Top 155 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Animators - Page 2

You always have to be available for people, and you have to be clearly stating what you want to see, in so many disciplines, all at the same time.

One of the first things was I made Arlo [the Apatosaurus] a younger character. And then when I was that age (around 11 or 12), what was I like? Sweat pants, turtle-neck kid; didn't know anything about fashion or style, the culture of the world. I was very sheltered.

I thought of the character being real, a living person, not a drawing.

All problems in computer graphics can be solved with a matrix inversion.

The book that influenced me most is Sherlock Holmes, which teaches you the way to deal with reality: to deduct. It teaches you to put together the signs. For example, I look at a person and I see their coat, their jacket, their handwriting, their iPhone, and I am able to deduct some details about who they are, what they wear, and what they do. For many years I was fascinated with Sherlock Holmes. The series trained me to look at the world through these sharp, unforgiving eyes.

There's really no reason film and digital can't happily co-exist and benefit from one another. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something.

Like every normal person, I hate my voice. And I am not the only one who hates my voice. The voiceover gets a lot of strong reactions. A lot of people love it, and a few people truly hate it and pronounce the films are unwatchable because of my Latvian accent. But it also has a certain level of theatricality, and everything is important for a manic character.

At one point, I animated villains in our stories, a bear or a giant, then on The Little Mermaid Ariel just called to me and I started to fall in love with characters who had that burning desire inside of them, this hope.

There's an image of Rapunzel free, flying in the air, as a sunburst, which says so much. This is a girl who has to get out and bless the world.

I realized I’m not supposed to be pursuing impact, I’m supposed to be pursuing God. And when I pursue God I will have exactly as much impact as He wants me to have.

For me, drawing is the greatest joy. Animation is never as good as when I'm sitting at that desk drawing. Even when it's up on the screen, it's never as wonderful as those moments when it's drawn, to me.

Maybe the most annoying questions is: "Where do you see yourself in so many years?" It's a terrifying answer no matter how you think of it.

If you go to a film festival and watch a bunch of features and then watch a bunch of shorts, you will almost always find that the shorts are where people are taking more risks and pushing more boundaries...simply because they have much less to lose.

Never let anyone tell you that something is impossible.

Tuesday's coming, did you bring your coat?

Most people's personalities and roles are locked by the time they're nine or 10. I think there's something to that.

The design is a really flat primary color with all sorts of abstract geometric shapes, just implying something. And then you'd have your characters running from something with guns. It was very expressionistic.

What inspires me is when I see something and I say, "I can do that too!"

It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.

With my personal work I prefer not to work from storyboards because being a director, producer and animator in one person I don't have to communicate my idea to anyone else, I can keep the feeling of the story, the story arc and structure in my head.

There can be no formula in arts. Formulas are for factory mass productions. There are no discoveries in already discovered formulas.

I would never jump under a subway car because that would delay all the people behind me. How inconsiderate!

I love sight gags and broad stuff, but you can get to such a subtle degree, especially with CG animation.

Eva is a story of repetition. It is a story where our protagonist faces the same situation many times over and determinedly picks himself back up again. It is a story of the will to move forward, even if only a little. It is a story of the resolve to want to be together, even though it is frightening to have contact with others and endure ambiguous loneliness. I would be most gratified if you found enjoyment in these four parts as it takes the same story and metamorphoses it into something different.

Nobody wants to see the truth. Everybody wants to have the fantasy. When I look back at the books I was reading in my childhood were selling some sort of fantasy as well. Most stories are not going to tell the deep suffering of every day. No book prepared me for the suffering I would experience in life because the word "suffering" does not even describe what the suffering is. No story is going to tell you that, and no words can tell you that.

I give away wheelchairs to people who need them because they're expensive and not everybody can afford one. So I figured why not raise funds to buy the chairs and improve people's ability to get around.

Have you ever been tempted to start your own business? First read this cautionary tale, especially if you think your ideas come from God.

Placing blame in marriage is like saying, 'Your side of the boat is sinking.'

I do love improvisation, I love when I find an object in my studio or kitchen (look, a tea sample's tiny glass jar!) and instantly incorporate it in a project. It makes me feel creative on an every day basis.

If an audience finds themselves paying attention to how you made your film, you're sunk because that means they're unplugged from your story. What matters is what's unfolding on the screen, not how you put it there. It doesn't matter if it's red triangles or million dollar software if the audience doesn't care.

Don't animate drawings, animate feelings.

The effort you put forth to anything transcends yourself, for there is no futility even in death.

The most important thing is not the work I can do for God. The most important thing is to make God the most important thing.

Usually the more money that something takes to make, the less interesting it's forced to become.

I'm still learning. I've never done a digital project before. And I'm pretty sure I did things to the software that weren't supposed to be done.

The shapes and markings of Felix and Mickey, perhaps more than Oswald, have similarities, but when you are using such simple basic construction (i.e. circles) there is bound to be such duplication.

To me everyone goes through that at some point in adolescence, you know. There's - you meet someone when you're a young teenager, and they're never right for you, and you always wind up hurting someone on the way to figuring out all this stuff. But it was a fun writing process.

I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I think I was six or seven when I learned how to read, and I still remember it.

I guess I'm interested in the behind-the-surface feelings of the human condition, in my own way. I was always struck by the gap - at least in the books I was reading - between what people tell stories about and what I actually feel. I started thinking about a gap between fantasy and reality.

Even if you have a gift, it's nearly impossible to become a good actor in just a few weeks of training.

I define art as a work created by a human that has a unique point of view and discovers something that was not there before.

An odd outlook on life is the beginning of good comedic writing.

The fantastical images in my works are descriptive in a different way - a metaphorical way - that removes you from reality. Then, this visually removed point of view allows you to deal with a very heavy subject.

The use of 'conspiracy theory' as a derogatory - as an epithet almost - is something the propagandists have perfected over the decades, and it's a useful tool for eliminating articulate dissent and other points of view, and information that might be inconvenient for a policy agenda.

When you get questions that annoy you the art is answering them differently. If you're bored with it, then everyone will be bored with it.

Fighting a cold, but I'm powering through. As they say, there's nothing better for a cold than doing interviews all day.

I looked back at the previous 10 years and realized I had spent 10 years trying to convince kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity. And that was a pretty serious conviction. You can say, 'Hey kids, be more forgiving because the Bible says so,' or, 'Hey kids, be more kind because the Bible says so!' But that isn't Christianity, it's morality.

You can make a little thing feel like a big thing. To me, it's all tone. Tone is the most important thing in the world. Then character, then story, or something like that.

I'm a bit of a weird creature... I'm self taught and went to a regular film school, not art school, and I think it's unusual for somebody to approach animation from that angle. In a sense I've sometimes consclassered myself more of a filmmaker who just happens to animate.

I think it is valuable to be poked at and I think - and this is obviously where things are headed. It's going to be much harder to be a Christian in America ... which means to be a Christian you actually have to think it's worth it. You actually have to think it through, you actually have to process it.

You're an idiot. Study harder.

Fairly early in life, I noticed my brain was weird. By that I mean that I noticed it had a way of looking at normal things from a slightly twisted angle - just twisted enough that it often made me chuckle.

Traditionally, digital projects, when you project them, they get really washed out. It's complicated stuff with gamma, but basically your blacks get very milky and the colors get very weak, and we made so many different versions of it to just pump more color into it, so it would look just as good in the theater as it does on your screen at home. And color was my constant whine. It needed to be very oversaturated.

The [character] that I was able to crawl into the most was Lilo from Lilo & Stitch. This was sort of a cartoony-looking girl, but her problems were completely real. Her funky world that she createdI mean, you know kids like that. It was very honest and genuine and I wanted to do an honest job, so I thought about the character a lot before I animated it. I really got into the character, where [I] almost felt that pain that she had. The loss of the parents - you need to feel all that. That was a big learning experience for me.

Fundamentally, Eva is just my life copied out onto film. I'm [still] alive, so the story hasn't finished.

Time travel is a thing. It can be very dangerous, and it's also very - it's an expensive thing to do.

This ambiguity is another example of a growing problem with mathematical notation: There aren't enough squiggles to go around.

I animated everything traditionally, on paper. I love how the texture of paper looks (it also matches textures of papier-mâché) and I love the tactile process.

Storyboards are kind of inflexible, once you finish making them you have to stick to them. Since animation takes such a long time you become a slave to a storyboard that was created four years ago while as an artist and storyteller you change, you have new ideas.

The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn’t have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that’s what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children.