Animation Culture Quotes

'Toonami' was a tremendous vehicle, delivering the art of Japanese animation to a massive audience that may have otherwise never experienced it. I feel an immense debt of gratitude to everyone involved with the show and to every fan who supported it.

I love the culture of animation. What stop-motion has in common with live-action is that it has many of the same departments. There's hair, costume, makeup in the form of paint, gaffers, electricians. So there's the same sense of real stuff, real light. But it's not like everything happens at once, like it does in live-action. It's all subdivided into these small sets. It's where my strengths are. Live-action is just an utterly different world, and I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.

As a young artist in New York, I thought about postwar Japan - the consumer culture and the loose, deboned feeling prevalent in the character and animation culture. Mixing all those up in order to portray Japanese culture and society was my work.

When I first started working at Disney animation, I can't tell you how many people said to me, 'Oh, man, take a powder.' Nobody takes animated musicals seriously. I swear.

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.

I grew up, obviously, watching tons of animation; Saturday morning cartoons or anything that we could get our hands on. And then when 'The Simpsons' premiered, that just kind of changed the landscape of everything. We hadn't had prime time animations since 'The Flintstones.'

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

In the '70s, as a kid, someone took me to a Tournee of Animation festival at the L.A. County Museum of Art.