Nick Park Quotes

I'm not a big fan of CGI. I'm not a fan at all, unless they use it in a way that doesn't call attention to itself.

I think of Ray Harryhausen's work - I knew his name before I knew any actor or director's names. His films had an impact on me very early on, probably even more than Disney. I think that's what made me interested in animation: His work.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

I grew up watching movies and being amazed at the animatronics you'd see in stuff like 'The Dark Crystal,' and all those kinds of movies. So, I'm always enthralled with how they can make it all work, behind the scenes, with the visual effects.

Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.

I feel I'm just meant to do stop-motion. Live-action is much more glamorous to some, but it's basically a whole army of people focused on one thing.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

Every 'Star Wars' film was about pushing what was possible in terms of effects, puppets, matte paintings, stop motion and, now, digitally.

If any single human being is responsible for all this nonsense I've done with my life, it's Ray Harryhausen... In 'Kubo,' you can see some of his influence throughout.

Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. In live action, you're moving so quickly.

I grew up as a little 4- and 5-year-old kid, watching Phil Tippett and my dad make monsters in our garage. That's what I did, as a child.

Comics are about the illusion of movement, and movies are about movement itself.

The nature of motion capture is only going to work for certain films. It's not going to put any other type of movies out of business.

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.

But with The Dark Crystal, instead of puppetry we're trying to go toward a sense of realism - toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive and we're mixing up puppetry and all kinds of other techniques.

I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.

As a kid, I sat transfixed watching Ray Harryhausen's '7th Voyage of Sinbad.'

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.

When you take something that's inert, and through motion, give it life, make it appear to be alive, living, breathing thinking and having emotions, that's animation. But when you take something that's live-action, and move a part of it, that's a special effect.

That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.

Animation offers a medium of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.