Deep Thoughts For A Monday Morning

“I’ve always felt that characters should be uncomplicated, then put the complicated things into the animation.” – Grim Natwick

“The mechanics of moving the human figure cannot be isolated from the motivational drives and dramatic meaning of any action, without rendering it empty and useless. It is primarily the emotional content of an action that is of interest to an audience, and the goal of animators must be to express this in graphic motion; not merely to move arms, legs and bodies around in space. At this point it will become possible to deal with ‘realistic subjects’ and make them exciting and believable.” – John Hubley

“A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, THE LITTLE PRINCE

“I believe licensing usually cheapens the original creation. When cartoon characters appear on countless products, the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it…I don’t want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor’s voice, and I don’t want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don’t want the issue of Hobbes’s reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip’s world is diminished. CALVIN AND HOBBES was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.” – Bill Watterson, CALVIN & HOBBES

(Thanks to Nick Cross, Harry McCracken and Jim Korkis for the quotes)