Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.

And it's not only films, I'm pretty unaware of anything that's going on in popular culture right now.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

Every time I started going in the direction of thinking how it might turn out, I started to just turn my brain around and not go there, because I think the surest way to guarantee that you won't win is to assume that you will.

That's not the part of the story that I'm interested in, anyway. The part that I'm interested in is all the personal stuff. I tried to base the powers on family archetypes.

Oh yeah, I'm still employed at Pixar and I love it here.

I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent.

I think it's the most extraordinary studio around. I would love to do my next project with Pixar.

My kids love anime, but I don't show them the really graphic stuff.

If you look at a lot of animated movies, they don't pay attention to how things move through space.

I think if you have a really big, heavy person, there's a feeling of an invisible puppeteer jerking them around in space. They don't feel like they are moving themselves.

I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.

If you move something 10 pounds through space and then stop suddenly, there's a little overshoot. When you transfer weight from one leg to another, there's a certain way that it happens.

Look, it's a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It's meant to be a great time at the theater, but it's also designed to work on more than one level.

Well what's funny is, again, people say they believed what was going on, but again, Bob's hands are about three times bigger than his feet. So these are very caricatured.

I had about the biggest, longest wish list anyone could have, and 99 percent of what I wanted to get on the screen we got on the screen within our schedule and within our budget and within our resources.

I was not a big comic-book reader.

But I don't just see the movie when I see the movie, I see all the great people who worked on it and all their hard work, because they could not have worked any harder.

Look, I think if you talk down to a kid or aim specifically at a kid, most kids aren't gonna like it, really, because most kids can feel when you are being patronizing.

Ten-year-old boys move differently than middle-aged women, who move differently than athletic guys, who move differently than government bureaucrats.

I have three kids and a wife, and any moments that aren't dedicated to working on this film in some way, or family, are immediately reserved for sleep.

If there are similarities, it's simply because the same thoughts that occurred to other people also occurred to me. I'd be astonished if anyone could come up with any truly original powers that were at all interesting any more.

Without naming names, I think other movies look more realistic but they feel less real.

Well I'm still working on The Incredibles. So I'm going to take a little time off. I've got a couple of tricks up my sleeve. I'm not ready to talk about them yet, but expect the unexpected.

Even in hand drawn animation, humans are widely considered to be the most difficult to execute, because everybody has a feeling for how they move.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

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.

Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.

When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.

But probably for the last ten years or so, I've been fitting in animation work into my other projects.

So many plays with magic in them that would be a terrific invitation to an imaginative animation team.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

I know pretty well in the broad sense what I'm going to do, because I have to know that when we shoot the live-action, so that it'll synchronize. Then I know pretty well when I get to the animation stage, what that scene requires.

The success of The Simpsons really opened doors. It showed that if you were working in animation you didn't necessarily have to be working in kids' television.

I love doing the voice of Batman because of the quality of the animation. The music is particularly incredible. Another bonus is getting the opportunity to work with some very respected actors who do not usually do voice work.

We go through, I think, six different drafts of each script. And then my shooting it is roughly, you know, fifteen percent of the total work that gets done on a show. Then it's all post-production animation after that.

Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.

In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.

Yes, actually. Animation's a very easy thing to watch on tour.

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.

In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line.

Well, for one thing, the executives in charge at Cartoon Network are cartoon fans. I mean, these are people who grew up loving animation and loving cartoons, and the only difference between them and me is they don't know how to draw.

You don't have a face to work with, so your voice has to do all the work until you see the animation. So, a lot of it I had to pull back because it was too big.

We always thought the Tom Tom Club could change to anything, but it acquired this image, which was cartoon animation and this real light-hearted dance music.

Animation had been done before, but stories were never told.