Animation Technique Quotes

Sure, they were simple desk lamps with only a minimal amount of movement, but you could immediately tell that Luxo Jr. was a baby, and that the big one was his mother. In that short little film, computer animation went from a novelty to a serious tool for filmmaking.

What we do sometimes when we're in the sessions recording the dialogue is we'll set up a video camera and we'll video the whole session. So then the animator, if he wants, can draw upon those tapes to pull expressions, mouth shapes, maybe some gesturing that happens.

The difference between 'Resident Evil: Damnation' and 'Resident Evil 6' is in 'Resident Evil 6' we did facial mo-cap, along with the voice over. We had these little reflectors glued to our faces and these head pieces in this room filled with light with about 40 cameras.

Sid [the character from 'Ice Age'] is a prehistoric sloth. Sloths move really slowly and they store food in the cheek pouches. That's where I got the voice that you hear. He had to sound as though he was storing food.

When caricaturist, Al Hirschfeld, did a drawing of a celebrity, it often looked more like the person than the person did. That's our goal in animation.

Too many of Disney animators, and a lot try to emulate Disney, are trying to hit what they call quality levels. They're boring mannerisms.

I learned how to do stop-frame animation and I experimented with that a lot, and pretty much that was my mode of animating through high school.

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.

One day, I was taken into a room with 25 animators, all working on Sadness. They asked me a lot of questions, and they got something of the way I move into the character.

I love doing voice-overs; I wish I could do more of them. It's a lot of fun to see how they take the voice and animate it and try to capture your own expressions and features. It's fascinating.

Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.

The way Disney characters move, they're very kind of slow and fluid and flowing; one pose kind of eases into the next. If you look at a show like 'The Simpsons' and subsequently a show like 'Family Guy' - the characters will jerk from pose to pose a lot, a bit more snappy. Which sort of goes along with the writing tone of the show.

The animators bring their own spontaneity to it as well, because when they do a take of a shot it really is like just one continuous activity for them. They launch into it and do it, and they're not even quite sure how it's going to turn out when they're doing it. They're sort-of sculpting their way through a scene and trying to make this inanimate object alive.

Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?

One of the things I've found about SpongeBob's movement style is that, in addition to being animated and sort of stretching and squeezing, he's really based on the classic silent comedians, physical comedians.

I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.

I'm always impressed with the work of animators. You have to be able to draw the scenes in between movements. I'm impressed with the way they can do that - I don't think I could.

There is something I feel when I animate something; you can never really understand the character you're animating unless you've had the opportunity to turn it around. Once you've done that, you know it is a three-dimensional object.

Motion capture is amazing. I prefer it. You wear a 'Power Ranger'-esque suit, you have tape balls on you, you have 60 cameras around you capturing your every movement and there's no hair, no makeup.

I quickly realized that this medium had a lot to offer someone like me. To do Disney-quality hand-drawn cartoons, you have to be a master of two art forms. Seriously, you have to be able to draw like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo. But also you have to know movement and timing and control that through 24 frames a second.

Animators have to live life 24 times as long as we do - every 24 frames of a second.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

There was actually a camera on your face. I don't know so much about the animation process but the camera was in our face so it could get expressions from our faces that would eventually arrive on the gnomes. It almost felt like you were cheating at times because it was a wee bit too much fun. You were in that box on your own. Kelly [Asbury] was in Toronto, I was in LA, so I was just on my own. I thought: "I can't be getting paid for this as well!"

The wonderful thing about the talking dog collars in 'UP' is that we were able to hear the thoughts of the dogs without moving their mouths or emoting like a human. The dogs could pant, scratch, and move the way dogs truly do. The animators studied the movements of many dogs, and we had a dog specialist come in and talk to us about dog behavior.

I'm very fond of the strictly visual cartoons I did when I was breaking in in the 1970's. Over time I migrated to a more verbal approach.