Duke Johnson Quotes

I'm meant to be an animation director. That world, and the culture of stop-motion, is where I want to live. It's more my problem than Hollywood's. I'm not attuned to Hollywood.

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

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There's a solitary aspect to animating... It's ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

Muppet films are never easy to film 'cause Muppets have no legs.

I'm always impressed with the work of animators. You have to be able to draw the scenes in between movements. I'm impressed with the way they can do that - I don't think I could.

'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.

And there's a visceral fun in watching Team America and making it, like taking a puppet and throwing it against the wall. Because it's not CG, there's something funny about it.

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 learned how to do stop-frame animation and I experimented with that a lot, and pretty much that was my mode of animating through high school.

I love the idea of animation just because it removes the actor from the character, and you can be anything. I've been devouring 'Adventure Time' and 'Archer.' I'd love to get my hands dirty on either of those shows.

You must lose yourself if you want to be successful in animation and be the character.

You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

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.

Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.

On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back.

One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.

Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.

I mean, I did a film, a musical of 'Scrooge', in '70, and the tricks were done by flat clothes and mirrors. I hope that the day will come when we don't have to turn up at all.

The best way for a beginner to write for animation is to closely watch animated films, then read the screenplays for them afterwards.

I have always been a fan of Jim Henson, and I love his Creature Shop creations, the skill of the puppets and the characters he creates.

Working on 'Nightmare Before Christmas,' I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, 'You can't have a main character that's got no eyeballs!' 'How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?' You know? So, it's those kind of things that really wear you down.

The surprising thing was, it's actually easier working on animation than working on a comic strip, because Garfield is animated in my head.

There is an animated version of 'Lazer Team,' with all the action sequences, that exists. It's a pre-visual fidelity, and the voice acting is terrible because it's one of our animators doing it. But we could sit there and watch what the scene is supposed to look like while we're doing individual shots.