Animator Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Why fit in when you were born to stand out?

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

Sometimes you will never know the value of something,until it becomes a memory.

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.

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

An animator is an actor with a pencil.

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.

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.

I think a good study of music would be indispensable to the animators - a realization on their part of how primitive music is, how natural it is for people to want to go to music - a study of rhythm, the dance - the various rhythms enter into our lives every day.

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.

The industry in Japan moving toward CGI is not as severe and extreme as in the U.S. The animation industry in the U.S. is firing 2D animators and closing those studios, but I think it's possibly because the national traits of the U.S. prefer super-realism. Since Japan is a country that prefers plane vision, I don't think we will leave 2D and substitute hand-drawing with CGI entirely.

I love the culture of animation. What stop-motion has in common with live-action is that it has many of the same departments. There's hair, costume, makeup in the form of paint, gaffers, electricians. So there's the same sense of real stuff, real light. But it's not like everything happens at once, like it does in live-action. It's all subdivided into these small sets. It's where my strengths are. Live-action is just an utterly different world, and 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 get a lot of credit for Tron. They called us scene choreographers back then because the animation unit wouldn't let us be called animators because we were working on computers. And we were some of the first people ever to make 3-D computer animation.

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 great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.

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.

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

nothing is impossible

Disneyland is like Alice stepping through the Looking Glass; to step through the portals of Disneyland will be like entering another world.

Sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody. I guess that’s the job I do.

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

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 love the nostalgic myself. I hope we never lose some of the things of the past.

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

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

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

Toward the end of the film ['Life, Animated'] we see 'The Sidekicks Story,' and that is a story that Owen drew himself. We took that style, which is decidedly different from Disney animation, and used it as a basis. It's a 'two-dimensional' hand drawn animated form, so I went to this company in Paris called 'Mac Guff,' and they assembled an amazing group of young animators, and brought it to life.

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?

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.

The quality and success of Disney was actually bad for us animators because everyone on the planet thought that animation was only for kids and only in a certain domain. The big film festivals never thought much about animated films.

Joanna Priestley’s amazing body of animated films have deservedly earned their place in the pantheon of contemporary international animators. Inventively visioned, superbly crafted, and rich with insight into the physical and spiritual dilemmas that confront us all, each new work provides an unexpected pleasure.

I've done animated TV stuff, but I'd never done animated film work, which is much more involved and much more labor intensive. The animators are much more meticulous and detailed. It's just been really fun and really satisfyingly creative.

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

There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.

The animators bring their own spontaneity to it as well, because when they do a take of a shot it really is like just one continuous activity for them. They launch into it and do it, and they're not even quite sure how it's going to turn out when they're doing it. They're sort-of sculpting their way through a scene and trying to make this inanimate object alive.

The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it's their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.

The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.

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.

Joanna Priestley is one of the most interesting and adept personal animators and filmmakers. I have enjoyed her work for years and been amazed at how she gets into her own thoughts onto the screen in a very elegant and focused way. You have to see this.

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.

Raymond Hendler exhibited a group of abstract paintings that displayed rare high spirits. Using a great deal of fresh white, Hendler devised extremely simple symbols which he dispersed felicitously on his shining grounds. These bright, often linear hieroglyphs serve both as pictorial animators-they often flow in winding patterns or like fluent handwriting-and as references to the plentitude of the artist's existence. Gardens and sky and human joy are read in these exceedingly compressed forms.

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.

A man should never neglect his family for business.