used and it also keeps you from going braindead. If you grow bored and uninspired working on something, the audience will be able to tell.

Characters in animation do not cheat. They do not let you go for another. Animation is on certain points, very close to the pornography industry. All your physical needs are met. You can watch different animations and find anything you desire.

When industry people see something different they don't know what to do with it, so filmmakers who make films about women, they kind of fall through the cracks. If a woman filmmaker makes film about war, like [Kathryn] Bigelow, they say "Okay, this is a war film, it has ninety percent men in it, we know what to do with it." But then she still gets attacked for not doing it properly. [...] But even though it bothers me I don't want to dwell on the sex and gender thing.

I usually get involved in the interviews about the animators and the filmmaking in general, because I had a chance. I got to know, not only Marc Davis, but Frank Thomas, Artie Johnson, Ward Kimball, all these great animators, and just ask them all these questions about how they did certain things, what their trials and errors were, the ups and downs.

VeggieTales is something that, on paper, makes no sense at all. It is a series of children's videos where limbless, talking vegetables act out Bible stories. Try raising money with that pitch.

There will always be stories that require a feature-length format, and there will always be stories that will be told in short-form.

Beware of your dreams. They can become misplaced lovers. They can become idols.

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.

If you are drawing a blank, or are having a hard time drawing a certain thing, then it is because you have not studied it enough.

People are who they are by the way they react to things.

Think you can't write women? Don't. Write people and make them women.

When I do only images, people don't connect with the images because the images are too weird to understand. But when I explain the weird images with straight words, then all of a sudden there is a tension between the two that the audience wants to see.

I went to the archives to see what Dumbo work there was, not for current film, but just for my love of animation. And I couldn't believe all the artwork the guys had done to find this universal empathy to Dumbo. There was one drawing where they used his ears as a sign: "Eat at Joes!" These guys were continually searching and digging to see what that is.

I wanted draw the cartoon characters, and then it all started to make sense as I was watching these classics come back to the theater like Lady and the Tramp and so forth. If you want to animated the dog, you have to know where the ribcage is and the hip bone and all that.

The messages our kids receive from teachers, coaches--and even, with the best intentions, from us - can push them toward pride or despair...toward self-righteousness or self-hatred.

So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing.

Sometimes people think if someone has depression, that person must be a broken Mormon. We believe that righteousness is happiness, but what happens when people are righteous and they're not happy?

Both the writing and the visuals in that sense are very exploratory. It goes back to my rule for myself [in] making it.

Believe in your character. Animate (or write) with sincerity.

The easiest way to create awareness is through fashion.

By using formula in filmmaking we are admitting that film is not art.

I tend to think of all new voices as a potential for failure, and all the people I've worked with before as the greatest potential for success.

I have decided that I want animation to be taken seriously; that is the goal of my life. I believe that animation is a very important medium to tell stories, not just for kids but for adults.

No matter what decade science fiction comes from, it's representing the present.

To be animating at the same time, it's the ultimate freedom in filmmaking because you can literally put anything on the screen that you can imagine.

It's one of those things that if I was smart enough to explain it in words, I wouldn't have had to make a movie "World Of Tomorrow" out of it. It's a love letter to science fiction.

God is not calling us to work for Him. He is calling us to walk with Him.

Once an audience feels that you trust them like you trust a friend, they do become your friends.

It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.

Pixar makes movies that make sense for Pixar, and Disney makes movies that make sense for Disney, and they've each emerged in their own unique way.

I try not to think of myself as a woman filmmaker. I don't look for women influences. I have noticed in the past few years that there is a certain ceiling that a woman filmmaker can reach. I don't believe that it's sexism per se, but there are certain expectations in the industry about what films should be, how they should be made, what stories they should tell, and it's a habit, it's a tradition.

I still have the same outlook on things that I did 10, 20 years ago. As an animator, there’s no career path that you can follow; there’s very few people doing this that you can look to and pinpoint the mistakes. It hasn’t changed since I was little. You have interests and follow them and strange things happen, organically or not.

I believe the human spirit is indomitable.

I frequently run into this, where I genuinely feel like - and this is not just my head cold talking right now - I often, and this is going to sound weird, but I often feel like the guy who makes these movies is smarter than me. Smarter than the guy on the phone right now.

I'll have a sentence in my head that's kind of beautiful and interesting, but I'm not sure why or where it's coming from. So it's kind of funny, because when people point out patterns or themes, it's the exact opposite of my film school experience.

I have friends and illustrators who can't stand drawing on the Cintiq. [A graphic pad tablet used by digital animators] There's a certain tension and friction when you draw on paper that they miss. The tablet is very slick. It's like drawing on glass. But that didn't bother me at all.

There's more than one way to be a girl

Telling the complete story of VeggieTales would require much more time than we have before us tonight. Since this is Yale, I decided to craft a shorter version of the story, using very large words. Remembering though that I was kicked out of Bible College before I'd had a chance to learn many very large words, I concluded that my only remaining option was to tell the story simply, using simple words, and chance the consequences.