I've seen animation features just languish until the right combination of things come along to keep it alive.
'The Critic' was so absurd, and I loved that. I loved working with Jon Lovitz, I think he's got a great, great voice for animation.
When an executive walked on our floor, it was at their own risk. As far as what others thought of working for me, I know I was very tough at times, and would storm down the hall after watching some bad animation from Korea. But overall, I feel we had a good time.
What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.
Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.
I learned my lesson that in the live-action world, you have to earn the support of people over a very, very long time. And in animation, I already have the support.
Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.
In all animation, if it's done quickly, you'll know it. And if you're very slow and careful with it, it's going to look a little more beautiful. It's just compressing time into seconds.
When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.
I guess the biggest challenge to doing any kind of animation voice work is that you only have your voice to tell the story.
No movement can afford to be caught in a time warp and exist in a state of suspended animation.
And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.
We go through, I think, six different drafts of each script. And then my shooting it is roughly, you know, fifteen percent of the total work that gets done on a show. Then it's all post-production animation after that.
In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.
But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.
Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience. Our challenge is to make stories that connect for kids and adults.
Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.
One good thing about animation is that, if you do screw up a line, they won't use it. You can keep going until it's right.
Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.
Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.
The success of 'The Simpsons' really opened doors. It showed that if you were working in animation you didn't necessarily have to be working in kids' television.
Animation did not become the dominant form of children's television until the '60s.
My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.
When I was a teenager, I did one animated series back when I was on 'General Hospital.' It was 1971 or '72. Then I didn't do animation until 'Batman.'
I did what we call dry for wet effects, some of the miniatures work and two animation sequences.
I'm a big fan of cel animation, I'm a big fan of computer animation, and, most of all, I'm a big fan of stop-motion animation.
People, they think that animation is a style. Animation is just a technique. It's like, people, they think that comics is a style, like comics is a superhero story. Comic is just a narration, and is a medium, you can say any kind of story in comics and you can say of any kind of story in animation.
There's a process in the movie industry in both live action and animation called development hell!
We always thought the Tom Tom Club could change to anything, but it acquired this image, which was cartoon animation and this real light-hearted dance music.
The nice thing about animation, you don't even really have to account for yourself. All of the physical stuff that you work on as an actor, you just throw away.
Hand-drawn animation is something that I feel really strongly about. A Pixar movie may be really great, but it looks like it was drawn by a machine.
I started to do stop-motion when I was a kid. You take a Super 8 and make some models, and move, click, move, click. All that. I love all forms of animation, but there is something unique and special to stop-motion: it's more real and the set is lit like a set. But I think it's also a kind of lonely and dark thing to want to do.
Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.
Animation is the only thing I ever wanted to do in my whole life. I have no desire for live-action or anything else.
I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.
One of the defining things about my career on camera is I like to play different characters. That gets difficult to do. People don't trust you to do something different. In animation, it's all about trust and how far can you go away from yourself. It's a really marvelous environment that's extremely creative.
