Top 95 Animators Quotes & Sayings

I animated 20 years at Terry Toons. It's important to know that animators like pizza and a raise once in a while, and you've got to treat them with love.

I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.

I was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.

People used to want to be filmmakers and animators; now they want to make apps.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

Since the waiting time required during the rendering process has been dramatically shorter in the last 10 years, I think that CGI animation has finally become practical. It is a fact that I processed the Steamboy work based on the assumption that the machine spec would be higher. In that context, young 3D animators have also gotten more skillful in recent years. But what I didn't expect is that the skills of traditional 2D animators have become worse, and notable young animators have not come out to the scene. This is a big issue for the industry.

My respect for animators and animation directors has gone way, way up and it is just not something you can phone in.

The animators are absolutely extraordinary. It's mind-boggling.

The 'Aladdin' thing - that's not work; that's just fun. Three days in the recording studio going mad, then the animators do all the work. Not a bad way to cash a large check, my friend.

(The) process of acting is no different to conventional screen acting, in that it's providing a perfect interface between the director and the performer. So there's no sort of long way around a viral committee of animators.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

I think all directors should be animators.

I've been very lucky to work with many amazing animators and directors who can interpret and extend the music I make. When it's done well, it can create extra meaning and new context for the song.

It's like, the more you commit, the happier the animators are; if you're at all iffy and concerned, then it doesn't free them up to do as much fun stuff, so you have to just go for it and, again, trust the people around you and not be seemingly guarded and numb. Throw caution to the wind a bit.

In timing a film, we used to assume that sneaks move slowly. This was great for animators-thirty-six to forty-eight drawings for a single step-but it was sheer hell for the pace of the picture. So the rapid tiptoe was invented.

I just want to make sure that I give the animators everything they need, so they have plenty of choices to match their animation.

People who get into animation tend to be kids. We don't have to grow up. But also, animators are great observers, and there's this childlike wonder and interest in the world, the observation of little things that happen in life.

I want to see abstract art move. Especially in the '30s, you had animators doing innovative work, and I was entranced by that. It's basically what you see when you close your eyes, when you fall asleep.

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.

The era of 'The Jungle Book' was when the animators were at the top of their game and their sense of character was great.

The Disney animators' rules on adult females: mothers are perfect but imperiled; stepmothers are wicked and occasionally homicidal; godmothers are sweet things with magical powers.

What's fun about the story development at Pixar is it's a journey. You don't just write a script and then that's the movie you make. It's just constant evolution and being open to that and that collaboration with the voice actors and with the artists and animators at Pixar.

My livelihood depends on the art of animators.

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.

When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.

All new tools are useful to animators, but great animation comes down to great animators.

Sometimes you're talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

As far as doing a TV special, I would have to be in control of it. I'd want my own team of animators to work on it.

You know, the only way I've found to make these pictures is with animators. You can't seem to do it with accountants and bookkeepers.

I know reels can be expensive but even if you construct one on your own if you don't have enough money to get a more professional one while you're getting started, as far as college animators go or young indie developers I don't think they are going to care if you have the highest quality reel yet.

The animators working with these 3D models, they're artists, right? They're great at what they do. They're artful in how they move characters about.

In performance capture roles, it's not a committee of animators that author the role, it's the actor. I think that's a significant thing for people to understand.

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.

One day, I was taken into a room with 25 animators, all working on Sadness. They asked me a lot of questions, and they got something of the way I move into the character.

Paprika is evidence that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox.

Animators do amazing working translating and interpolating the characters [in the Planet of the apes], the facial performances. What we're creating on set - if you don't get it on the day, in the moment, on set, in front of the camera, with the director and the actors. The emotional content of the scene and the acting choices.

I'm always impressed with the work of animators. You have to be able to draw the scenes in between movements. I'm impressed with the way they can do that - I don't think I could.

I decided to work on hand animate because the animators work as authors in every little scene and it brings real soul for characters.

My respect for animation has gone way up. It's a truckload of work. I have to sit with my animators the same way I'd sit with my actors and cast them.

Too many of Disney animators, and a lot try to emulate Disney, are trying to hit what they call quality levels. They're boring mannerisms.

I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.

We use shorts at the studio extensively to develop talent. I always love to give opportunities for young story people, animators, layout people something like that to take the next step up in their career and try things out.

When I was at N.Y.U., I studied abroad in Prague, and I learned about some of the European animators, like Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Barta. I didn't think at the time that I would end up doing anything like that, but I certainly thought it was very cool.

There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do.

There's this whole grey area seemingly every time it's talked about animators and who takes ultimate responsibility for the characters [of the Planet of the apes] but without question and I'll go down saying this year after year, these characters are authored by what we do on set. They are not authored by animators.

If the animators could hide something so secretly that I could watch it numerous times, both on the computer and on the screen, and not pick up on it, then it deserves to be in the movie. But if they had more overt things, I'd often tell them to cut it out. In general, as long as they captured the spirit of the character, then they're fine. But sometimes it took a while, and we had to replace a lot of animators.

Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.

The Catholic Church sees voluntary vampirism as a kind of suicide. I tend to agree. Though the Pope also excommunicated all animators, unless we ceased raising the dead. Fine; I became Episcopalian.

Watching Ray Harryhausen's films growing up was a pure joy. He brought legends to life and he became a legend himself. And I am sure that future generations of animators will continue to look to him for inspiration.

Animating is a very slow, pain-staking process and the animators become the actors at that point.

In animation, the directors are part of a huge team of animators who all have opinions, too. It's a much more democratic process. Also, the animation executives oversee things more.

I found a lot of animators bring a lot of baggage to the party, just that there's a certain way of doing things in that world that's a little hard to unlearn.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

We want to be proud of our work and make sure it's worth the talent of the animators, who spent four years of their love, sweat and tears on it.

I have never played a superhero in real life and I would imagine it is very different Voiceover is super easy. You just come in and do a bunch of versions of it and then the animators and directors on that side of the movie put your performance together.

With my own cartoon, it was just me being goofy by myself, but when it comes to an animated film, you're working with 45 animators and assistant animators. It's a whole different ballgame.

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man.

There's always kids who become stop motion animators. I get stuff all the time. They put it on YouTube. It's exciting to see.

I think living things can recognize the movement of other living things, and all the best animators in the world can't quite capture that something.