Ralph Bakshi

“Look what Disney's done to their animation department. There wasn't an animator in charge of their animation unit!”

“I draw what I feel, which is no more than doing my job.”

“Painting pictures didn't make me a lot of money. I have to eat.”

“What's most important in animation is the emotions and the ideas being portrayed. I'm a great believer of energy and emotion.”

“I'm having the same problems today that I had when I first started, saying that outrageous adult animation works.”

“The rise of anime had to happen. If the Japanese could tell better American stories, it would go through the roof. They still tell stories which are very much oriental. I take my hat off to them.”

“They say I'm a revolutionary, but they're all wrong.”

“I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.”

“Lord of the Rings made me realize that I'm not interested in doing anyone else's work.”

“My movies continue to be found and be sold because there's something going on in them.”

“Film has to describe and show.”

“I would like to have the original ending to my Lord of the Rings instead of the one they released. In my original cut I had the victory at Helm's Deep as the final sequence.”

“I am not interested in slickness for the sake of slickness.”

“As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks.”

“Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.”

“Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.”

“I thought I had the rights to The Lord of the Rings. I don't know how Jackson ended up with the rights.”

“Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.”

“Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.”

“I had the X rating on my films. Now they do as much on The Simpsons as I got an X rating for Fritz the Cat.”