Robert Stromberg Quotes

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.

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held.

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'm always there at home thinking of Wallace and Gromit ideas.

Animation is a technique, not a genre.

It's amazing what they can do with animation nowadays. It's really beautiful. The 3D stuff is out of hand.

I was influenced by Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reiniger, with her twitchy, cutout animation, which I happened to see at a very young age, but also by the Warner Bros. cartoons, 'Tom and Jerry,' and of course Disney. And also by Fellini's 'Giulietta of the Spirits' and Kurosawa's 'Ran.' And by other American illustrators and painters.

I did what we call dry for wet effects, some of the miniatures work and two animation sequences.

I had always loved cartoons, especially 'Bugs Bunny,' and I found I enjoyed making animated films. Even a 30-second commercial involved drawing and painting, storytelling, not to mention actors, music, and sound 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.

It is no surprise that animation is Hollywood's most successful and innovative genre.

What happened in the early days of Disney is that Walt Disney used all of the new technologies as they came out. When matting came out, they adopted it. They adopted sound and color and xerography. Walt did that. And then, when he died, people began to think that this is just about making films, so they stopped bringing in new technologies.

Animation in itself has so many different looks and styles and possibilities.

I've always been a fan of animation. As a kid, I used to watch a lot of the Saturday-morning cartoons, and I was always a fan of even claymation and that whole medium.

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

I was molded, spent my time underneath a lot of goo. And then the bits and pieces were sculpted. It took probably 10 days to create each character after all those camera tests.

I remember feeling that technology was like trying to draw with your foot. In a ski boot. It was the most indirect way to work imaginable, but the potential had us all excited. I started in stop motion.

I've done some effects shots. I've done some compositing. And in 'Just Like Heaven' did a lot of, like, motion control and things like that. But never done, like, computer-generated imagery in action.

I've loved all forms of animation.

I'm a big fan of cel animation, I'm a big fan of computer animation, and, most of all, I'm a big fan of stop-motion animation.

I used to draw and make plastic figurines and watch 'Wallace and Gromit' films.

I don't have anything against CGI.

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

People have been declaring stop-motion dead for a generation. But living in the digital age, people appreciate the art of craft, or working with your hands.

When we started on 'Coraline,' there was a whole host of things that we had no idea how we were going to do. Because we were making films in a way that had never really been done before, we were taking this hundred-year-old art form and bringing it into a new era by embracing technology and innovation.