How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio's first animated feature, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' premiered in 1937.
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.
In voiceover, you have to restrain yourself when you're acting in the sound booth in front of the microphone. If you lean left or you lean right, you're going to lose the voice. Yet you yourself become animated when you're doing the part. So you'll see a lot of flailing arms, but a very still face.
When you make an animated film, you make it over and over and over. We almost do ten versions of the film.
People, when they go on stage, tend to be animated and try to force things out instead of relaxing and bringing it in.
The old Rankin-Bass animated specials seemed to exist in a loosely shared reality, which is what attracted me to them. Santa, Snow Miser, Rudolph, Frosty, even the Easter Bunny seemed to be on nodding acquaintance with each other, even if only in cameo appearances in each other's cartoons.
'How to Train Your Dragon,' the first one, was a film I'd seen prior to being approached for the sequel. I don't often watch family animated movies, but it's one that I loved and thought was really well done: beautifully crafted storytelling.
They make three types of movies, and if you don't make one of those three, you have to find independent financing: It's either big-action superhero tent-pole thing, or it's an animated film, or it's an R-rated, raunchy sex comedy. They don't make movies about real people.
I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.
On an animated television series, you pretty much read the script as written. Whereas on an animated feature, you'll sometimes record the same scene multiple times over the course of a year as the filmmakers continue to tweak that part of the movie.
'Inside Out' - that was a really good movie. That's the first animated movie I saw since 'The Lego Movie.'
'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.
I do enjoy animated movies. I really love anime and movies like 'Spirited Away' and 'Howl's Moving Castle.'
The DC Universe Animated made for videos, which we do in cooperation with Warner Animation, are very intentionally scheduled at 3-4 a year, depending on whether or not there's a theatrical tent pole release in a given year, in which case we may choose to do four of them a year.
I grew up, probably like a lot of people, on cartoons. And I never thought I would have the chance to be in an animated movie. It's good also to show the world my sweet side with them.
In 'Tintin,' it's like a live-action role. You're living and breathing and making decisions for that character from page 1 to page 120, the whole emotional arc. In an animated movie, it's a committee decision. There are 50 people creating that character. You're responsible for a small part.
The hardest thing to do with an animated movie is to not make it feel synthetic: to feel like it's handmade, where you can sense the human hand in it.
There's something known as the Uncanny Valley where things look a little too real and you're not quite sure what you're looking at. It becomes weird like it did in 'The Polar Express,' where the eyes seem so realistic, and yet you know it's animated.
Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?
