The problem is, when you're making an animated movie, the studio has an illusion in their minds - and it's really not true - that because it's a drawing, it can be changed at any time.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.
To direct a genuinely animated film, you're really having meetings and discussing what you want with animators who then go off and produce one shot at a time that you look at and comment on.
A lot of people feel that there is less artistry involved in cartoon making unless they have painstaking control of each frame.
When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry.
It's a part of most actors to want to be in an animated feature; to extend the legacy of your career.
Each production has certain circumstances that will bring you to a certain way of making it. It is not intentional, it is not an artistic decision, the way we make films, it is the way we address to our problems.
With animation, because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want, the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules.
I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.
If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.
The great thing about the animation process is that is goes from, I write the lines, it goes to the actors, the actors bring a whole world to that, they bring the characters to life, then it goes to the animators, then it goes to the editor who cuts it together, and then you screen it and it goes back through the system again.