Top 60 Animator Quotes & Sayings

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There's a solitary aspect to animating... It's ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

Being an animator, and I've directed tons of mo-cap, which really is about how do characters move through space.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.

There's always one sequence in every animated film that's the bane of every animator's existence.

Mike Judge is very specific about how people look in his projects, and I think it's because he's an animator.

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.".

You draw the character from all angles - side, profile, back, etc. so the animator has this character in all the ways it looks like.

I'm writing a movie script about vampires with an animator called Michael Booth.

At one point, I was hell-bent on being a Disney animator, and sort of got over that in college and wanted to do my own stuff. You know, towards the end of college I had actually planned to go to the Boston Conservatory of Music for musical theater.

I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.

I've been very lucky. I've had three separate careers: freelance illustrator, then set designer, puppetteer and animator, and now fine artist. I just bluffed my way into every one of 'em!

I've always wanted to be an animator. That's an ultimate art form, right there.

I decided I wanted to be a painter, and then that moved into wanting to be an animator. By adolescence, I just wanted it to be something that was important...something that would make a difference in people's lives or leave an imprint in history.

Mr. Miyazaki's specialty is taking a primal wish of kids, transporting them to a fantasyland, and then marooning them there. No one else conjures the phantasmagoric and shifting morality of dreams - that fascinating and frightening aspect of having something that seems to represent good become evil - in the way this master Japanese animator does.

Nine times out of ten, I'm trying to meet someone else's expectations, whether it's the director or the writer or the animator, when I go back in to re-record a line. I'm the icing on the cake, but the cake is the thing. I'm really just a hood ornament on a very solid vehicle.

You need pencil miles to be a great artist, animator, or filmmaker, and the sooner you start making mistakes, the quicker you learn.

Luckily, I went to school at CalArts, and then ended up here at Disney, starting in the Animation Building and working my way up. I started as an animator, and then did character designing and storyboarding, and eventually, directing.

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.

To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures.

Short films really helped me develop as a story teller, animator, and as a director.

I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.

An actor uses his body as a tool and an instrument. In the same way a musician plays an instrument, the actor uses his body to convey feeling and emotion. An animator uses a pencil or a computer to create the same thing, the same exact way... An actor is taking words that are not his own, and he has to bring some kind of authentic life to those words. It's the same goal, to create this authentic life. Even if it's a drawing, or if it's a cartoon, you're still trying to create authenticity because, if the character emotes authentically, it has a power to connect with the audience.

I've always wanted to be an animator. That's an ultimate art form, right there

I'm a big fan of pantomime storytelling, being an animator.

If I hadn't gone into acting, then I would have perhaps become an animator.

It's a different way of getting across an emotion. You're trying to get it across to the animator because the animator is inspired by the voicetrack in terms of how to animate the character.

Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.

Every animator is really an actor performing in slow motion, living the character a drawing at a time.

I love being able to bring an animator's vision to life and give the breath to the voice of a character.

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.

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.

In some ways we describe 'Boxtrolls' as 'Oliver Twist' if Terry Gilliam had made it. I think he's an extraordinary artist, and animator.

This new generation of animators was trained in CG. They know all the fundamentals of any 2D animator, but a lot of them learned on these CG rigs. You give them a good rig, and they can make that thing sing.

When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn't draw well enough.

I grew up near Disneyland, and my brother's an animator, so I was always really inspired by bright, cartoony colors and that whole feeling of happiness.

To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures.

I do not draw any of the pictures for my movies as an animator. The reason for that is that I am terribly lucky to have many staff members who I look up to, and who are overflowing with talent, that work with me on each project.

My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.

Honestly, every person, every individual has a process, and my philosophy, whether it's an actor or an animator, is you try to understand the process that person has so you can get the most out of them, but I think you have to sort of manipulate that process with honesty.

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.

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.

Theresa strode over to us in a swish of cloth. "Enough of this, animator. He can't do it, so he pays the price. Either leave now, or join us at our...feast." Are you having rare Who-roast-beast?" I asked. What are you talking about?" It's from Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. You know the part, 'And they'd Feast! Feast! Feast! Feast! Feast! They would feast on Who-pudding and rare Who-roast-beast.'" You are crazy." So I've been told.

In college, I was a cartoonist at 'The Daily Northwestern.' So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that 'Star Wars' came out.

I hired Bob at Terrytoons. He was my assistant animator, and then became an animator himself. He had just come from Boston with his family and was a brilliant draftsman as well as a great jazz guitarist. We had lots of fun nights in Greenwich Village together and then later hanging in LA. Bob worked on Fritz the Cat , Heavy Traffic , Coonskin , and on Wizards . I am terribly saddened by his passing and will miss him dearly.

An animator is an actor with a pencil.

Literally overnight, I became an animator... and one that was well-known.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man.

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.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.

I've always drawn, for example, and I did consider when I was younger, it was either do I become an actor or do I become an animator cartoonist at that point. Do I work at Disneyworld or something and do animated cells or something?

Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.

When I was four years old some friends of my family took me to see 'Fantasia' and I was totally blown away. From that minute on I wanted to be an animator.

All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.

I was an animator for a while early on, but a 2D animator.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

And as particles are living digital elements, moving on their own according to the various attributes (such as weight, speed, shape) given to them by the animator, we don't know what the visual result will be until everything is completed. This result can often be unsatisfying, obliging us to repeat the process all over again, with new features.

When I was at Pixar, I was in my hole. I was an animator, I had my shots and I was like, "Yeah, I've gotta make this perfect!" It's a very selfish thing.

When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what's happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what's happening.