Don Bluth Quotations

We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.

If the machines can take the drudgery out of it and just leave us with the joy of drawing, then that's the best of both worlds - and I'll use those computers!

As you follow the escapades or the journey of the hero through a story, it evokes some kind of emotion in the viewers. The director's job is to make sure that the audience goes through the journey and has an emotional reaction.

You've got to be able to make animation for much less... Less is not the studio's way.

Reese Witherspoon. She's sophisticated enough that you just like her. You like her and she's smart.

I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.

I remember when we were doing the first Dragon's Lair, I got really involved with coming up with all the little rooms and what was the danger in the room and going into it with bats and spiders and snakes.

The heart of Dragon's Lair has always been its compelling story. With Dragon's Lair 3D, we think the team has really created an interactive animated movie.

The only one that seems to be able to hold the business is Disney. They do it is because they have a fabulous philosophy about marketing- but even they wavered.

When business executives are making the artistic decisions and don't understand animation, things can go awry.

It just seems like the whole, overall animation world is trying to go where maybe animation doesn't belong.

The marketing department is really an important part of getting an animated film to work. If the people running it are used to selling live action films and the hard rock music and the sex and all those things... Anything outside that, they just don't know what to do with it.

I think we have to bottom out. When the studios jump out of the ring, perhaps the artist can get back in.

You just can't keep pouring money down an endless hole and never recoup any of it. It's got to be a business.

Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.

But I've been surprised over the years. I mean, someone told me the other day that maybe 360 million people have played this game in the world. That's a lot of people.

I prefer that animation reach into places where live action doesn't go, and it seems like all of animation nowadays is trying to go where live action is.

I'm saddened to see that everyone's pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can't be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn't mean that we can't listen to jazz.

If you look at the game and everything, it's not quite like looking at an animated film, because that's total character. This, this is really movement, but it's got funny little things if you look for the humor. They're actually getting to the character.

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.

Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.

With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.

There's about 260 rooms in the new castle which you go through, but it's all about the game play.

Usually with things, you go where you can find the financing to do it.

Shelf-life for a regular video game usually is about three to five years, and that's it.

How can you have a director that doesn't go to work with the crew every day and talk to them?

We started getting the script to different people and we were in the business of trying to fund it so we could get it off and running, and all the characters and sets designed and everything.

Universal, they've been pretty good too, but Steven rules his own kingdom, so you don't tell him what to do with his pictures.

We'd love to do Space Ace 3D. It has a lot of potential. But, it is really up to the publishers.

It's whatever sells; it's the business of it.

The studios will go wherever they smell money. It's like sharks to the blood.

I cannot explain why they made that sequel to Secret of NIMH. Because they claim that it the original didn't make money, so what was the enthusiasm to make a sequel?

Dragon's Lair 3D is about as close as you can come to controlling an animated feature film.

I'm also very pleased that we were able to include a full orchestrated score for Dragon's Lair 3D. The 40 different music pieces blend with the action to make you feel more a part of the whole adventure.

I think the work that they do and the style of 3D graphics is absolutely fabulous and I think it's a great brush to use for some stories. And there are other brushes that I think are exclusive to a different kind of story.

Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them-the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome.

Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them - the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome.

I can look at one that Warner Brothers just did - The Iron Giant. A really cool movie. I truly enjoyed that movie.

I have been involved with script approval, approvals of character designs and the art direction, on kind of a consultant basis.

I think the Web is sufficiently different, that it has access to people, and that you can probably distribute your own film right there

I think since all the studios have entered into the business, everything is about 'get it done, get it cheaper, get it faster, make more money, and please the stockholders.'

When I think about how fat the studios have become, I laugh. You have 24 people in the layout department-we're fat with personnel. All the rules and attitudes change in that kind of environment.

You know what, the second Dragon's Lair game... I think very few people saw it. And Dirk and Daphne did get married and they had children. They have 13 kids. And she still looks great!

We've written a song for this game, which is a bubble-gum song and is only to be listened to once, I think.

When we originally made the game Dragon's Lair, we had no idea the impact it would have on the game market. It was something new at the time; it was the first of the laserdisc games, and random-access was a brand-new technology.

We had this laserdisc before, you know, and now you just put it on this little teeny-weeny thing.

We figured out that we were going to have to do CGI and 2-D animation on screen at the same time. Sixty-five percent of the picture is CGI. That's a big mix. When you marry those two, they can either look very foreign to each other, or they look like they belong together.

We didn't know any better, so we rushed in. We did the best you could. On Secret of NIMH, we had two layout people, three background people, and 10 animators. That's how we made the movie.

Computers have taken so much drudgery out of it. Just one to mention, painting the picture. It used to be that everything was wet, everything was with a brush. Everything was wiggle it in water, wipe out your brush, get a new jar of paint, spill the paint, mop it up.

Disney knows that they're in a formulaic rut, and they're trying very hard, I think, to find something that's different. They've got so much money, they can throw it at anything.

The studios are not hiring right now, and they're beginning to have second thoughts about what they're producing. Even Dreamworks.

Dragon's Lair, for some reason, still commands shelf-life. If you go into a store, they will have Dragon's Lair somewhere in the store. And for 18 years this has been going on. So let's say that must mean there's an audience that wants to see it.

A picture will wind up costing $90 million dollars... Well, animation can't stand that. It can't bear the weight of a $90 million dollar budget, because it can't recoup. Then everybody's surprised when it only pulls in $50-$60 million domestic.

The best studio exec that we worked with was Bill Mechanic at Fox, because he was a listener. He was pliable, flexible.

I knew nothing about sci-fi. We took it. I figured, space hardware, everybody's seen, and you can call in Industrial Light & Magic and all the pros in the world.

If you go back to-I think it was Hunchback, then there was Hercules-those picture were sagging. They were in a formula groove. The audience knew that. The box office fell off, but it came back up with Tarzan.

In the corporate structure, you get people who are highly competitive with each other... Trying to get more money and more prestige.

I'd put David Schwimmer as Dirk... he's just kind of got that look.

Anastasia was disappointing. This is very important, that this movie-Titan-works.

All the painting on the cels was farmed out to women all over the city of Los Angeles. They took it into their kitchens and painted it.