Animation director Quotes

For me, animation is the caricature of life. It's something that we create, from the ground up.

The computer is designed to mimic reality.

And in an animated world, in my perspective, that's the worst thing to do. I want people to walk into a movie theater and be transported to a different world.

I have basset hounds. I have four now, I've had more in the past, and I relate to them because physically we're similar, in that they have very short legs and kind of long torsos, and I do as well.

I'm a true fan of animation, and it's my livelihood. Live-action is secondary to me.

Make sure your bathroom is clean. If you're having a girl over the house for the first time, make sure your toilet is clean, not disgusting. Guys' bathrooms are always the most disgusting thing.

[John Musker] got me reading the mythology and we very early on we worked up a basic storyline centered around the character of Maui. He just seemed like a great character to kind of build a movie around. He's this mythic demi-god, bigger than life character. He pulled up islands with his magical fishhook. He slowed down the sun. He's Pan Pacific.

I embrace my weirdness and the things I maybe didn't used to love about myself.

Those are things that make me different.

Learn how to draw. It's the basis of what we [animation directors] do. Keep a sketchbook. Try making a very simple little film. Try and tell a story clearly and entertainingly. Study the way people move and animate move. Observe all you can, and try and capture that simply in a few lines on paper.

I think I’ve had a crush on any guy that’s ever said anything nice to me

The thing about any character is that you want to be sincere.

If you don't believe your general, you're not going to go into battle knowing you're going to die.

Trying to be a leader, you've got to be really sure of what you're doing and you've got to guide people the right way.

Watching a movie with an audience is so exciting.

For me, coming from TV, you finish an episode and then it airs, and I'm at home. There's no gratification and there's no audience interaction with it.

Everything that I've ever done is not really based on reality, it's the caricature of reality, which is what's really exciting.

Catcalling is pretty much never going to work.

Like anytime a guy's like, "Hey girl! Can we friends?" It's like, I don't know you. I'm just walking by right now, and that's weird. No relationship has ever started from a catcall.

If you go out on a date, for the first date, a guy should pay, a guy should be respectful and, you know, I'm not saying roll out a red carpet, but, like, open the door and just be polite and just have common courtesy. I don't think that's too much to ask.

It was really John's [Musker] idea to begin with to tell a story set in the world of the South Pacific, Polynesia. He started, he just loved the world and he started reading a lot of mythology, which most people are not that familiar with.

There are stories of Maui everywhere in the South Pacific.

They're different. Different areas have different interpretations. But and so we [with John Musker] fashioned, that was kind of the inspiration and we came up with a very simple basic storyline, focusing on Maui.

Taika [Waititi] came up... We kind of had and we sort of named this girl Moana, named after the ocean. And we had a very, a visual outline of the story. And we heard about Taika from people in the South Pacific that we talked to.

We really wanted someone from the culture to sort of do that.

And we heard about Taika [Waititi]. We saw his movie Boy, which that he had directed and written and which was great. We read another one of his scripts that was great. And we brought him in, showed him what we were doing. He really liked the idea.

I mean, we were hearing music all the way through the islands.

You know, we, when we visit the islands, of course since the islands have been churches have come down, there's a church every two blocks. And so there's music in all these different denominations. So we said, music's gotta play a big part of this movie [Maona] to really capture the culture.

We wanted a musical number that would capture the exhilaration of being out on a boat as they were and sailing with the stars and all that. So that's the origin of We Know the Way. From very early on we said, for an audience that doesn't know this, what we need a song that can really have the kind of sweep and the, you know, pull you in. So that was early on, we conceived of like that should be a musical moment [in Maona].

We've always liked music in movies, you know, just 'cause it helps tell the story. It can be emotional. It can be funny. It can be so many different things. And it just and it gives you variety from and again, there's a certain stylization that happens with music. Animation and music seem to go together well.

I loved Road Warrior the first time. I saw The Road Warrior before I saw Mad Max, you know, I saw it in reverse order. And so I was, I've always been a fan of George Miller. This sequence I think got storyboarded after Fury Road came out I think as I recall. So I think, you know, we were inspired [making Maora].

I was always sort of a ham as a kid, just always wanting to entertain and to get people to laugh.

My biggest dream is to be able to be in a movie or some great TV show where I get to dance, and it's about a contemporary dancer of some kind.

I love how much dance is sneaking its way back into society.

Dance is so prominent, now more than it's been before, but I still feel like there's this void that needs to be filled that tells the story of a contemporary dancer who is in a company - I don't know, just that's my dream to do that.

Every woman is insecure, no matter how beautiful they are.

It's engrained in us by society not to love ourselves.

If you talk about big trends at Disney, these movies generally are generated by directors or directorial teams pitching ideas to John Lasseter.

I am a big fan of music in terms of storytelling device.

Whenever you're doing two things at once, you're compromising them both.