A Quote by Bill Watterson

In a comic strip, you can suggest motion and time, but it's very crude compared to what an animator can do. I have a real awe for good animation. — © Bill Watterson
In a comic strip, you can suggest motion and time, but it's very crude compared to what an animator can do. I have a real awe for good animation.
You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.
'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.
I came in with a very specific idea about what a Doctor Strange movie should be, which was rooted in the comics, and I thought it should be as weird and as visually ambitious compared to modern comic book movies as the comic was when it showed up in the '60s compared to other comic books at the time.
Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.
I went into Hollywood and met Mike Aarons and went to Grantray-Lawrence Animation to work on the, by today's standards, extremely cheap and crude Marvel superheroes cartoons which basically consisted of taking stacks of the comic book art, taking parts of the art, pasting it down, extending it down into drawings and occasionally a new piece of art to bridge the comic book panels and limited animation and lip movement.
Sometimes people try to read into my strip and find out what my state of mind is. And I can say if I'm in a good mood, generally the comic strip starts out in a good mood, but the punchline is very negative and sour.
Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!
Charles Schultz is a really interesting case. He wrote that comic strip and drew it himself from beginning to end, and it's a work of genius. It's very simply drawn, but it has some really deep emotions that you don't expect in a silly-looking comic strip.
Motion comics are a medium all their own. It is certainly not animation, in which a large number of artists do tens and even hundreds of thousands of drawings. The animation, or 'the reality,' is created in a computer, and the work of the original artist is the work. Nor is it a comic book. You can't turn the pages. You can't read the dialogue.
Animation is so much work! I don't know if I have the skills to really hack that. Maybe as storyboard artist or something like that. But you have to go to school to be an animator. I can't just pop behind the animator's table and be like, "Here I am.".
The comic strip is what I looked at, and it's another reason I did it. The comic strip, where animals would comment on human behaviour, interested me.
I really love animation as a storytelling medium, whether it's traditional, cel animation, or CG, or stop motion, which is more our studio's area of focus. But I find that the creatives behind any kind of animation are typically very similar, and so regardless of what aesthetic they use to realize their vision, I'm usually pretty into it.
The surprising thing was, it's actually easier working on animation than working on a comic strip, because Garfield is animated in my head.
I love all sorts of animation, probably the most beautiful would be the tradtional hand drawn animation that Disney is known for. Stop-motion has a certain "grittieness" and is filled with imperfections, and yet their is an undeniable truth, that what you see really exits, even it if is posed by hand, 24 times a second. This truth is what I find most attractive about stop-motion animation.
Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two.
First of all, computer animation is certainly a tremendous and viable medium today. But the warmth and personality derived from 2-D animation, in my opinion, cannot be surpassed. Certain stories lend themselves well to 3-D animation and I won't labor this with naming them, but in my bones, I still respond more emotionally to the artists feel in 2-D. You feel the 'actor' in the animator more personally...it's hard to explain.
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