William Hanna Quotes

A lot of feature films do two pages a day.

Up until the time Turner Broadcasting bought Hanna-Barbera, it was essentially an independent studio whose planning cycle had to be nine months. You got a pickup in January, and you put it on the air in September. That's been the cycle.

Shooting a season can be a grind. It can be seven to eight months of work. Once you stop, it slows down any momentum you had.

Looking back now on our workload, I just shake my head at our pace. 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' was my first series, so I didn't know anything about that when I started. I just assumed it was normal to make 26 episodes a year on a seven-day shooting schedule.

I think we had made 160 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons.

I'll just say that America - us included - has a long way to go to catch up with the animated work being done in a handful of countries, namely Japan.

That's the thing about 'The Daily Show' - we're doing four shows a week, so we can't be too precious about what's going on.

In 'Tom and Jerry,' there was hardly any dialogue at all. It was all action. It required a great many drawings to make.

On American sets, you work 12-, 14-, 16-hour days sometimes. All that volume over a short course of time can actually be less conducive to telling a story accurately.

Some scenes take days and weeks, and some scenes take an hour.

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.

I saw one of the old 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons the other day. I hadn't seen it for 30 years and I didn't remember it. We made 160 of them! I thought it was a very funny cartoon.

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.

Another thing that makes the process different is we go in there and are completely immersed in [that] world for however many weeks and then we would leave and they would be animating for however many weeks and we wouldn't have anything to do with it. Then we would come back and see all this work that they had done. So it just took a lot more time than it would on anything else.

One of the things about animation is it's so expensive to do the animation, that you can't produce coverage. You only have one chance to make every shot.

We shot every scene of mine in the entire movie in five days. All my coverage, everything. I left. They went back and shot everybody else around me. Insane. The part [Billie in Crazy Six] called for a handsome, coiffed cool guy romantic lead, and I showed up like you see him in the movie. And they let me do it.

I like making comics and animation because it takes such a long time. I'm not a runner of the 100 meter. I like marathons. The longer it takes, the better I feel.

Things move so quickly on set. When you're about to do another take and you have a minute to figure out what you're doing, you just kind of determine how you're going to do it on the spot.

We shot the movie [Waitress] in 20 days so there wasn't a lot of time to learn. There wasn't a lot of pie baking going on, at least not by me. But we always had pies while we were filming - we ate two different pies every day for lunch!

Years and years of talking and writing versions of the script [Sausage Party] and looking at various versions of the animations - I mean, it's really a lot of workshopping and trying different things, and using the cast to try different voices and characters. And that's the good thing about animation. Because it takes so long, it allows you to explore in a way that you can't in live-action movies.

I'm dreaming about making movies for eight weeks, because it's a luxury. But time is money. That's the reality.

I like alternating commercials with movies, because it keeps the pace up. You can't slack on a commercial. You need to go fast. That's a terrific piece of action, I think if that was scheduled for a movie, you'd put that in for two or three days worth of work.

When you assemble animation teams the way you do a live-action film, you're often struggling a bit to get a cohesive team together, so if you have a team that works well together, you're hoping for another film so that you can refine the team.

I can easily say "no" to a project if the script isn't great, but when the script is good, then I start asking the other questions. Who's going to direct it? Who's the creator? Who are the actors? When are we shooting? Where is it shooting? All that kind of stuff.

The scary thing is that sometimes you are wrapping up animation on a sequence and you don't know how the movie ends or begins. You just have to bluff and move forward.