Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's a lot of comic book inspiration and stuff I do that people probably won't recognize. I grew up in the '70s, so there's a lot of little things, like 'Three's Company' and 'Gilligan's Island.' Those shows were the foundation of my comedy in a way.
Jack' came from... I had the same dream since I was 10, about the world being destroyed and run by mutants. I'd find a samurai sword, pick up the girl I had a crush on, and we'd go through the land, surviving. That was the initial spark to 'Samurai Jack.'
I watching this Disney documentary, and I'm not Disney, but I was thinking about Mickey Mouse and he became an icon. Walt moved onto other things but he made him exist. I was thinking, 'Wow, is 'Samurai Jack' my 'Mickey Mouse?' Am I stupid to stop working on it?'
I was an immigrant when I came, and one of my biggest things was I really wanted to fit in. I didn't want to be, 'Oh, look at that guy;' I wanted to be part of the crowd. Which is a weird thing, because the more successful I got, the more out of the crowd I became.
Well I grew up following most of the major titles like 'Fantastic Four,' 'Spider-Man,' 'Avengers,' etc. But I had also a lot of love for the smaller titles like 'Master of Kung Fu,' 'Black Panther,' 'The Defenders,' 'Inhumans,' and of course Power-Man and Iron Fist.'
I saw 'Sleeping Beauty' when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring these things to life.
There are stories of Maui everywhere in the South Pacific. They're different. Different areas have different interpretations. But and so we [with John Musker] fashioned, that was kind of the inspiration and we came up with a very simple basic storyline, focusing on Maui.
I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.
I grew up in the '70s, early '80s as a kid, and when we first immigrated to this country I went to a 7-Eleven and for the first time in my life I saw... back in the day they had this little spinning comic book rack, and there were comic books and I was basically drawn to them.
Besides kind of like the Wes Anderson, or, of course, a lot of the European movies, most everybody in the States, the big studios, make pretty much the same film. And we're kind of held to Pixar standards, or Disney standards, as it's kind of always been in the animation industry.
For whatever reason, I think we have one type of animated movie and it's so wrong. I want to do a drama, I want to do an action, a comedy. In live-action, there are all sorts of movies. There's independent movies, big movies, action movies, funny movies, and for us we have one movie.
In college, I was a cartoonist at 'The Daily Northwestern.' So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that 'Star Wars' came out.
Learn how to draw. It's the basis of what we [animation directors] do. Keep a sketchbook. Try making a very simple little film. Try and tell a story clearly and entertainingly. Study the way people move and animate move. Observe all you can, and try and capture that simply in a few lines on paper.
We've always liked music in movies, you know, just 'cause it helps tell the story. It can be emotional. It can be funny. It can be so many different things. And it just and it gives you variety from and again, there's a certain stylization that happens with music. Animation and music seem to go together well.
We really wanted someone from the culture to sort of do that. And we heard about Taika [Waititi]. We saw his movie Boy, which that he had directed and written and which was great. We read another one of his scripts that was great. And we brought him in, showed him what we were doing. He really liked the idea.
I loved Road Warrior the first time. I saw The Road Warrior before I saw Mad Max, you know, I saw it in reverse order. And so I was, I've always been a fan of George Miller. This sequence I think got storyboarded after Fury Road came out I think as I recall. So I think, you know, we were inspired [making Maora].
The funny thing is, I was not a fan of horror when I was a kid. I was scared to watch scary movies. And then along came 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.' And I like those films because they made scary funny, and it was kind of ironic that I ended up doing the 'Hotel' movies.
I had done it all in my career. I always felt, as a kid, that that's what a director needed to be. Hitchcock could do anything in my mind. He's the director. That person has to be the best actor, the best designer, the best cinematographer. Then I came to realize that isn't the case. You just need to surround yourself with the best.
[John Musker] got me reading the mythology and we very early on we worked up a basic storyline centered around the character of Maui. He just seemed like a great character to kind of build a movie around. He's this mythic demi-god, bigger than life character. He pulled up islands with his magical fishhook. He slowed down the sun. He's Pan Pacific.
I mean, we were hearing music all the way through the islands. You know, we, when we visit the islands, of course since the islands have been churches have come down, there's a church every two blocks. And so there's music in all these different denominations. So we said, music's gotta play a big part of this movie [Maona] to really capture the culture.
We wanted a musical number that would capture the exhilaration of being out on a boat as they were and sailing with the stars and all that. So that's the origin of We Know the Way. From very early on we said, for an audience that doesn't know this, what we need a song that can really have the kind of sweep and the, you know, pull you in. So that was early on, we conceived of like that should be a musical moment [in Maona].