I loved 'The Secret of NIMH.' When that came out, it felt like, 'Wow, this is something really, really new.' It looked like a Disney film, but it felt very cutting edge to me. To a twelve-year-old kid, it seemed very inspiring.
When we made 'Toy Story,' journalists were more interested in talking about the technique because it was so new and unknown, and we just wanted to talk about the story.
The same sort of thing was supposed to happen when performance animation was invented: Everybody thought it would save so much time. But it became its own niche altogether.
Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.
Our ambition is to be the center of independent animation filmmaking; to be the bravest animation studio in the world.
I feel like animation's stagnant. There's not much that's trying to push the artform, and so, for me, I'm way too critical about it.
Animation had been used only for things like King Kong and the destruction of cities, which was very popular in the 1950s. I got tired of destroying cities. I destroyed New York, I destroyed San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Rome, and Washington. I was looking for a new outlet, and I came across the Sinbad legends.
Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.
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 would say that Pixar is doing for animation what Chaplin did for film, infusing it with heart and characters that you care about and stories that you lose yourself in. They are similar revolutionaries and changing a medium.
It just seems like the whole, overall animation world is trying to go where maybe animation doesn't belong.
Nobody does animation better than Disney; it's just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society.
Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!
