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.
Aaron Ehasz
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.
Akira Toriyama
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.
Alan Menken
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.
Andy Serkis
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.
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.
I've been told that some guy wrote something like, 'Andy Serkis does everything, animators do nothing.' Of course I never in a million years said that, wouldn't ever say that. It's not within my understanding of filmmaking to ever say anything like that.
My livelihood depends on the art of animators.
People used to want to be filmmakers and animators; now they want to make apps.
Bill Plympton
There is an animated version of 'Lazer Team,' with all the action sequences, that exists. It's a pre-visual fidelity, and the voice acting is terrible because it's one of our animators doing it. But we could sit there and watch what the scene is supposed to look like while we're doing individual shots.
Burnie Burns
People were very nice to me. They knew I didn't have the money to do figure-drawing classes, so they let me annex the figure-drawing classes that the animators had.
Byron Howard
The era of 'The Jungle Book' was when the animators were at the top of their game and their sense of character was great.
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.
Colin Trevorrow
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.
Dan Castellaneta
Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.
Darren Aronofsky
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.
Duke Johnson
Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.
Edwin Catmull
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.
Gary Larson
My respect for animators and animation directors has gone way, way up and it is just not something you can phone in.
Gore Verbinski
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.
Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.
The animators are absolutely extraordinary. It's mind-boggling.
I was at Disney for about four years, so I made good friends there. It was a time of not a lot of creativity. It was the end of the first great era, with a few of the original animators. They called them the Nine Old Men. I learned a lot from them, but it wasn't going to be a future home for me.
I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators - people like myself - love it so much that we're always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.
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.
Any time you get to work with creative people - animators, actors, directors and producers, all of this - it helps to refine what tools you'll need moving forward.
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.
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 was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.
I saw 'Sleeping Beauty' when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring these things to life.
When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.
'Cars' has been a godsend. I mean, I get paid to talk into a mic. Honestly, I had no idea it would become as big as it did. When I first got the part of Mater, it was actually a small part. I did the voicing for it, though, and the animators liked it so much they rewrote the original script so that Mater could be in it more.
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 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.
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.
I just want to make sure that I give the animators everything they need, so they have plenty of choices to match their animation.
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.
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.
If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.
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.
You have to understand that when you're a voice actor on an animated film, you're really just a tiny little piece of this huge process. And when you finally get to see the finished product and see all of the wonderful work that the animators & the designers & the writers did to make your character stand out, it's just so touching, so humbling.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 Disney animators' rules on adult females: mothers are perfect but imperiled; stepmothers are wicked and occasionally homicidal; godmothers are sweet things with magical powers.
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.
I mean, we make a 15-minute show that's incredibly silly, even though all of our scenic designers, puppet builders. animators, everybody that works on the show take their work very seriously. So somebody saying that we'd even be in contention for a very respectable award is really nice.
