11 minute read
35 Years of Great Quotes
Over the past three and a half decades, we have heard and read a lot of wonderful insights, clever quips and career tips from our favorite animation superstars. Here is just a sampler of some of the great ones that have stayed with us:
“The tacos of success are dripping with the salsa of failure.”
Jorge R. Gutierrez, creator/director, Maya and the Three, The Book of Life, El Tigre
“I always say that the answer you’re supposed to give when you’re asked, ‘Who are you writing for?’ isn’t kids. I am really not writing for the kids, I am writing to my own experience as a kid.”
Chris Nee, creator, Doc McStuffins, Vampirina, We the People, Ridley Jones
“Shrek is not like anything anybody has ever done before!”
Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Disney, former CEO of DreamWorks
“I’ve never aimed my films at children as the main audience. I think you restrict yourself when you do that. But on the other hand, I was very surprised that a lot of kids actually watched The Triplets of Belleville, and they all loved it. My own daughter, for example, was never forced to watch the film. She actually has a lot of Pixar movies at home!”
Sylvain Chomet, director, The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist
“I set out to create a story about a girl. And a funny girl who makes mistakes and then has an opportunity to learn from them. My biggest hope was that girls would respond to it favorably and let themselves be a little less self-conscious or less hard on themselves.”
Sue Rose, creator, Pepper Ann, Angela Anaconda
“The ‘Are you a Tuca or a Bertie?’ question is like asking if you’re an introvert or an extrovert. I mean, sure, based on context, and what time of month it is, and who’s around me, I might be more or less chatty — but ultimately, I don’t think it’s helpful to define yourself by these things, because depending on where you are in your life, you’ll be different!”
Lisa Hanawalt, creator, Tuca & Bertie
“People would ask, ‘How are you going to juggle it all?’ I finally just said, ‘Guys, I got it. I’m a mom.’”
Jennifer Lee, CCO, Disney Animation; director, Frozen I & II
“Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modeling the cat I just didn’t feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.”
Nick Park, Aardman; director & creator of Wallace & Gromit
“I feel like there has never been a better time for storytellers and filmmakers, because the appetite for this has not gone away. How people see it is different, but the fact that people still want to tell good stories and watch good stories, I think that’s what’s really exciting.”
Bonnie Arnold, producer, How to Train Your Dragon trilogy
“It’s so obvious when you see it, you just go, ‘Oh, well of course. Why haven’t we seen something like this before?’ It just makes you see how absolutely silly it is that things are just so limited and so ‘status quo’ when all of these stories are just reflecting the world as it is a little more. You see people like this every day when we walk out the door, it’s just pushing the camera a little over to the left and you have a whole other world that you can see and relate to.”
Peter Ramsey, director, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Rise of the Guardians
“You feel that weight and that pressure of being the first, also because there’s a scarcity of our stories in the media. I’m but one humble, nerdy, Chinese-Canadian girl trying to tell one very specific story.”
Domee Shi, director, Turning Red
“When people ask when The Simpsons is going to wrap up, my standard answer is that there’s no end in sight because anytime I speculate on the show ending, the people who work on it and diehard fans get very upset. So, I always say there’s no end in sight.”
Matt Groening, creator, The Simpsons, Futurama, Disenchantment
“The success of The Simpsons really opened doors. It showed that if you were working in animation you didn’t necessarily have to be working in kids’ television.”
Seth MacFarlane, creator, Family Guy, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show
“I think there’s room for lots of different types of stories and we have enough princess stories, and we have enough toy-driven stories out there. We always ask ourselves first and foremost when we get involved in a project; why, why animate it? You know animation takes such a long time and there always has to be a really good reason for that.”
Nora Twomey, director, The Breadwinner, My Father’s Dragon
“We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there’s some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You’re making it too complicated.”
Brad Bird, director, The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, Incredibles movies
“The more visible women and minorities are in positions of power, the more inclusive it feels. Things are changing (very) slowly, but we need to constantly remind the white men in power about unconscious bias and how to embrace change.”
Joanna Quinn, director, Affairs of the Art, Girls Night Out
“I think 2D animation disappeared from Disney because they made so many uninteresting films. They became very conservative in the way they created them. It’s too bad. I thought 2D and 3D could coexist happily.”
Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder, Studio Ghibli; director, Spirited Away
“I don’t think the war is won for women in animation, so there are still battles to be fought: for more women in technology and in more leadership positions, for more directors, for more story supervisors, for more lead animators, etc. Another big battle is to get strong female characters on screen, with stories that aren’t always romantically inclined, or even warrior princesses, or even just princesses.”
Brenda Chapman, director, The Prince of Egypt, Brave
“That’s kind of what it came down to, and the inspiration for creating the show was that point of, ‘When will we be included in all the fun?’ I grew up loving shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons. For me, as an African American growing up in South Central Los Angeles, I knew that the one element missing in all of my favorite animated shows was us.”
Bruce W. Smith, creator, The Proud Family, The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder
“Our characters act silly, even totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don’t come out of pop cultural references. It seems like we’re aiming at a child audience, but everyone can laugh at the basic human traits that are funny. It’s playful, the humor is playful, the world is playful. You can kind of let go.”
Stephen Hillenberg (1961-2018), creator, SpongeBob SquarePants
“I can speak directly to our young audience about my experience with anxiety or about queer relationships. Children don’t have a reason to not accept and they also have no tolerance for boring, inauthentic stories. They demand that I have fun and that I tell a story that’s fun.”
Rebecca Sugar, creator, Steven Universe
“Any new property is always risky. And my show really didn’t have a strong hook to it. I couldn’t come up with a tagline for it. I just liked that it was friendly and nice, just two friends that hang out in a weird world. I think that’s what was risky. It was boring and you couldn’t see where it would go. I mean, I could. But I don’t think anyone else could see where it could go, in the beginning.“
Pendleton Ward, creator, Adventure Time
“Sony Pictures Animation wants to make films that are really bold and different from what you’ve seen before … All studios and studio heads will talk about being filmmaker-driven, but I am going to suggest that we mean it a little bit more than some other studios do.”
Kristine Belson, president, Sony Pictures Animation
“In 2023, we can celebrate the 31st anniversary of the historic best picture nomination for Beauty and the Beast. That nomination caused such a stir that some worried an animated movie might win best picture every year; a sentiment that, in part, led to the creation of the best animated feature award. At least we used to be taken seriously. Surely no one set out to diminish animated films, but it’s high time we set out to elevate them.”
Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directors, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie; exec producers, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Mitchells vs. the Machines
“What we’re really asking for is for people to have a strong personal vision for what they want to do rather than to sort of follow prescribed network formulas. We will often challenge them to go back and really think about ‘What is the version of this story that I want to tell?’ We don’t want a lot of shows that look and feel the same.”
Melissa Cobb, VP of kids & family, Netflix
“I’m an animator at heart. I don’t know what anybody likes. I just know what I like. And so I’ve always tried to be sincere about it. That has been the whole goal after making all these shows for almost 30 years. I try to have an honesty about them. I’m not just going to do a cowboy show because cowboys are popular. It’s not like anybody was screaming for a caveman and dinosaur show. The fun of it is definitely the animation, the drawing — but also, now, telling different types of stories.”
Genndy Tartakovsky, creator, Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Primal; director, Hotel Transylvania 1-3
“We are always trying to trigger people, provoke, make them care. Generally, I stay away from fear. I don’t really find that a pleasant one. But, obviously, a lot of people like horror movies because they like that adrenaline rush. You just want the movies to have the right balance of truth so people don’t just feel like it was a big sugar-coated nothing.”
Pete Docter, CCO, Pixar; director, Monsters, Inc., Up, Inside Out, Soul
“George Bush is just as scary as the mullahs in my country, if not more. He can go and kill thousands of Iraqis every day, by making people believe they are the enemy, and not human beings any more. If evil has an address, a nationality, you can exterminate all of them. This is fascism. But evil is international and the fanatic is international and universal. There is no difference between a Muslim fanatic, a Christian fanatic, even a secular fanatic.”
Marjane Satrapi, writer/director, Persepolis
“Computer animation is moving so fast that Toy Story looks really ropy now. Whereas there are hand-drawn films from the 1940s that still stand up. Bambi still looks really timeless. And that’s because its language is the language of painting and illustration, rather than the language of the latest technology.”
Tomm Moore, director, The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers
“The opportunity was impossible to turn down — the idea that I could build an animation studio from scratch and pick all the people I wanted to work with. To build the studio and then try to sell individual shows was difficult, but we had a three-year runway of commitments from Netflix. It was an incredible deal.”
Margie Cohn, president, DreamWorks Animation
“I remember hearing Glen Keane once talking about how he feels every time he begins a project. That’s when I realized wow, I guess as artists, we are all insecure and we all improvise. People who think they know everything are people who’ve stopped learning. You don’t want to be one of those people!”
Sergio Pablos, director, Klaus
“There’s something so primal and beautiful and warm and charming about stop motion that I adore. When I started doing it when I was a kid, in my parents’ garage or basement, even as terrible as my early forays into animation were, there was just something amazing about the fact that you could take a physical thing and imbue it with life. It could have that spirit inside of it, even though it’s an inanimate thing.”
Travis Knight, co-founder, LAIKA; director, Kubo and the Two Strings
“Every movie goes through that U-shape where you start with, ‘Oh that’s a great idea. I love it.’ Everything’s possible. And then you face, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, and that’s impossible, and that’s a bad choice.’ You go through the practicality of it. And then you come up to ‘Great.’ But that middle part is when you don’t have results yet.”
Jennifer Yuh Nelson, director, Kung Fu Panda 2 & 3; supervising director, Love, Death + Robots
“I always tell people: focus on what you want to say and who you want to be as an artist and stick to that. If you can, before you do your own show, try to get a job in the industry. In my own personal experience, working on four seasons of Dexter’s Laboratory made The Powerpuff Girls that much better. I had that idea when we were making Dexter’s, but I wasn’t ready to make that show until I had some time on another production.”
Craig McCracken, creator, The Powerpuff Girls, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Kid Cosmic
“It’s not like we have a formula, but I think one of the reasons this show has survived is that it has a big heart at its center. Other cartoon shows have people crap on each other and make racist jokes. But I don’t think people tune in for that. I just don’t think a show lasts for 10 years without a heart.”
Trey Parker, co-creator, South Park
“Kids love to be scared; we all do. But there’s a difference between leaving them hanging out there, with their fears, and then bringing them safely home. Kids love it when someone like them stands up against real evil, something really horrendous and frightening, and wins.”
