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
To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.
Bud Luckey
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.
Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.
Catherine Jinks
Luckily, I went to school at CalArts, and then ended up here at Disney, starting in the Animation Building and working my way up. I started as an animator, and then did character designing and storyboarding, and eventually, directing.
Chris Buck
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.
Chuck Jones
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
I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.
Damon Wayans, Jr.
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
It's a different way of getting across an emotion. You're trying to get it across to the animator because the animator is inspired by the voicetrack in terms of how to animate the character.
I was an animator for a while early on, but a 2D animator.
Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.
When I was four years old, some friends of my family took me to see 'Fantasia' and I was totally blown away. From that minute on I wanted to be an animator.
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?
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.
Programmers are very creative people. And animators are problem solvers, just as programmers are.
When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn't draw well enough.
Mr. Miyazaki's specialty is taking a primal wish of kids, transporting them to a fantasyland, and then marooning them there. No one else conjures the phantasmagoric and shifting morality of dreams - that fascinating and frightening aspect of having something that seems to represent good become evil - in the way this master Japanese animator does.
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.
Honestly, every person, every individual has a process, and my philosophy, whether it's an actor or an animator, is you try to understand the process that person has so you can get the most out of them, but I think you have to sort of manipulate that process with honesty.
My respect for animators and animation directors has gone way, way up and it is just not something you can phone in.
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.
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.
To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures.
Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.
The animators are absolutely extraordinary. It's mind-boggling.
You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.
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.
I've always wanted to be an animator. That's an ultimate art form, right there.
I'm writing a movie script about vampires with an animator called Michael Booth.
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.
Short films really helped me develop as a story teller, animator, and as a director.
Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.
I was mentored by great Disney animators at the end of their careers.
I'm a big fan of pantomime storytelling, being an animator.
In college, I was a cartoonist at 'The Daily Northwestern.' So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that 'Star Wars' came out.
