Animation Evolution Quotes

Are we blasphemous in saying that 2-D is largely a thing of the past, and computer-generated animation is the present and future? It's all about creating a better experience for the viewer - and that includes 3-D.

In 'Bojack,' at least at first, we had to couch some of the sadder or weirder or introspective stuff we were doing in the costume of a typical adult animated comedy. With 'Undone,' it felt like we'd outgrown that expectation.

At first the cartoon medium was just a novelty, but it never really began to hit until we had more than tricks... until we developed personalities. We had to get beyond getting a laugh. They may roll in the aisles, but that doesn't mean you have a great picture. You have pathos in the thing.

Especially in the last 10 years, the writing on animated shows has jumped by leaps and bounds.

When we first started, everything was animated, everything was comedy, and there was really nothing that was longer than about two minutes, because that's all audiences would watch.

If you were to look at an old 'Betty Boop' cartoon or an 'Out of the Ink Well' animation, there are many things about 'Adventure Time' that really remind you of that, even though it doesn't look like any of those cartoons.

I think the idea of a traditional story being told using traditional animation is likely a thing of the past.

We actually tried to put in [Kung Fu Panda 3] all the things we wanted to put into the first two films. We're all the same people who've been working on the other films and we all had things we couldn't do, and had to leave on the table. We just couldn't achieve them before. This time we have multiple new environments and different styles of animation.

If you look back at Disney's 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' or 'Pocahontas,' animated films were trying to get more and more real before CG really arrived.

I feel like animation's stagnant. There's not much that's trying to push the artform, and so, for me, I'm way too critical about it.

Animation had been used only for things like King Kong and the destruction of cities, which was very popular in the 1950s. I got tired of destroying cities. I destroyed New York, I destroyed San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Rome, and Washington. I was looking for a new outlet, and I came across the Sinbad legends.

Walt Disney had always tried to get more dimension in his animation and when I saw these tapes, I thought, This is it! This is what Walt was waiting for! But when I looked around, nobody at the studio at the time was even halfway interested in it.

I think 2-D 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 2-D and 3-D could coexist happily.

I grew up, obviously, watching tons of animation; Saturday morning cartoons or anything that we could get our hands on. And then when 'The Simpsons' premiered, that just kind of changed the landscape of everything. We hadn't had prime time animations since 'The Flintstones.'

I've been working in computer animation for 25 years. I'm obviously a devotee of the technology. I just think it's the one aspect of the medium that's going to continue to revolutionize the filmmaking. It's constantly changing and it's constantly opening up new possibilities. The technology is evolving where 2-D animation was ultimately limited by how long you could pay how many people to make a movie. I mean computers, not that it's in anyway a labor saving device, but it promises to open up exciting new technical possibilites.

Nobody does animation better than Disney; it's just that some of us wanted out of the box. Burton was one. I was another. We were the mutual complaint society.

In '83, not only was there no such thing as performance motion capture technology, there was no such thing as digital animation. This was the analog era.