He was mostly leaping tall buildings in the beginning. There were cases where he would leap off a tall building or swoop down, and at that point he would look like he was flying, I suppose. It was just natural to draw him like that.
The identity of Studio Ghibli movies are how the characters move. They move like live, real people.
The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.
If you can find a way your character moves, you know more about your character than you'd ever dream.
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.
Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.
So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.
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.
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
When you're shooting you go to references in your mind. You think about how you should stand in these particular clothes, or how you should move. You think about the different characters you're playing, really.
Raft told me how to walk with him in a scene: We'd start off in a long shot normal, and about the time we got together in a close-up, I'd be bending my knees so I'd be shorter.
After 'Kong,' my knuckles have never recovered because I had to wear very heavy weights on my forearms and around my hips and ankles to get the sense of size and scale of the movement of the character... You are telling your body that you are these things and that you're feeling these thoughts and that you're experiencing these experiences.
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.
It is for the latter that I always wanted to be an actor: to play characters who are always on the move.
The physicality of any character is always split up into fast, slow, high energy, low energy, what kind of personality he has. So that's where the physicality comes in. And flying through the air is just something you have to do if they ask you.
I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.
There's something very strange and wrong-seeming about drawing realistic eyeballs in comics, at least in the mode of comics where action is carried more by the movement of the characters rather than where narration links disparately framed selected images.
The animators working with these 3D models, they're artists, right? They're great at what they do. They're artful in how they move characters about.
For me, the walk of the character is always the first part that I must define for myself.
It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.
Movement is very important to a character, no matter what period you're working in. So when it came to playing Emma Jung and lacing up in the corset, it was really not a foreign thing for me.
Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.
I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know.
Silent is about needing to make a scene shorter by having physical things to cut to. That way, you can manipulate a character to the other side of the room. But, if they say the wrong thing, it might locate that action in a particular part of the scene. It's a mechanical need.
If you look at a lot of animated movies, they don't pay attention to how things move through space.
