It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.
How mad would it actually be to do an 'Avatar' type animation film, but about something mundane like a Winn-Dixie cashier's day at work? That'd be something else, I think.
I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.
In musical theater you have to be very big and very animated, while film and television are more toned down.
At that time, the people that were in the animated film business were mostly guys who were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists. In other words, their ability to draw living things was practically nil.
Wouldn't it be great to see a line in all movie credits that truthfully says, 'Nobody was harmed in the making of this film, and at the cast party, all animals got a belly belly belly rub.'
With animated film, you have to create the sonic world; there's nothing there. You get to color things in more and you're allowed to overreach yourself a little bit more, and it's great fun.
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.
One of the big moments of my life was watching 'Star Wars' on its opening weekend in Hollywood. I was watching all these people enjoy this film, and I thought: animation can do this.
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.
My first student film was Orientation, which was basically the set-up for Animal House. There are a couple of scenes that we later borrowed in some form.
There are lots of wonderful actors doing animated films these days, but I prefer it when you can't recognise them - it means they've really become the character.
I worked as a production assistant on a couple of films, and finally, I got a job at an animation studio as an editor. After that, work begat work. I got into directing music videos and commercials.
What's kind of wonderful about being the voice in an animated film is you're a small part of an enormous production. And in a way, you get to remain a little bit objective.
I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the env...
In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we’re in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the...
When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living.
It's weird - on almost every film I've worked on, the first sequence we storyboard ends up being the first sequence that goes into animation, and ends up being almost shot-for-shot the same.
If I'm really feeling good and not having a lot of interruptions, I can do a minute of animation a day, so theoretically, I could do a film in three months without any interruptions.
On a live-action movie, things happen that are unexpected. In animation, you have to fabricate the feeling. That takes a tremendous amount of nuance until the film becomes sentient and gives back.
'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.
