On Animation

On Animation: The Director's Perspective is a collection of interviews with 21 animated feature-film directors. Interviews cover in-depth discussion of each director's career -- focusing on their creative development, their films, lesson learned and advice. The interviews were edited and produced by Ron Diamond.

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Be a fly on the wall as industry leaders Bill Kroyer and Tom Sito take us through insightful face-to-face interviews, revealing, in these two volumes, the journeys of 23 world-class directors as they candidly share their experiences and personal views on the process of making feature animated films. The interviews were produced and edited by Ron Diamond.

Your job is not to be the one with the answers. You should be the one that gets the answers. That’s your job. You need to make friends and get to know your crew. These folks are your talent, your bag of tricks. And that’s where you’re going to find answers to the big problems - Andrew Stanton

It’s hard. Yet the pain you go through to get what you need for your film enriches you, and it enriches the film. – Brenda Chapman

Frank and Ollie always used to say that great character animation contains movement that is generated by the character’s thought process. It can’t be plain movement. – John Lasseter

The beauty of clay is that it doesn’t have to be too polished, or too smooth and sophisticated. You don’t want it to be mechanical and lifeless. – Nick Park

The good thing about animation is that tape is very cheap. Let the actor try things. This is where animation gets to play with spontaneity. You want to capture that line as it has never been said before. And, most likely, if you asked the actor to do it again, he or she just can’t repeat that exact performance. But you got it. – Ron Clements