Lee Unkrich

“You can be stuck for two weeks on a problem, and then you get the right couple of people in a room, and in five minutes, you get a great answer.”

“With the first 'Toy Story,' we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We'd never made a movie before, so we went down a lot of blind alleys along the way. We went through seven different writers before we finally settled into our groove.”

“One of the tricky things with animation is, because we spend four years on the movie and everything is done so methodically day by day by day, it can be a struggle to have the finished film feel spontaneous and loose and naturally occurring.”

“I was disappointed that 'Tangled' didn't get nominated for Best Animated Film.”

“Finding a good kid actor is like finding a needle in a massive haystack.”

“We try our best every time to make engaging films that we're interested in, and we just hope the rest of the world likes them.”

“Live action movies are someone else's story. With animation, audiences can't think that. Their guards are down.”

“The best way to bring people in and have them empathize with others is through storytelling.”

“It's important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good.”

“The question I get more than any other is, 'What does it mean to direct an animated film?' And the reality is that it's not a whole lot different from what you do in live action.”

“The walls between live-action and animation are becoming really porous, and it's interesting.”

“For 'Toy Story 3' to be recognized by the Academy as not only one of the best animated films of the year, but also as one of the 10 best pictures of the year, is both humbling and overwhelming.”

“When we were making 'Toy Story,' my grandmother was very ill, and she knew she was not going to make it. I went back to visit her, and there was a moment during that visit that I had to say goodbye, and I knew I'd never be seeing her again. I looked at her and knew that I was looking at her for the last time.”

“I don't like 3D movies that have things popping out of the screen. Firstly, I find it straining on my eyes, and more importantly, it distracts me from the movie.”

“I never wanted 'Toy Story 3' to feel like another sequel just grafted on. We all know that if you put 3 after your title, it typically means garbage, and we knew that going in.”

“Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'”

“I didn't want to be the guy who screwed up 'Toy Story.'”

“Everyone looks at our films and thinks that we are somehow able to make movie after movie that does well and is entertaining, but there's an enormous amount of work that goes on under the hood and an enormous number of mistakes that are made along the way.”

“I love movies that are funny and scary and truly emotional all in one film, and I don't feel like I see movies like that a lot.”

“Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at 'The Simpsons' - they never age, the baby never grows up - or 'Peanuts' - the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.”