False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces; but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.
I have not grown up on movies. I didn't watch much films in my childhood, but I was fond of animation films.
For me, part of the fascination with making animation is you go to a place; it's a complete immersion in someone else's fantasy.
I try to make a really good spy movie, so the animation has to be good. 'Bot Seeks Bot' was one of my lighter and more playful ones, so it can survive not being visually told as well. I did have some issues with the quality of the inking on some of the animation, but a lot of that will only ever bother me.
The great thing about animation is it's like the radio. I used to do lots of radio when I was a kid, and you get to play parts you would never get to play ordinarily.
I've always loved animation and animated films.
The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.
I love working with rotoscopic animation because under the incredible handpainted artwork are real actors and real human performances.
In some ways, I feel like the strength of animation is in its simplicity and caricature, and in reduction. It's like an Al Hirschfeld caricature, where he'll use, like, three lines, and he'll capture the likeness of someone so strongly that it looks more like them than a photograph. I think animation has that same power of reduction.
It is no surprise that animation is Hollywood's most successful and innovative genre.
Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.
All animation is a tremendous amount of work, but when you put 'Star Wars' on the top of something, there's already this bar that people are going to put on it.
Usually when I mention suspended animation, people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh.
As to the differences between game work and novel writing, well, obviously the former is a lot less lonely - you're in and out of meetings all the time, bouncing stuff back and forth with the level designers, the art department, the animation team, so forth.
I learned a lot about 3D animation from and with my dear friend Michael Hemschoot of Workerstudio. Taught me that I want to play more with animation and image manipulation. Fun stuff!
In animation, what's wonderful is that when you start to work with multiple nationalities, the common language becomes a visual language rather than a spoken language, which blends beautifully with the art form.
I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!
Animation is a technique, not a genre.
I'm a huge fan of animation, and just the arts in general - anything that emanates from someone's mind and soul and is capable of touching other people's minds and souls.
It's awesome, because in live-action, most of my comedies have been rated R, so I'm trying to make adults laugh. While animation is a completely different world where you're trying to make children laugh. So that difference is a blast to do.
I used to watch every episode of 'Justice League,' I went to all the movies, I had the Superman lunchbox. I was enamored with animation in general and always wanted to somehow be a part of it.
It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.
I have a studio at my house, and there is a sister studio for Disney which is about 45 minutes away, and we haven't dropped a beat. In the art of animation and voiceover work, you can pretty much work from anywhere.
When I get up in the morning and put on a pink or a green wig, I see myself as a piece of animation. It lets me be the person I want to be, a person who's not embarrassed to have fun.
I ran development and programming at Disney TV animation. We did a lot of cartoons.
If I wasn't acting or doing stand-up, I would be in animation. Or if I had the discipline I might studies physics.
The voice for 'Surly' is, of course, very close to my own voice, but it's informed a lot by this story, by the arc and the animation and working with the whole creative team on 'The Nut Job' in finding what really works.
Jim Henson once allowed me to visit the Muppets on set and spent an entire day showing me how he and the other puppeteers performed Kermit and all the characters! After that, I was lucky enough to work with both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on many fun animation projects and learned so much from them.
I'm meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It's more my problem than Hollywood's. I'm not attuned to Hollywood.
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.
It's a strange business, and unfortunately, what we do in animation is a mystery, especially the directors.
I run advertisements and sell T-shirts to cover overhead costs and pay the few people who help me out behind the scenes. Anything left over is spent on production costs, animation costs, etc.
I want to do voiceover for animation, so I am looking to do something along those lines. So, my agent is looking for something in that area, and I think that would be a lot of fun.
I've been very fortunate in animation - when I get on a project, people tend to keep me, so I have long stays of work rather than bouncing around.
I get asked a lot if I'd want to get into live-action movies, and the answer, honestly, is 'no.' I'm an illustrator, and I think animation is an extension of that way of expressing myself. That's not to say I'd never make a live-action movie, but I don't strive for it.
It's amazing what they can do with animation nowadays. It's really beautiful. The 3D stuff is out of hand.
