Travis Knight 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.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

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.

When Disney was creating Elsa, they based a lot of her movements on that of a ballerina, which was interesting for me to find out because I actually did ballet years ago. That definitely informed some of the ways I made her walk and move.

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.

The identity of Studio Ghibli movies are how the characters move. They move like live, real people.

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.

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.

Making cartoons means very hard work at every step of the way, but creating a successful cartoon character is the hardest work of all.

'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.

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.

Any type of animation, it could be really super crude or very sophisticated, it doesn't mean anything if we don't make this point in this shot, this one here and this one here. There's the saying, 'One shot, one thought.' It's pretty much a true way to go.

'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Acting is a plum gig, and then animation is an even more plum gig.

My respect for animation has gone way up. It's a truckload of work. I have to sit with my animators the same way I'd sit with my actors and cast them.

Working at Pixar has been like my graduate school for screenwriting.

Creating a character is about what they look like. The look speaks volume to the audience.

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.

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.