Henry Selick Quotes

The nice thing about animation is that you can realise your inventions without understanding all the hard theory.

The thing that I enjoy about animation is the fact that it is unbridled, and there are no boundaries; when you are in the room, you don't have to focus on your clothing, make-up, hair, your choreography or your blocking; you really do have total freedom.

Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.

Through the years, I've developed a style or a language that I like, even when it applies to action. All my action principles are very similar to my cartoony principles, because all the poses want to be really strong.

Coming from the world of animation, every single line counts; every single gesture counts. You put thought into every single one of those things and the way a frame is composed.

For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up.

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.

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

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.

Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.

So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

Animation is a technique, not a genre.

I love animation, I really do, but I don't do it for the children.

I learned how to do stop-frame animation and I experimented with that a lot, and pretty much that was my mode of animating through high school.

Creating a character is about what they look like. The look speaks volume to the audience.

In terms of writing characters or stories, at least initially, there's no difference between live-action and animation. A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.

I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

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.

Animation is incredibly difficult - much like doing a giant sweeping fantasy novel.

When I watch a movie I don't really care too much about the plot - not that it isn't important, but what I remember is the visual imagery, something that happens in an individual scene.

Animation is very much a team effort so you must be a team player.

All of the things we learned on 'Coraline' we applied to 'ParaNorman,' and all of the things we learned on 'ParaNorman' and 'Coraline' we applied to 'The Boxtrolls.'