Jennifer Yuh Nelson Quotations

If you only do what you can do, you'll never be more than you are now.I never thought i'd be where I am now, but the fact that I am is pretty cool.

One of my favorite things about the Kung Fu Panda 3 is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that's the mistake. Because we're never going for full realism - for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren't going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real.

I think it's really nice to have an authenticity, it's a huge source for us to be able to lean on people who have that knowledge.

Oriental DreamWorks did a lot of the surfacing of the village [in Kung Fu Panda 3] and you know all the little paintings on all the gables and everything? They have meaning, and they could do that because they know what that means, we don't necessarily know about that over here.

We had Chinese artists that would put in elements for the Chinese audience like the calligraphy actually means something so the audience when they read it they'll understand. So there were definitely little things we were able to do that specifically leveraged the artists' talents.

You have hundreds of artists you're dealing with across the world and the scale of this movie [Kung Fu Panda] was insane - we had a parallel pipeline going on where you had two versions recording Mandarin voice actors, getting it to be funny for Mandarin audiences going beyond a straight translation, and then animating it and lighting it, it's a lot of work.

Usually they have to deal with a dubbing situation or subtitles, and it takes you out of the experience. That's why we wanted to make something that felt really immersive for Chiniese audience, but it takes a lot of work to make 2 versions of a movie!

We did two films [Kung Fu Panda], because the first two films were so embraced by the Chinese audiences we wanted to make something we could push further and since this is a co-production, it seemed like the perfect time to create something that felt native to Chinese audiences.

I think the one thing specifically that is most consistent, is that we want to harken back to martial arts movies because that's kind of the genre we're paying tribute to, so there are some similarities to a lot of films, because they all feed off each other!

We go for our own reality. I remember some of our guys saying it is way harder to make stylized art directed explosions of jade rather than a regular explosion of shrapnel.

We actually tried to put in [Kung Fu Panda 3] all the things we wanted to put into the first two films. We're all the same people who've been working on the other films and we all had things we couldn't do, and had to leave on the table. We just couldn't achieve them before. This time we have multiple new environments and different styles of animation.

The story in that particular spot was an ancient history story, and we wanted to give it a historical feeling, which was why we used a historical calligraphy scroll come to life.

When people feel safe, they can come up with ideas. It's important to listen to the actor who is there on the stage and living it.

As quiet as I am I find it amazing I can stand in front of hundreds of people now and make a speech because i've had to do it so much. I've so much support from the people around me that I can achieve something like that, crazy introvert that I am, I never would have thought that would happen.

As I said, i'm very quiet, i don't go around saying "I'm awesome!" but when I brought in my portfolio into DreamWorks and showed them what I could do, my art style is a lot wilder than I am.

I think the best thing I have is the introvert's ability to listen when you're working on something as complicated as this and you have to really be aware of everyone's specialized skills.

Aside from that i'm an introvert and i'm a quiet person. The benefit of that is I listen. It's not like my mouth is open and I broadcast everything and i'm drowning everyone out. When I'm listening to the incredible artists I work with and i'm hearing their specialized advice on what they would do with something then we can, all together, as a big collaborative group.

I think more than being a woman is the fact that i'm an introvert. In the environment I work in people forget that i'm a woman which is wonderful it just shows what a wonderful environment i work in, no one treats me differently. They don't think that because i'm a woman i'll make decisions differently.

Lots of people support me and I forget. But sometimes things happen and I remember, and they say I encourage them, it makes me feel very happy.

8 year old young girl came up to me when I went to speak at an elementary school, and she gave me a drawing. It was great and she said "I want to be just like you when I grow up and direct movies". And that just made me choke up. It was so cute, and the reason why she's looking at me is I look like her.

We have those new environments [during Kung Fu Panda 3] that give a scale to the movie, that are the spirit realm and the panda village. The spirit realm, having no gravity, having this massive space, allowed us to do huge action shots. All that we just couldn't do before. We just couldn't get the scale, we'd have to cheat them. This time we found ourselves more free.

I think we had to push forward to make sure it was different, do something that we had never done before and yet still have the consistency to stay in the same world. This was our chance to do all the things we didn't get a chance to do before. We've been working on these movies [Kung Fu Panda] for twelve years and we have to keep things exciting for us in order for us to devote that many years of our lives to do this.

Po's [Kung Fu Panda] unending enthusiasm is something we wish we could have. We can't help but root for him because of his geek energy.

I think it's because Po [from Kung Fu Panda] is such a geek, and he is so relatable. He is so excited by life and is excited to learn new things. I think that accessibility is something that we all can relate to, there are so many things we wish we could do but don't have the means to achieve it.

Tigress is my alternate personality, especially with children. I love animation because you get to do things you don't normally get to.

You have to make sure that people are still motivated and happy and creatively challenged so that it can all be stitched together. The voice acting starts after a lot of the storyboards are done.

You're right, we both have been working on these films [Kung Fu Panda] forever and we know these characters so well that literally we will react to the same note in the same way. We will have the same answer most of the time.

We went to a remote Panda Base which was insane because inside there were several cribs which held about twenty baby pandas. They were all different sizes and they were all lying there in a long row. It was so cute, I could hardly stand it. I wanted to take them all home with me.

When you see all of the pandas in this movie [Kung Fu Panda 3], they are rolling because that is exactly what they do. Not only were we able to watch the pandas play but we had free range to walk around and get a feel for the architecture and get a sense of where they lived ,so there's a lot of firsthand exploration.

One of the things we love about Po [Kung Fu Panda] is that he's vulnerable. He's someone that we can all identify with because he has those insecurities. He's an outsider feeling guy.

There aren't a lot of female story artists, and it's baffling to me. There are a lot of kids in school that are female and I wonder, 'Where did they all go?' People have brought it up, asking me, 'What did you do?' I don't really know. I puttered along, did my thing and gender has really never been an issue.

We got the best actors imaginable [in Kung Fu Panda]. If we could have made a wish list I don't think there would anyone else we would have added. Yeah, we've been blessed with exactly how amazing a cast of actors we have. To have someone like Bryan Cranston, who is not just an amazing actor, but who has such a range.

It's like being the general of an army [directing a film]. You send people out to die.

A lot of the time in animation is spent getting the story right - that's something you can't rush.

I'm a very soft-spoken person. I don't throw furniture. I don't throw tantrums.

We want to be proud of our work and make sure it's worth the talent of the animators, who spent four years of their love, sweat and tears on it.

I'm not aggressive by nature and it was tough for me to make the transition to directing.

When you make a movie, it's just so personal and then you put it out in front of people and it becomes something else.

Every movie goes through that U-shape where you start with 'Oh that's a great idea. I love it.' Everything's possible and then you face 'Oh, we can't do that, and that's impossible, and that's a bad choice.' You go the practicality of it. And then you come up to 'Great.' But that middle part is when you don't have results yet.

We always try to make the very best movie when we're working on and we can only think one at a time. We want to make this a perfect jewel, and then we'll see what happens after that.

Growing up, my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn't know anything about cameras. I didn't know how to make a film and I obviously didn't have a special effects budget. I was a kid. So I was learning to draw to get down the stuff that was in my head, that I couldn't afford to actually do.

I don't think about the gender thing very much. But when I speak at schools, I've had female students say to me afterwards, "I never envisioned myself being a director, since I've never seen women do it." But after seeing me, they can picture themselves directing, so maybe we'll see more female directors.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

The hidden village was something we found when we went to research in China we climbed a mountain in the Sichuan province where the panda sanctuary is based, and we climbed to this beautiful, mist-covered, almost primordial place and when we turned these corners these moss covered old buildings would come into view, revealing themselves and it was so beautiful and so unlike anything we'd seen that we literally took those moments and put them into the film [Kung Fu Panda 3].

Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!

If you have a movie that doesn't strive to go to a certain emotional point, you can do anything and it will be fine and funny. But if you have something pretty emotional at its core, you have to make it right. You don't want it overwrought or unearned. Everything has to be moving towards this one thing.

Sometimes, you just have to go in there and bowl people over with your sheer force of will.