Marc Davis Quotes

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.

To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.

'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.

Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.

I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.

On the 'Tom and Jerry's,' Joe and I would sit across a desk from each other and develop the story. Joe would do the storyboard and I'd do the timing and the direction of the animation.

In the case of 'Blood Stone,' the producers, EON, Michael Wilson, Barbara Broccoli, David Wilson and Gregg Wilson, had an idea for a story and had a lot of it done. And I came in, worked with them, fleshed it out.

I mean when I was working shall we say with Disney, you know they sent me the script for the film Hercules and I had to imagine what all the characters looked like. And to develop those characters, so nothing exists visually when I get the script.

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

The way we work at Pixar is we write the script, but then we quickly move on into story reel, which is basically like a comic-book version of the film. And then we do our own dialogue and music and sound effects, all in an effort to be able to basically sit in the theater and watch the movie before we shoot it, essentially.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

You can write a script, but that's just a starting point as a cartoonist. The heart of the process comes when you start to draw it, and you work out how to lay the page out, how best to tell the story.

I'm interested in animation. I actually feel like I've learned so much about the process how to make an animated movie.

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.

Every animated film that I've worked on - whether it was as a story artist or as Head of Story or even as director - where we originally started out with our story and where we eventually ended up were often very different places.

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

Coming from the world of animation, every single line counts; every single gesture counts. You put thought into every single one of those things and the way a frame is composed.

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

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.

The first thing I put down on paper is a storyboard, like a film director.

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.

I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.

What's kind of wonderful about being the voice in an animated film is you're a small part of an enormous production. And in a way, you get to remain a little bit objective.

Mr. Disney and his staff were constantly scouting for great stories to bring to life on film.

The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.