animators

"Yeah, that story’s not finished. We have more things written already and figured out for it to finish, but somebody’s got to want to finish it. .. It’s not up to me. It’s not like I can go, ‘Okay, Genndy, here’s $10 million or whatever.’ My life doesn’t work like that. It’s still, well, ‘Why should we do it? Why was this canceled?…Are people going to watch it?’ You still have to resell it and have people want to pay for it. It’s not up to me. .. Yeah, that’s probably the only thing I would return to. Obviously there’s more Primal planned, and hopefully I’ll get to do it, but looking backwards, I have too much new stuff that I still want to do. Unicorn is just scratching the surface of where I want to go."

"The kids’ business of animation is pretty much gone at this point, but adult animation has been steadily rising for the last twenty years. It’s incredible to see, and all the original shows feel like they’re adult, and I want to open that up to features. Why can’t viewers watch animated movies for adults in the same way? An R-rated raunchy thing is fine, but maybe we can do an action, epic thing in the future. Primal proved I had that muscle, and I want to be sincere, because if I’m not, it’s going to fail. If there’s an emotion I want to convey or something I’m experiencing, that’s where I’m at."

"When my career dies, and I can’t sell a project or do anything else, that’s when [Dexter’s Laboratory] will return to save me and help pay my mortgage and everything,” Tartakovsky joked. “But I think [Samurai Jack] was very organic because we never finished the story. I never looked at it as a revival, but more of a continuation to finish it. And I think, the problem with [Dexter’s Laboratory] was the woman who played Dexter’s voice [Christine Cavanaugh], she passed away a while ago. I feel like her voice was the soul of the show, so it’s very hard for me to do an imitation. Unless we reimagine it in some other way."

"[Responding to the perceived surrealism of Clangers] They're surreal but logical. I have a strong prejudice against fantasy for its own sake. Once one gets to a point beyond where cause and effect mean anything at all, then science fiction becomes science nonsense. Everything that happened was strictly logical according to the laws of physics which happened to apply in that part of the world."

"And they [Smallfilms] had a superb ear for creating sound effects that children could easily mimic the moment the programme had finished: just think about the swanny-whistle voices of the Clangers, the beatbox rhythm of Ivor's engine, or the marvellous carousel of just bloody lovely sounds that made up most of Bagpuss […] These are the sounds I hear in my own head when I remember my own childhood, and Oliver Postgate put them there."

"Being creative, having to do something new, invent something, alter things, in order to show you're still there is a personality fault, basically. I think a lot of people who have done creative things do so because if they don't, they cease to exist. This, I know, is true of myself, and I wouldn't wish it onto other people. There is nothing quite like as frightening as having a wife and six children and a blank piece of paper, which is your next year's feeding, and you have to pull out of the sky your livelihood. The idea of being able to live on one's creativity, where you are dubious of its continuity, is a recipe for terrible anxiety."

"We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we'd made, and they would say, "Yes, lovely, now what are you going to do next?" We would tell them, and they would say, "That sounds fine, we'll mark it in for eighteen months from now", and we would be given praise and encouragement and some money in advance."

"Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn’t matter. The viewers didn’t notice because they were enjoying the stories."

"Animation wasn't so much an imitation of life - it was a punctuation of conversation. We always stayed on the one who was talking. It made for a very simple film that was very clear, and there were no unnecessary things going on all around the edges. If I'm going to say something to you then I'm going to do it with a certain amount of gestures; in-between the times I'm completely still. This was how we managed to get through 120 seconds of footage a day, when most studios were getting through 10 seconds. We'd never move a mouth, we'd change the expression, because people were watching the hands."

"Their [politicians] words and phrases are skillfully chosen to keep us complacent and confident in our fairly comfortable world. We don’t usually notice this because ours is a world in which whether or not the words we are offered are true rarely makes much difference to our lives. But, out in the real world, the way words are used or misused can make the difference between life and death."

"All the way through, if you look at my films, you will see that my animation is very economical, but very powerful. Because, I'm not recreating life, I am illustrating a story and telling a story by an extension of the pen. I'm coming at it from the other direction, and what is the minimum amount of visual delivery that I have to do to get this to appear to be alive, which one has accepted more or less anyway that they're there, and to convey the movements, and it is surprising how much one needn't do, and how much better it is from not doing those things that animation doesn't do well."

"That voice of his was loved by the nation. I mean, if I could've been Oliver Postgate, with that voice, and with his mind, and those wonderful, wonderful stories, I would have given my teeth. He puts his arms round you, figuratively speaking, and says "Look, it's all right. Don't worry. Whatever I'm on about at this moment, there's security here with me." And that's the voice that does it; I had to work to be loved, Oliver Postgate, lucky man, didn't."

"I was also invited to give a couple of informal seminars to the Animation School at the RCA. These were so informal that they could hardly have been said to happen, but they taught me more than I really wanted to know about the way in which our simple craft had been inflated into a maniac pretentious pseudo-art."

"That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn't matter what the picture was of. It didn't matter that Master Ho had stumbled rather than walked… I had done something momentous. I had opened up another dimension to the still picture. I had given it the extra dimension of time. I had made it come to life."

"The films we made were aimed at the Head of Department at the BBC, who was about 57 at the time, and she was a nice lady called Ursula Eason, and very humane and ordinary, and full of fun. If we had studied children in any way, apart from having children, we wouldn't necessarily have succeeded in selling the films, because the woman at the BBC had fairly clear opinions of what she would find acceptable, and these were conditioned in some ways by the fact she was a middle-aged, English (well, Irish actually, if you go all the way back) lady, who was brought up as I was on Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, and Lewis Carroll, and all the sort of 'Founding Fathers' of English Tweeness."

"What matters most is the story, and it should never be sacrificed to the method. These days immense quantities of money are spent making something that doesn't call for it. As a result, to raise enough backing, children's films have to be dumbed down for the widest possible market."

"And all of these things, the selection of just the right characters, just the right soundtrack, and just the right tone is an incredibly hard thing to pull off in TV; incredibly hard. You can't fake it, you can't screw up your face and slog your way through it: it only occurs when an innate facet of someone's character is allowed to bleed into the production, giving it a unique personality and resonance all of it's own."

"You can't remember where you came from (In a spiral of ants) You can't remember where you're going (In a spiral of ants) You can't remember knowing You are one ant Over, it's over The pheromones, the self-avoiding odyssey Consuming the colony The Circle rules your life"

"Two trucks having sex, two trucks having sex. My muscles, my muscles, involuntarily flex."

"But something keeps me as a pet: the only house that's not on fire yet. I made it when I was an architect. This is just a side effect."

"Any outlaw tryin' to draw with a pen and a pad Can draw Jim West with a pen and a pad Don't even think about a pen and a pad weighin' a ton Just tryin' to draw just for fun."

"Suddenly, there's a ring in my cell phone; I pick it up: It's the Angel of Death, and he says "Wazzup?" I say, "What is it this time?" And he's like, "Well, hello, goodbye, I'll see you in Hell." He can be like that sometimes, he's such a nut. So I snicker and say, "I'd love to, but Gravity's calling, I've got some falling to do""

"Prance omelette stalking chimneysweep Eleven hatred earmuff okay rathskeller My elusive hula yellow sketching creamy helium gentlemanly communique."

"Lost in solipsism, he then slowly pulls a lever which sets off a mechanism which does nothing whatsoever, but the nothing that it does negates the everything we know because it's screaming just because, because it's neither friend or foe, and so we label it a menace or a grandiose work of art. From its finale to its genesis, we slowly pull it all apart."

"A marker on a grave, marker on a grave Marker on a grave and I know I'm the one who died And underneath the name, underneath the name Underneath my name it says, "He Earned His Life""

"Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this record in no way endorses a belief in the occult."

"This is the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny. Good guys, bad guys and explosions, as far as the eye can see And only one will survive, I wonder who it will be. This is the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny"

"It's not the nothingness at the end, so much as the message nothingness would send."

"Hey you, sit down and listen! Don't be flippant and don't be dismissin'. Think you're a Flash encyclopedia? Eating, breathing Macromedia? Think you're cool sayin' "All Your Base"? Get that Xiao Xiao outta my face! You gotta be kidding me with that crap, Animutation's where it's at."

""Dear Butch Hartman,"

"One of the traits I’ve most admired in Butch is his ability to keep learning, and as he says in the interview, to never give up. It’s something I stress to many of the young folk who come by, but rarely heeded. Keep learning, never give up. Butch Hartman, in a nutshell."

"Justin Cummings, An Open Thank You to Butch Hartman, February 8th, 2018. https://www.overlyanimated.com/2018/02/08/an-open-thank-you-to-butch-hartman/"

"Fred Seibert, May 15th 2016, 7 Questions for Butch Hartman Cartoon Superstar. https://medium.com/@fredseibert/7-questions-for-butch-hartman-cartoon-superstar-9a77815094cc"

"If you guys can't do it yourselves, you shouldn't criticise anybody else. You shouldn't do it. Now another cartoonist wants to have a problem with me, that's a different story."

"But, not so astonishing if you’ve ever met Señor Hartman. A man of deep faith, he’s an artist and writer (and director and producer), talented, confident, funny, motivated, Butch might be one of the hardest working men in show business."

"Hartman's cartoons are instantly recognizable: visually, his character designs tend to be angular and have thick outlines. Most notable is that his are the few characters in TV animation to have colored eyes rather than black circles. Writing wise, expect the characters to be so self-aware that you might be asking them if they are holding up the fourth wall, as well as including a healthy dose of pop culture references, both modern and not so modern."

"“When you have a character like Superman -a guy that can do anything- you have to give him some sort of limitation. That’s the only way to make the stories interesting. That’s where Kryptonite comes in. And Superman’s been around for sixty years. Cosmo and Wanda have Da Rules. Da Rules is a book of rules that the Godparents have to follow. It’s their how-to manual and part of the whole Godparent package. It’s a text that dictates their every move and severely limits them in the way that Kryptonite limits Superman.”"

"“Timmy’s a ten year old all-American boy who just so happens to wear a pink baseball cap. He’s the star of our show. The nucleus. The center. Without him, the Godparents wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t have any fun now, would we?”"

"“Drawing is telling a story with pictures. Writing is telling a story with words.”"

"“Whenever you put yourself out there to do anything, there’s always someone who’s going to, like, try and bring you down ‘cause they’ve never done anything on their own. And so if someone doesn’t do anything and they want to like, you know, criticize, I have no time for them.”"

"“People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re a cartoonist. I thought computers did all that now. I say ‘right, like we just press a button and Pinocchio happens.”"

"March 30, 2016 was the 15th birthday of Butch Hartman’s The Fairly OddParents. It’s not like I use the term “cartoon superstar” lightly. Let that sink in for a minute. Friends was 10 seasons, Mad Men was seven, The Sopranos was seven too. FOP is right up there with The Simpsons, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, and Spongebob Squarepants. An amazing, uncommon, accomplishment."

"“I don’t care how talented you are: be nice to the people you work with. The person you’re rude to today could be your boss tomorrow”."

"TV fans will, more often than not, pay close attention to cancellations and renewals happening with long-lasting broadcast series or hugely popular cable shows, not giving much consideration for how that process works for more niche fare, such as animated programming. I recently spoke with The Fairly OddParents creator Butch Hartman at Comic-Con, and he floored me by saying just how many times the beloved series had been cancelled by Nickelodeon over the years."

"“My mother Carol, really nice lady, lived in Las Vegas, my mom worked at a hotel called the Rio. Was a big casino where, it was a big fancy hotel. Really nice. And, after you lost all of your money there, you could just feel nice about being in a nice hotel. But then you would get kicked out of the hotel because you didn’t have any money. And she was tired of living in Las Vegas. She wanted to come live with me and I live in California with my wife and two daughters. So, I flew up to Las Vegas, you know with a cape and boots, and I landed next to her house. So we packed up all of her stuff in a moving van and proceeded to drive back from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Now, the drive is about four hours. If you’re in a moving van, it’s about eight hours. We’re, you know, talking and stuff. We pass the world’s biggest thermometer … we’re driving along and I knew that Nickelodeon was looking for a boys’ action show because that was, kind of, the talk around the studio at the time … and I thought “what would I do?” What would I call it? And I really realized that if I could call it something cool and have a great title that would be step one. ‘Cause I used to watch a show called Johnny Quest and I thought if I could come up with a show name that was just as cool as Johnny Quest, that’s half the battle. So I’m trying to think of really cool words that can be in the name like, you know, power or thunder or lightning or McDonalds… I finally settled on the word phantom. And I thought ‘phantom’, that’s a cool name… And I needed a first name. I thought, okay, Billy Phantom, Jimmy Phantom, by the time I was driving into Los Angeles, I had come upon the name Danny Phantom. And, then I started thinking ‘what could the show Danny Phantom be about?’. … It could be a show about a kid who does something with ghosts. Maybe, he catches ghosts, right? So I thought, like a Ghostbusters type of show first. I originally thought like a Scooby Doo-ish type of show. Danny Phantom and the Spector Detectors. Him and his friends would go around and look up ghost mysteries and they would catch ghosts and things like that. None of them were superpowered. And I thought no. That has been done, obviously with Scooby Doo. I really wanted to give Danny a white owl named Spooky … and when I was developing the owl, the movie Harry Potter was coming out. And there was an owl in the movie and everyone said no, you can’t do the owl because Harry Potter has an owl … I really wanted to make Danny Phantom kind of a comic book character because I love superheroes … and so I decided to give Danny ghost powers… he could walk through walls, disappear and fly. He was much more unique than the other guys… and one day, I finally drew this drawing. I was gonna colour his hair in last and I coloured his whole outfit black, white boots, white gloves, and I got to the hair and I left the hair white. And I thought, that’s really cool. His hair can be white when he turns into a ghost. And that was the look for me … and finally when the head of Nickelodeon took me out to dinner, the following year, and was gonna pick up more Fairly OddParents, he said ‘hey, do you have anything else?’… and I said to him ‘well, I’ve got this show called Danny Phantom. It’s about a kid with ghost powers. And the first thing he said to me was,’can you have it done by March?’ And I thought ‘wow, that’s exciting. He was ready to give me a brand new show right there and I was ready with a show idea.”"

"Thankfully, Nickelodeon's sporadic decisions don't seem to have Hartman pessimistic about The Fairly OddParents' future on the network."

"“My real name is Elmer. I looked it up. It’s a German name. It means “please make fun of me my entire life.”"

"Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hartman is admittedly one of the few who isn't at all interested in creating cartoons for adults, and has often expressed his disappointment in other animators for implying that there is anything wrong with cartoons that are exclusively for children. He even has a pet project Noog Network, an app which hosted exclusively "kid safe" shows. Regardless of one's agreement with him, it is clear that the career path he has chosen suits him."

"Animation can be used to tell stories. My film, The Legacy of Rubies, which won Best Animation at AMAA, tells a story and to make these young ones know that they can do it too. All we need is the capacities to be established."

"We have animation studios in Africa, but I am yet to see anybody that can say I am an independent animation studio owner. We are trying to see that animations are well generated in Africa. We want a platform where young people can dialogue and be part of the game."