Animators

"Why is it that Johnny Spaghetti Stain in Georgia can knock a woman up, legally be married to her, and then beat the day lights out of her, but these two intelligent, sophisticated writers who have been together for 20 years can’t get married? It’s infuriating and idiotic. I’m incredibly passionate about my support for the gay community and what they’re dealing with at this current point in time. I have arguments with people where I get red in the face, screaming at the top of my lungs."

"Stay away from the church. In the battle over science vs. religion, science offers credible evidence for all the serious claims it makes. The church says, “Oh, it’s right here in this book, see? The one written by people who thought the sun was magic?” I for one would like to see some proof that there is a God. And if you say, “a baby’s smile,” I’m going to kick you right in the stomach."

"Let me make this clear: Ren & Stimpy really is a children's show. It was made for kids. I'm not putting anything in there that I don't think a kid can watch, or should watch. It's completely a kid's show."

"Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads."

"Forget the takes. Takes are cheap shots. Anyone can do a goddamn take. [...] You don't have to be a genius to draw a take. It's emotions—the full range of emotions—that works in Clampett's cartoons."

"Illustration from the late 1900s up through the middle of the 20th century was absolutely amazing. In general, American culture was at its highest skill-wise in every aspect of human life in the 1940s. It's all been downhill since then. You just open an old magazine from the 1930s and '40s and look at the illustrations in it. There’s nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then."

"The main thing missing from cartoons is today that old cartoons were cartoony. They did things you can't do in any other medium. Today's cartoons are very conservative and are more like live action. The characters look the same in every frame of the dang cartoon. The old cartoons squashed, stretched, and did crazy expressions. They were imaginative and crazy. A lot of cartoons aren't imaginative, they just say things. It might as well be radio. There is no point in having anything to look at in modern cartoons. But you can't say that about every cartoon. Genndy Tartakovsky's cartoons are beautiful. The closest thing now to what I'm saying is SpongeBob but even that doesn't go very far. It's like a conservative version of Ren & Stimpy."

"As Norman McLaren said, animation is not a bunch of drawings that move — it's a bunch of drawings of movement."

"John Lewell: Can you tell us: what exactly was Jack Warner like, as an employer? Chuck Jones: Well, what he was like was nothing! We had nothing to do with Jack Warner. After fifteen years of direction (and the other person present, Friz Ferleng, had directed longer than that) we were finally invited by him to have lunch in the executive dining room. This was reserved for executives and favorite directors. Jack Warner was there. And Harry Warner was there. Jack didn't say very much to us. He was talking to other people about other things. But Harry Warner said: "The only thing I know about our cartoon department is that we make Mickey Mouse." Well, that was a little startling. It was the early 1950s, for God's sake! And so when we left, I said: "Don't worry, Mr Warner, we'll continue to make good Mickey Mouses!" And he patted me on the back."

"I don’t mind people admiring me if they want to but I don’t think it’s very logical. It’s not like I was St. George knocking off some dumb dragon or anything like that. First of all, you’re talking about something I did a long, long time ago. Secondly, we were doing things that were not expected to last a lifetime. We figured they’d last about three years and then disappear forever. Remember there was no television back then and no place for the cartoons to go after they left the theaters.But I’m not trying to demean what we did. I always took the work very seriously and I’m proud to have been associated with the work we did. It’s just that adulation is impractical and makes me uncomfortable. Nobody noticed us back then. Nobody called us geniuses. And we didn’t feel like artists. We were just trying to make people laugh."

"The two most important people in animation are Winsor McCay and Walt Disney, and I'm not sure which should go first."

"A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry; once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together."

"Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable–this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience's opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity."

"[W]hen the coyote falls, he gets up and brushes himself off; it's preservation of dignity. He's humiliated, and it worries him when he ends up looking like an accordion. A coyote isn't much, but it's better than being an accordion."

"A comedian is not a person who opens a funny door — he's the person who opens a door funny."

"Everything on Saturday morning [cartoons] moves alike—that's one of the reasons it's not animation. The drawings are different, but everybody acts the same way, their feet move the same way, and everybody runs the same way. It doesn't matter whether it's an alligator or a man or a baby or anything, they all move the same."

"The best way, of course, to understand the animator is to see that he parallels the actor. He has the same responsibility a fine actor has. [...] Even the people who write about animation just don't seem to understand that when you have a drawing, you don't have a character. [...] "This is the first Bugs Bunny" has no meaning. It's how Bugs came to stand and move and act, and what his feelings were, and his thoughts, and what kind of personality he was. That developed over a period of time. And you need fine animators to do that."

"Animation in itself is an art form, and that's the point I think always needs clarification. True animation exists without any background, or any color, or any sound, or anything else; it exists in your hand. And you can take it and flip it. [...] What makes animation is the fact that you have a series of drawings that move. You don't even have to have a camera, you see; animation exists without it. If you want to broaden your audience, or make it more colorful or add music, then you put it under a camera one frame at a time, and then you run it at the same speed as you flip it, and then you have animation. If it depends basically upon soundtrack, or basically upon music, or color, graphic design, or anything else to sustain itself, then it is not unique to animation."

"There's none of this wisecracking and cynicism that you see in … some of the other cartoons. He's supposed to be a role model for kids. He cares about other people."

"There are two kinds of genius, the imitable and the inimitable. "Gumby" is a work of the second sort, the thing so completely, singularly itself, so far off down its own road, so unpredictable and odd, bizarrely constituted and eccentrically executed that there's nowhere for anyone to take it, no variations to play on the theme. He is original and inarguable, and though he has gone in and out of fashion, been parodied and abused [...] whatever insults have been done him are only further testament to his iconic power."

"Clokey says he underwent "a marvelous, life-changing experience" by taking LSD in supervised doses in the late 1960s. "It opened my awareness to what life is all about," he says. [...] — There's a master's thesis for someone who wants to hunt for the psychedelic influence in the shows."

"It’s so satisfying, and when you see it on screen, you feel like God because you’re bringing life to clay."

"I didn’t allow merchandising for seven years after it was on the air because I was very idealistic, and I didn’t want parents to think we were trying to exploit their children."

"Clay is embedded in our subconscious. It has been there for at least 50,000 years."

"The essence of Gumby is that he makes children feel safe. He's their greatest pal."

"An odd outlook on life is the beginning of good comedic writing."

"I expected Vischer’s story to be interesting, but I wasn’t ready for a thriller. The book begins with Vischer relating his childhood in a light and fun manner, but by the middle of the book when he was pouring out gritty details from his heart, I kept stopping myself from flipping to later chapters to see how exactly this story would end up."

"Have you ever been tempted to start your own business- First read this cautionary tale, especially if you think your ideas come from God."

"The impact God has planned for us doesn't occur when we're pursuing impact. It occurs when we're pursuing God."

"I am growing increasingly convinced that if every one of these kids burning with passion to write that hit Christian song or make that hit Christian movie or start that hit Christian ministry to change the world would instead focus their passion on walking with God on a daily basis, the world would change."

"Why does God want us to let go of our dreams? Because anything you are unwilling to let go of is an idol, and you are in sin."

"I never swore as a kid. Honestly. Never. I never smoked a cigarette and I never tasted alcohol until I got to Bible College."

"Fairly early in life, I noticed my brain was weird. By that I mean that I noticed it had a way of looking at normal things from a slightly twisted angle--just twisted enough that it often made me chuckle."

"In truth, I sat down in 1992 to make a kids’ show that I would want to watch with my kids. That would work for me. That would have sincerity in it, but not too much. That would mix what I loved about Monty Python and David Letterman with what I hungered for from Thomas Aquinas and Mother Theresa."

"Telling the complete story of VeggieTales would require much more time than we have before us tonight. Since this is Yale, I decided to craft a shorter version of the story, using very large words. Remembering though that I was kicked out of Bible College before I’d had a chance to learn many very large words, I concluded that my only remaining option was to tell the story simply, using simple words, and chance the consequences."

"VeggieTales is something that, on paper, makes no sense at all. It is a series of children’s videos where limbless, talking vegetables act out Bible stories. Try raising money with that pitch."

"Thanks for coming! And, I have to make another movie, now."

"And for two years, we had this sign up saying we will finish this movie and we changed it to 'did' finish the movie."

"Say you've been to MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Disney Studios in Orlando, you'll know that there's an animation studio where you actually walk out of the back door of the animation studio and you're in a theme park. Now you say, hey, that's pretty cool. Could any animation studio have a sort of situation like that that is any cooler? And you think not. Well, you're wrong, I'd say, because here at Big Idea when we walk out our back door, We have the Timework button, we push the button, we open the door[...] and, we're in a mall. Disney has nothing on this. You can be animating one moment, buying candy by the pound the next, or taking a ride on a little train, or going to the food court."

"That's right! You're watching the DVD! So, the coolness of what the bowing man is doing is self-evident to you!"

"As you can see, we're about to visit our lower level which is--for the most part--full of "Mens" and "Infants"."

"This is where we store our bicycles. A lot of people ride their bikes to work here. And, of course, there has to be a robot to protect them and make sure they don't get stolen like R2D2 in episode two where he did a very bad job in protecting Princess Amidala from those worm things. But this robot is significantly more effective as a theft-deterrent system than R2D2 was in that film. That's why the bikes are here."

"I'll very often just start humming my way through a scene. Say, OK the tempo should be about like this, it should pause here, it should pick up here. And very often I'll make up a little melody just to do that. About half of the little melodies in the score for Jonah are those little melodies that I made up just to use to kind of pace a scene and then we got kind of attached to them."

"The ending of the film seems so bizarre. It is actually probably the most literal retelling of the story of Jonah from the Bible that you've ever bumped into."

"It is pretty clear in the Bible story that the whale swallowing Jonah wasn't meant as a punishment from God, it was God saving him from drowning. So it was actually provision to give him a second chance. The whale itself was the start of Jonah's second chance."

"When we retell a Bible story at Big Idea we will go through the Bible story very carefully. We'll figure out the key plot points, they key themes and we'll set those aside as, you know, sacred, cannot be messed with. And then, we'll mess with everything else. We'll just have lots and lots of goofy fun with everything else to make the story fresh even to grown-ups."

"The most important thing is not the work I can do for God. The most important thing is to make God the most important thing."

"The messages our kids receive from teachers, coaches--and even, with the best intentions, from us — can push them toward pride or despair...toward self-righteousness or self-hatred."

"We're all broken. We're all messed up pigs. When we can accept that, we're ready to become the new creations God intended us to be. And that's when the fun starts!"

"People often repeat the fallacy that "film is a passive medium". The statement is usually elaborated like this: "When I read a story in a book, I have to use my imagination to conjure up what the characters look like, the sound of their voices, the appearance of their surroundings, the house, the landscape. When I see a movie, those things are all nailed down for me, so I don't feel as involved." What the person is describing are the most obvious aspects of a given story, that is, its physical properties. They are, in fact, the least interesting and least important components of a story. I do not read books in order to imagine the physical appearance of things."