Matt Groening Quotes

I think with animation there's a certain freedom that you're given. You don't have a thought at the back of your mind, that worry that you'll have to cut and go back to the top of the scene. You're not working with anyone else from the cast. It's just you.

The thing that I enjoy about animation is the fact that it is unbridled, and there are no boundaries; when you are in the room, you don't have to focus on your clothing, make-up, hair, your choreography or your blocking; you really do have total freedom.

When I do 'Sweet Tooth,' really, whatever I want to do with the characters kind of goes. I'm sort of in charge.

The nice thing about animation is that you can realise your inventions without understanding all the hard theory.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.

With comics, you don't have to worry so much about budgetary constraints. In film and television, however fanciful you want to be, someone can come up to you and go, 'Okay, this is going to cost X amount of dollars, and we only have so many days to film this.' With graphic novels, you can have that alien invasion you've always wanted to see.

You can sometimes break rules in comics that you can't necessarily break in cinema. It's fun to find something cool in a comic and then try and find a way to break the same rule in another medium.

For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.

Nothing can ever be a rule in drama, because then you're saying certain things won't ever happen, and that would be very boring.

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

The great thing about animation is it's like the radio. I used to do lots of radio when I was a kid, and you get to play parts you would never get to play ordinarily.

One of the defining things about my career on camera is I like to play different characters. That gets difficult to do. People don't trust you to do something different. In animation, it's all about trust and how far can you go away from yourself. It's a really marvelous environment that's extremely creative.

I get to experiment with a lot of looks with my character so that's really fun for me. It's like getting to paint a new canvas everyday.

I just felt like there was a world of cartoon voices that had to be discovered by me.

The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.

Some of my favorite media is the still cartoon that you can sit and study. You can get amazing metaphors across really quickly. I'm in awe of a Charles Schulz.

You have a lot more freedom when you're the sidekick - you can bring a lot more of your own flavor to the role, and you can get away with a lot more.

Those are fun, especially if they're going to shoot them in four weeks, because you know they're not going to mess with anything you do, so it can be very imaginative.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

The whole thing with animated movies is that it's very hard to get out of your head because it's very moving through each line systematically.

I think films are bigger than structure.