Wes Anderson Quotes

It's a different way of getting across an emotion. You're trying to get it across to the animator because the animator is inspired by the voicetrack in terms of how to animate the character.

What we do sometimes when we're in the sessions recording the dialogue is we'll set up a video camera and we'll video the whole session. So then the animator, if he wants, can draw upon those tapes to pull expressions, mouth shapes, maybe some gesturing that happens.

One day, I was taken into a room with 25 animators, all working on Sadness. They asked me a lot of questions, and they got something of the way I move into the character.

Sometimes I am just playing the character. I will move out of the way of the microphone, and they will have to tell me. Because I am moving around a lot. I am performing the cat. The animators look for that material, to see if they can put it back into the movie.

Like, every couple of months you read, they rewrite, you come back in, they've animated more stuff - they usually videotape you while you're reading it - so they'll incorporate some gestures and some facial expressions into it.

You don't have a face to work with, so your voice has to do all the work until you see the animation. So, a lot of it I had to pull back because it was too big.

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.

In terms of animation, animators are actors as well. They are fantastic actors. They have to draw from how they feel emotionally about the beat of a scene that they're working on. They work collaboratively.

'Ice Age' felt like stage acting. You'd write a sequence, and sometimes you'd submit pages, but other times, I would actually perform it for the directors and producer in my office.

Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?

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

When you do animation - well, straightforward animation, although it's not straightforward - the voice for a character or something, they're always singular experiences, really.

As an actor, I always wondered what it would be like to watch an animated character with your voice behind it and see if it seems seamless or if it seems like your voice is isolated from the animation.

When Tim and I first discussed the part in 2003, he told me, 'I'd love for you to play five Oompas.' But five Oompas quickly turned into 165 - and they're not computerized; I did each one individually myself.

On an animated television series, you pretty much read the script as written. Whereas on an animated feature, you'll sometimes record the same scene multiple times over the course of a year as the filmmakers continue to tweak that part of the movie.

'Resident Evil: Damnation' was physically mo-capped and recorded with the mo-cap actors first, so there wasn't a whole lot of flexibility with timing, so it was more stringent. We had to go in individually.

The amazing thing about motion capture is everything translates. Your slightest emotions translate through the suit and into the character.

I love being able to bring an animator's vision to life and give the breath to the voice of a character.

My first jobs were at Pixar and John Lasseter just doing animation would always allow actors to do that, and then animate to that. It was an early lesson for me that, if you're lucky enough, as I've been in my career thus far, to get really incredible iconic people to do your stuff, you want them to tell your story and you want them to be on page in the important moments, and they usually are.

I love doing voice-overs; I wish I could do more of them. It's a lot of fun to see how they take the voice and animate it and try to capture your own expressions and features. It's fascinating.

While you're testing out armatures of puppets, you're also trying to find the proper visual vocabulary for the character and to come up with a guidebook of sorts for how a character will move and act.

The most challenging roles were Disney's 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Mars Needs Moms' because they were both motion capture, so there was a lot of physical work involved.

If an actor only comes alive when he has lines to say, it doesn't work, and the same goes for illustrated characters.

It was actually after I saw 'Pinocchio' that I thought I might try and work in that industry in some way.

Giving the voice and expressions to a character is giving it a soul.