Henry Selick Quotes

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

If you look at a lot of animated movies, they don't pay attention to how things move through space.

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

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

Animation is a technique, not a genre.

Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.

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.

In animation, action is changing so quickly that there's really not a lot of suspended moments.

Yes, actually. Animation's a very easy thing to watch on tour.

I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.

My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation.

There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.

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.

Animation translates well to a small screen. When you look at Walt Disney or Chuck Jones - you know, Bugs Bunny - there really isn't any difference if you watch on a very big screen or a computer screen.

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.

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement.

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

When you throw punches at actors, you stop, you pull it, and it looks like you pulled it. When you throw punches at cartoon characters, they are not there, so you can swing through. It looks like you really decked them.

Hand-drawn animation is something that I feel really strongly about. A Pixar movie may be really great, but it looks like it was drawn by a machine.

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've always loved animation and animated films.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

I love great animation.