An animator is an actor with a pencil.

When animators weren't sleeping, they were drinking.

I was an animator for a while early on, but a 2D animator.

I'm a big fan of pantomime storytelling, being an animator.

Literally overnight, I became an animator... and one that was well-known.

If I hadn't gone into acting, then I would have perhaps become an animator.

I've always wanted to be an animator. That's an ultimate art form, right there.

I'm writing a movie script about vampires with an animator called Michael Booth.

Short films really helped me develop as a story teller, animator, and as a director.

All new tools are useful to animators, but great animation comes down to great animators.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

I love being able to bring an animator's vision to life and give the breath to the voice of a character.

Mike Judge is very specific about how people look in his projects, and I think it's because he's an animator.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer.

To be an animator you have to be able to tell stories but I'm not very verbal - I definitely do it through pictures.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.

My grandfather was actually a union organizer at Walt Disney. He was an animator. He used to draw Donald Duck for Walt Disney.

You need pencil miles to be a great artist, animator, or filmmaker, and the sooner you start making mistakes, the quicker you learn.

I wanted to be an animator originally. I went to art school; I went to art college and everything. But that screen was just calling me.

In some ways we describe 'Boxtrolls' as 'Oliver Twist' if Terry Gilliam had made it. I think he's an extraordinary artist, and animator.

I'm not a public enough persona to be big and loud at the front of the ship. I'd rather more quietly interact with the artisan animators.

Mostly I wanted to be a writer, though for a couple of years there I wanted to be an animator, because I loved drawing and capturing beautiful movements.

All the old great companies were run by guys who knew what an animator meant, and guys who knew how to draw. All the companies today are run by executives.

When I was four years old, some friends of my family took me to see 'Fantasia' and I was totally blown away. From that minute on I wanted to be an animator.

Pixar has invented much of computer animation as it's known today, and I've been very lucky to be the first traditional animator to work with computer animation.

There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do.

When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I wanted to be an animator and even took art classes. But by the time I was in college, I realized I couldn't draw well enough.

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There's a solitary aspect to animating... It's ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

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.

I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.

This new generation of animators was trained in CG. They know all the fundamentals of any 2D animator, but a lot of them learned on these CG rigs. You give them a good rig, and they can make that thing sing.

I've always drawn, for example, and I did consider when I was younger, it was either do I become an actor or do I become an animator cartoonist at that point. Do I work at Disneyworld or something and do animated cells or something?

Luckily, I went to school at CalArts, and then ended up here at Disney, starting in the Animation Building and working my way up. I started as an animator, and then did character designing and storyboarding, and eventually, directing.

At one point, I was hell-bent on being a Disney animator, and sort of got over that in college and wanted to do my own stuff. You know, towards the end of college I had actually planned to go to the Boston Conservatory of Music for musical theater.

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.

When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what's happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what's happening.

Honestly, every person, every individual has a process, and my philosophy, whether it's an actor or an animator, is you try to understand the process that person has so you can get the most out of them, but I think you have to sort of manipulate that process with honesty.

To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures.

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.

In college, I was a cartoonist at 'The Daily Northwestern.' So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that 'Star Wars' came out.

'In-between' is sort of - an animator does the key poses. He'll do extremes, you know, like a character reaching out for a glass of water and then another one of him drinking. And the in-betweener has to do all the drawings that goes between those two. You know it could be 12, 23 whatever in-betweens.

Mr. Miyazaki's specialty is taking a primal wish of kids, transporting them to a fantasyland, and then marooning them there. No one else conjures the phantasmagoric and shifting morality of dreams - that fascinating and frightening aspect of having something that seems to represent good become evil - in the way this master Japanese animator does.

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