GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY

As soon as you think, 'Pirates are really popular right now with kids so I'm going to write a pirate movie'... that's when you're dead.

Animation is my love, but I think there's definitely room in live-action. I mean, 'Iron Man 2' was fun, and I got to see that world.

One night I was sick and I watched the old black and white 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' And it freaked me out.

I try not to be in my head too much, I just try to do what feels right.

With features, you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on production and marketing, so everybody's panicked because you literally have an opening weekend to succeed.

I read comics because of the art.

One of the things I hate about TV for kids is that it conescends to them.

I feel like animation's stagnant. There's not much that's trying to push the artform, and so, for me, I'm way too critical about it.

Trying to be a leader, you've got to be really sure of what you're doing and you've got to guide people the right way.

Stories are important, but I'm really into characters, and if you can give birth to a good one, that's true success.

I think the fate of 'Star Wars' is everlasting, which is great.

I'm a very happy, optimistic person.

I don't like darkness in everything. I like my superheroes in primary colors, and fun.

I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, loving comic books, and they were much cartoonier. And then everything became super dark and muscular and airbrushed, and I stopped collecting comics.

'Samurai' is not an animated show like you would normally watch on TV. We tell the stories from a different perspective - backward, very nonlinear. It treats it more seriously as an art form.

Besides kind of like the Wes Anderson, or, of course, a lot of the European movies, most everybody in the States, the big studios, make pretty much the same film. And we're kind of held to Pixar standards, or Disney standards, as it's kind of always been in the animation industry.

Everything that I've ever made in my life is from my instinct.

Storytelling has changed. Shows like 'Adventure Time' have taken storytelling in a different direction.

My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some '70s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement.

In feature animation, cartoony or exaggerated animation is almost taboo. There is this precedent that if you do that kind of stuff people won't like it or it will be too zany.

I love 'Jack' as one of my creations and would never want to change it from what it was supposed to be. There was no reason to reinvent.

For whatever reason, I think we have one type of animated movie and it's so wrong. I want to do a drama, I want to do an action, a comedy. In live-action, there are all sorts of movies. There's independent movies, big movies, action movies, funny movies, and for us we have one movie.

I've always felt that kids are a lot smarter than we've given them credit for, but we've never given them a chance to figure things out as they're watching television.

I remember seeing my first Disney film when I was 13 or 14. It was 'Jungle Book,' and I remember really falling in love with it.

The magic of 'Jack' is that it's unique, there's not a lot of stuff like it.