What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.

I know what we do really well - I just try and keep us focused on doing that.

The thing that's changed the most has just been the rapid technology.

Every single thing you see on-screen came out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed.

The entire exhibitions industry in the United States of America has filed for bankruptcy.

Inspiration comes from all different places.

Shrek is not like anything anybody has ever seen before.

It was the business that made Pop go away, not our inability to create.

I have a very difficult time getting the Napster world.

Since we made Shrek in the digital format, you actually can see it in its purest form digitally.

What I love most about animation is, it's a team sport, and everything we do is about pure imagination.

You can tell when an actor or actress cares about their work. It's really clear.

A company like DreamWorks, all we do is make product. That's all we do. We don't own distribution. We are purely in the creation of content.

I haven't got a lot of patience.

I love to look at The Graduate, or Lawrence of Arabia, or things I had nothing to do with. But you could not get me to go back and watch movies that it was a privilege just to be around them when they were being made.

When you're dealing with clay animation, people forget that every single set is built to scale and by hand.

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.

Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.

I did what we call dry for wet effects, some of the miniatures work and two animation sequences.

Studios have been trying to get rid of the actor for a long time and now they can do it. They got animation. NO more actor, although for now they still have to borrow a voice or two. Anyway, I find it abhorrent.

Well, directing is doing the key drawings, not the key animation, mind you.

Animation did not become the dominant form of children's television until the '60s.

My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military.

I brought in the stories many times. I don't just do animation.

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement.

No movement can afford to be caught in a time warp and exist in a state of suspended animation.

I am an animator. I feel like I'm the manager of a animation cinema factory. I am not an executive. I'm rather like a foreman, like the boss of a team of craftsmen. That is the spirit of how I work.