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'The Jungle Book.' It's one of the best animated films ever. I saw it when I was small at a cinema in Tehran.
Sep 29, 2025
The quality and success of Disney was actually bad for us animators because everyone on the planet thought that animation was only for kids and only in a certain domain. The big film festivals never thought much about animated films.
I grew up watching all the great Disney animated films and to be able to carry that torch and know that I'm contributing to the same magic and wonder for a whole new generation is a great thing.
I have some calls out to Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Eddie Murphy. I said, 'I won't star in any blockbuster films if you stay out of animated films.' They just won't call me back.
I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.
I looked at the 1950 animated film [Cinderella], I read a couple of editions of the fairy tale that I have in my house and all of it seemed to say that there was room for a version that delivered, in this story, which seems to invite a feeling in people and I think that is some version of a classical world.
I'm more intrigued by things that I haven't really conceived of yet. I have the luxury of being able to think: "I've never done a ballet or an animated film myself." There are certain things that I feel I'd love to. I just want to keep trying new things and seeing if I'm any good at them, and if I'm not, then at least learning that. I definitely think I'm more interested in what medium I can explore right now than any specific story.
'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.
I've always loved animation and animated films.
Joanna Priestley’s amazing body of animated films have deservedly earned their place in the pantheon of contemporary international animators. Inventively visioned, superbly crafted, and rich with insight into the physical and spiritual dilemmas that confront us all, each new work provides an unexpected pleasure.
I think I might do an animated film next. I'm serious.
[Before introducing the nominees for best animated film] If you're at the awards party with the guys who made the Lego Movie, now would be a good time to distract them.
The music is an important and crucial part to an animated film. You don't think about it, but you can watch Tom and Jerry with no words, for hours, and the music dictates the emotion and where the story is going and how you're supposed to feel. Everything is in the music.
The whole thing that drew me to doing an animated film is that you're freed from the physical limitations of your physical body. All of a sudden, you get to be something that has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a 6'4", lumbering dude, and that is really exciting.
My filmmaking style of remixing came out of necessity. When I was a film theory student at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, there were no film production facilities. The only way I learned to tell stories on film was by re-cutting and splicing together celluloid of old movies, early animated films, home films, sound slug - anything I could get my hands on.
I've done animated TV stuff, but I'd never done animated film work, which is much more involved and much more labor intensive. The animators are much more meticulous and detailed. It's just been really fun and really satisfyingly creative.
I have a goal to do my own animated film, something all my own.
I've been with that project [ Sausage Party] since its inception, since they wrote the script. It took them four years to get anyone to make the movie, because it was so filthy and there was this firm belief that there wouldn't be a market for an adult animated film, even though 10 or 15 years prior, South Park [Bigger, Longer, And Uncut] did really well.
Well, I'd never done an animated movie before, which is why I was so excited about doing it. It was one of the little boxes as an actor that I wanted to tick off. I wanted to do an animated film. So, after my mum got over the fact that I was never going to play Shrek's sister, this was the nearest I was going to get!
I'm there [on Moana] with the other actors, so you play off one another. It's not just your idea of what the character is and what the world is like it would be in an animated [film], where it all sort of exists in your head. It's all right there, and if Diego's performance is doing what it's doing, it affects yours.
There's a bit of a difference in the way he sounds. Samuel E. Wright lent his voice and personality to the animated film with his booming voice. I have a high-tenor voice. Instead, I have to figure out a way to convince the audience to come along with me and accept this new texture and tambour to the way Sebastian sounds. I have a great dialect coach.
I feel like there's a lot of experience I have from doing TV animation that would be especially useful doing an animated film in terms of some efficiencies of the process that are necessary for TV, just because you have to crank out material every week, that could be applied to film.
When you do a voice in an animated film, you don't see the finished product at all. You're not animating. You're not doing the voice on the finished product. You're doing the voice long before.
I am pretty interested in trying to write and produce an animated film at some point, but that's a job that takes several years, minimum, to get an animated movie going.
I'm a huge fan of the animated film 'The Land Before Time' and that was one of my favourite animated films when I was growing up.
Animated films are so precisely engineered - right down to forming lines of dialogue with words pulled from several different takes - how do you translate that spontaneity from the live-action to the digital realm?
I'd like to drill in a little more detail into one aspect of cutting which is particularly close to me and that's dialogue editing. It is a vital part of editing especially in animated film, but in the end it is usually completely transparent to the audience. The vocal performances are reported for over several years and the actors are very rarely in recording studios together. That's why the editor has got to all these different performances and edit them together to create the illusion of spontaneity and real action.
What's kind of wonderful about being the voice in an animated film is you're a small part of an enormous production. And in a way, you get to remain a little bit objective.
Ever since I was little, people would always make jokes about my low voice. But I think it's so cool that you don't have to have the picture-perfect, girly voice to do an animated film. I think it's great for kids with different voices to know that they could do something like this.
If you look at the game and everything, it's not quite like looking at an animated film, because that's total character. This, this is really movement, but it's got funny little things if you look for the humor. They're actually getting to the character.
Most of the animated films I watched, the emotions are all prepackaged like canned music, the hand actions, the sighs.
If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.
One of the best animated films I've seen come out of Disney was the Tarzan movie. I wasn't crazy about the story or the design on Tarzan's face, but the traditional animation was spectacular.
The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.
Sausage Party is my first animated film, and there's a doll of me. There's a doll of all the characters. There's a doll of me, and I found it on Amazon. It just came out. I ordered it, and I just got it the other day. I was like, "I'm going to order 25 more of these." My daughter really loves it.
Each film has its processes. It doesn't mean that all animated films have to be like "Boy and the World," but creators have to have total freedom. There are films that are born with the purpose to sell. They are still admirable films with great artists and great visuals, but we wanted to use a more radical approach to create art. That's what we tried to do.
That's the thing with animated films - I often feel that puppets get the better parts compared to us normal actresses.
I really like the animated film process. It's kind of like doing a play, because you can experiment with it, rewrite it, screen it, go back, then work on it a little bit more. If the joke doesn't work, you can fix it. It's different from a live action movie.
I do think that animated films have the ability to touch you someplace. There is something about live action movies that is different because we know the characters are real people, so they always stay flawed for us somehow. But animated films touch us in a very clear, uncomplicated place. They have that ability. And an animated character can make an expression in a way humans can't do.
You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.
So much emotion can be brought in an animated film that's very hard to get in a live-action film. I haven't quite put my finger on why, but it might be because the characters can make facial expression that, if you made them in a movie, they'd call them corny.
I love animated films when they are good, because they do bring a lot of emotion and heart that's very difficult to get in a live action film.
The marketing department is really an important part of getting an animated film to work. If the people running it are used to selling live action films and the hard rock music and the sex and all those things... Anything outside that, they just don't know what to do with it.
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