Brad Bird Quotes

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

The two great things about computer CG stuff are I can now do gags I would never have dreamed of in the old day.

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

A lot of people have helped me along the way. But you know the biggest thing for me was when computer animation came along.

I don't have anything against CGI.

If people want to watch a CG movie, there's plenty out there.

'Avatar' means so many things to so many different people. When I think of the creation of it, I think of me and Mike at the computer in a little apartment in Burbank.

As I look back on my career, I had a goal, which was to build the first feature computer-animated film.

I think Mike and I would absolutely love to do feature animation. Either another story, or it if worked out, one in the 'Avatar' world. We would be really excited.

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.

It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.

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.

Animation is very singular. Like, even the 'Toy Story' movies. People will go, 'Oh, gosh, you're so lucky, getting to play opposite Tom Hanks!' And it's, like, 'It may have appeared to be that, but we were never in the room together.'

The idea of an animated film is you always kind of get a little bit daunted by it as a filmmaker because it feels like a lot of your communication is going to be with computer artists, and you're going to have to kind of channel the movie through extra pairs of hands.

I would love to voice an animated penguin or platypus at some point.

In computer animation, every detail has to be thought out, designed, modeled, shaded, placed and lit. The more you add, the more computer memory you need.

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.

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

You look at CG sometimes and its terrible. You look at CG sometimes and its great.

I actually worked for a small company in Ohio that sort of farmed out work from Disney and Dreamworks, so I really only ever worked in two studios.

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.

Special effects are characters. Special effects are essential elements. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

I love the idea of animation just because it removes the actor from the character, and you can be anything. I've been devouring 'Adventure Time' and 'Archer.' I'd love to get my hands dirty on either of those shows.

Obviously, with a CGI character, you're building a character in much the same way as a real creature is built. You build the bones, the skeletons, the muscles. You put layers of fat on. You put a layer of skin on which has to have a translucency, depending on what the character is.