I'm in 'Madagascar 2.' I'm Testy the Lion. The franchise moves to Africa, and Bernie Mac is also in the film. I loved working for Dreamworks on that film.
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.
People say that the best part about doing animation is that you don't have to dress up to go to work, but I don't believe that. I dress up to go to work. I dress up for an airplane. I think it's just focusing your skillset, focusing on your voice and the comedy.
In 'The Smurfs,' I was actually a live action character. So, I was a real person in that movie. But I was working with animated characters, which is very strange because they're off recording their work, and we're kind of reacting to nothing when we're doing the film.
I wrote for 'King of the Hill' for three seasons.
There's nothing better than voicing a character. You don't have to worry about what you're wearing; you've got the script in front of you, and it doesn't involve your body: it's all about your voice, and it's really fast work.
I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids' show called 'Pepper Ann.'
I hate when people go on TV and tell you how hard it is to do animation. No, no, no. UPS is hard work. I’ve done some animation and here's how easy it is. The easiest job in the world. I go in a booth and I go, what’s the line? And the guy goes, it’s time to go to the store. And then I go, it’s time to go to the store. And then they gave me $1 million.
A simple idea. And the man that worked on it, Mike Gabriel, doubled the value. Beautiful job. I should say triple. We have others like that, but, unfortunately, shorts, which are my favorite approach, are economically of no value.
If you imagine yourself as a craftsman at ILM, you spend your days tumbling buses and animating shards of glass. You're doing a lot of visual effects work.
Well I'm still working on The Incredibles. So I'm going to take a little time off. I've got a couple of tricks up my sleeve. I'm not ready to talk about them yet, but expect the unexpected.
It's a hilarious part of my past, all the sitcoms I did in the '80s. And then all the animation - animation is amazing. It's really been great.
I am a proud mother - that's another reason I love doing any kind of animation. When my son was growing up, if he was watching something animated and I was in it, that was way cooler to him than seeing me in a movie.
There's a big song at the beginning [of Sausage Party], and that was really fun to do. It felt like we were living out a dream of being the South Park guys for a minute.
When you're doing voice work, you're in a bubble where you just think about the story and the words. They record you on video while you're doing the voice work, so they capture how your face is moving and the gestures you make.
My animation work is a major source of pride for me.
I did the voice of Cyclops on 'Shrek the Third'. I don't know how I got that. They said they wanted a Michael Chiklis type, and apparently it came down to me and Michael Chiklis, so how they gave it to me, I don't know.
The most challenging roles were Disney's 'A Christmas Carol' and 'Mars Needs Moms' because they were both motion capture, so there was a lot of physical work involved.
My mother had no interest in cartoons. I remember thinking, 'I am never going to grow into that person.' Which is so ironic - now I get to work on 'Family Guy' and 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama', all of these great animated series! TV was my passion.
You never come home depressed from a cartoon job.
But probably for the last ten years or so, I've been fitting in animation work into my other projects.
All animation is a tremendous amount of work, but when you put 'Star Wars' on the top of something, there's already this bar that people are going to put on it.
I'm really comfortable doing voice-overs, but it's really fun to do animation.
It's always fun when you're doing the CGI stuff, to actually get to work with someone who is real, who's there.
Initially I took the job because I thought it would be really easy. I was like, I'll take the paycheck because I want to do my own movie. That didn't work out. In the first two weeks I fell in love with Kratos from an animation perspective; I'd never been able to do anything like this.
