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And there is no finer moment, when I sit in a screening, and the parents and the kids are all laughing at the same gag.
The whole style of 'Hotel Transylvania' isn't really goofy. Their castle, it's not super tall; it's almost normal sized.
Everything that I've ever done is not really based on reality, it's the caricature of reality, which is what's really exciting.
There were so many amazing comic books. Like I was around for the original Frank Miller/Chris Claremont 'Wolverine' miniseries.
Akira Kurosawa, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock were the main inspirations for 'Samurai Jack,' along with a lot of '70s cinema.
There are so many sitcoms, especially in animation, that we've almost forgotten what animation was about - movement and visuals.
I remember seeing my first Disney film when I was 13 or 14. It was 'Jungle Book,' and I remember really falling in love with it.
Animation is my love, but I think there's definitely room in live-action. I mean, 'Iron Man 2' was fun, and I got to see that world.
I feel like animation's stagnant. There's not much that's trying to push the artform, and so, for me, I'm way too critical about it.
As soon as you think, 'Pirates are really popular right now with kids so I'm going to write a pirate movie'... that's when you're dead.
I love 'Jack' as one of my creations and would never want to change it from what it was supposed to be. There was no reason to reinvent.
My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.
When we were kids, I know when I saw 'Pinocchio' it had a huge impact. I was ten years old, and I went home, and I was drawing the characters.
If you talk about big trends at Disney, these movies generally are generated by directors or directorial teams pitching ideas to John Lasseter.
I remember arguing with my dad to let me dress up to go to a Halloween party in seventh grade, but I never in my childhood went trick-or-treating.
The one amazing thing about 'Jack' is that I did it in 2001, you know, and it still survived. There's something about it that's connected with people.
Making a feature like 'Hotel 3' or 'Hotel 2' is kind of fun and jokey. It doesn't take itself too seriously. You could do whatever you want, basically.
For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.
If you look back at Disney's 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' or 'Pocahontas,' animated films were trying to get more and more real before CG really arrived.
I used to work until two in the morning every night, then still get up at six. Now, I have to help my daughter with her homework, spend time with my wife.
Going as far back as 'Dexter's Lab,' we've always had these sequences with no dialogue. The interesting thing is those sequences got the biggest reactions.
I've always been in love with samurais, that kind of classic idea about a hero who has a sword with an intense skill and is very stoic and doesn't talk much.
I really loved that old UPA stuff, like 'Gerald McBoing-Boing' and 'Mr. Magoo.' They were simple yet effective 'toons that talked to everyone, not just kids.
Boarding for me, like in the days of 'Dexter,' was really hard, because I couldn't draw as well, and I had people around me who drew really well, so it was hard.
If you have a character who wins all the time - well, if you have a character that loses and wins, it makes him more alive. Bugs Bunny, for example, didn't always win.
I've always felt that kids are a lot smarter than we've given them credit for, but we've never given them a chance to figure things out as they're watching television.
TV is great, and I love it, but to watch somebody's hand-crafted drawings on the big screen is an experience that we've forgotten as an audience, how much fun 2D can be.
My love of visual sequences stems from live-action films like Sergio Leone westerns, Kurosawa, some '70s action films, Tex Avery, and my general love of animated movement.
With features, you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on production and marketing, so everybody's panicked because you literally have an opening weekend to succeed.
I've always thought that maybe I need to do a live-action movie, have it make a lot of money, and then come back and have a bigger budget for animation and do more with that.
In feature animation, cartoony or exaggerated animation is almost taboo. There is this precedent that if you do that kind of stuff people won't like it or it will be too zany.
I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, loving comic books, and they were much cartoonier. And then everything became super dark and muscular and airbrushed, and I stopped collecting comics.
'Samurai' is not an animated show like you would normally watch on TV. We tell the stories from a different perspective - backward, very nonlinear. It treats it more seriously as an art form.
We use music, cinematic storytelling and very stylized backgrounds to create mood and atmosphere as 'Samurai Jack' travels an exotic landscape. The environment is a major character in each show.
Humor is the hardest thing to do. Action is so much easier, because you're just trying to establish the mood, and a pacing, and a rhythm, and an energy. Where, in humor, comedy is so subjective.
I didn't want 'Hotel Transylvania' to be the nail in the coffin for cartoony animation. Because if the movie failed, I could see people blaming that aspect of it. I was really nervous about that.
I have basset hounds. I have four now, I've had more in the past, and I relate to them because physically we're similar, in that they have very short legs and kind of long torsos, and I do as well.
Watching a movie with an audience is so exciting. For me, coming from TV, you finish an episode and then it airs, and I'm at home. There's no gratification and there's no audience interaction with it.
The computer is designed to mimic reality. And in an animated world, in my perspective, that's the worst thing to do. I want people to walk into a movie theater and be transported to a different world.
I mean, for sure, from my history, I have an extreme fondness for 2D. I think it feels very hand-crafted, and you see the artist's personal touch. I think something about CG makes it a bit more sterile.
Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.
For me, I rarely go and see 3D movies because I feel like, when you're wearing glasses, you're aware that you're in the theatre. And the whole thing for me with the movie experience is to be lost in the movie.
I love the way the long scenes feel - one of the characteristics of '70s filmmaking is that you don't cut around a lot; you let things play out. I did that on 'Samurai Jack,' and it carried over into 'Clone Wars.'
Going from 'Dexter' to 'Powerpuff,' there was a lot of dialogue, there was a lot of... you know, we did action, of course, but I was getting burned out on the words, and both shows had this big, thick black outline.
Through the years, I've developed a style or a language that I like, even when it applies to action. All my action principles are very similar to my cartoony principles, because all the poses want to be really strong.
I'm super comfortable with TV, especially in my situation where I pretty much have 100% freedom. That's the ideal, and I've been fortunate in TV to have pretty much everything I've done be at least somewhat successful.
For me, doing all the TV stuff and having the experience directing, knowing what you want to make is 90% of it. The rest of it is just guiding everybody on that one path. But, figuring out the path is the difficult part.
Taika [Waititi] came up... We kind of had and we sort of named this girl Moana, named after the ocean. And we had a very, a visual outline of the story. And we heard about Taika from people in the South Pacific that we talked to.
A good cartoon is always good on two or three levels: surface physical comedy, some intellectual stuff - like Warner Brothers cartoons' pop-culture jokes, gas-rationing jokes during the war - and then the overall character appeal.
It was really John's [Musker] idea to begin with to tell a story set in the world of the South Pacific, Polynesia. He started, he just loved the world and he started reading a lot of mythology, which most people are not that familiar with.