Puppet Animation Quotes

Funny enough, there have been puppets in everything I've written because I have a huge love of puppets. There's a big puppet musical at the end of 'Sarah Marshall.' I wrote 'The Muppets.'

I've always loved animation it's the reason why I do what I do for a living - the films of Walt Disney. This art form is so spectacular and beautiful. And I never quite understood the feeling amongst animation studios that audiences today only wanted to see computer animation. It's never about the medium that a film is made in, it's about the story. It's about how good the movie is.

Watching 'Dark Crystal' now, having made Muppet films, it really strikes me just how ambitious that film is in terms of the constructs, the builds, the puppeteering.

Typically, with low-budget stop-motion, you can get away with a cartoony style.

It [moviemaking] is about entertaining audiences with great characters and great stories, you want to make people laugh, you want to make people cry, you want to have great music that is memorable. You want a movie that, as soon as it's over, you want to watch it again, just like that. That's what it is, whether it's live-action, animation, hand drawn, computer, special effects, puppet animation, it doesn't matter. That's the goal of a filmmaker.

Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. In live action, you're moving so quickly.

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

One time, when I was really young, my dad and brother were watching 'Team America,' the Trey Parker and Matt Stone movie. I walked in and they didn't know I was there, but I got really freaked out by the marionettes - just the look of them, their mouths, those grins. That cemented in my brain.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

Stop-motion is sort of the redheaded stepchild of animation. But it's incredibly beautiful.

I think stop-motion has always been semi-obsolete. And stop-motion animators - people like myself - love it so much that we're always going to be looking for new ways to make our films.

You can exaggerate with puppets. You're not trying to look like real people. The way the Muppets are designed is really appealing. Puppets are best if they're exaggerated creatures.

I started to do stop-motion when I was a kid. You take a Super 8 and make some models, and move, click, move, click. All that. I love all forms of animation, but there is something unique and special to stop-motion: it's more real and the set is lit like a set. But I think it's also a kind of lonely and dark thing to want to do.

I'm a big fan of cel animation, I'm a big fan of computer animation, and, most of all, I'm a big fan of stop-motion animation.

My background is in largely in theatre and acting. I grew up in a town with a well-respected Shakespeare Festival, and I fell in with some kids whose parents worked there. We staged all-kid versions of 'Hamlet', 'Cymbeline', a few others. All the while, I was making short films; monster movies, slapstick comedies, claymation.

Static puppets, I wanted them to move, they're looking out the windows, but we didn't have time to rig those. I have more ideas than I can execute also every time that I do anything. I put the puppets in because people love 'em. I'm a populist in that sense.

You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.

Stop-motion is sort of twitchy; you can feel the life in it. If we were to remove that completely, there'd be no point in it.

Let's be honest, working in stop motion is awful. It's the worst. It's such a stupid way to make a movie. It's ridiculous. You're literally playing around with these dolls that are maybe 9 inches tall, trying to coax a performance out of it.

The thing with animation is that you record the actors like a radio show and then the animators become actors in their own way because it's their job to take this puppets and make them seem alive. They bring their own personalities to the way they move these puppets.

I've always loved stop motion animation and I particularly wanted to do stop motion with puppets that have fur, for whatever reason that is.

While you're testing out armatures of puppets, you're also trying to find the proper visual vocabulary for the character and to come up with a guidebook of sorts for how a character will move and act.