Jim Henson Quotes

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.

I'll come up with an idea for a character, and I'll write some jokes and make sure that that character is going to have some legs to it - that it's really going to work. If I can come up with jokes and material that I think will work, then I make a cheap version of the doll. Achmed started out just being this little plastic toy from the store.

With my own cartoon, it was just me being goofy by myself, but when it comes to an animated film, you're working with 45 animators and assistant animators. It's a whole different ballgame.

I am not interested in one-sided characters.

While playing complex characters you're staying in the same place but you're departing with your mind and soul and educating yourself until you can really understand such huge worlds. Those are the roles that keep loyal to the authenticity of what people are, and not caricatures. It's something that requires me to prepare for three, four months. I love the process of it, rather than, "Okay, I'm ready, I'm set with the wardrobe that somebody else chose for me."

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

I've been a huge animation fan since I was a kid, so the idea of seeing my characters in full motion on the big screen is completely mind-blowing.

In the earliest days of Pixar, when we were making 'Toy Story' and 'A Bug's Life,' we all came together as a group.

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

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

I look for a layered character who has problems and issues - which, by the way, we all do have.

I want to make my own animes.

I've always been interested in mechanical things. I think I must have been heavily influenced by my father, who is also very good with his hands. He liked to build things. I always loved to watch him do it, and I loved to build things on my own.

I like working with my hands, need to do that more often.

I love roles where it's not about being perfect or being beautiful, where there is more of an interest in what's going on inside the character.

It's always fun to layer a character, to make the character a little bit more dynamic than it is on paper.

It is difficult to portray grey characters because there is a very thin line between being nasty and slightly negative.

I could watch 'There Will Be Blood' all day long, and Daniel Plainview is a terrible person - but he's still compelling to watch. That's what makes me want to engage and see what happens next.

All animation is a tremendous amount of work, but when you put 'Star Wars' on the top of something, there's already this bar that people are going to put on it.

A big part of directing animation is deciding what you really want to do and making sure it's about something. My favorite thing about animation is the storytelling. You can really dig into the story and spend time with the writers. The writers don't just write and leave.

As long as I can recall I've always wanted to make cartoons.

With 'Korra' we've really taken a lot of time to craft it. We're aiming pretty high, and in order to keep up the quality it just takes a lot of time and a lot or work.

I was working in a gaming company, but I really wanted to make animation. I didn't really have anything special, no special tools at my disposal, so I used what I had on hand like Photoshop, and that's really how I started.

I would love to play a negative guy, play the villain. It is always interesting to have shades to your character.