Jennifer Yuh Nelson Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 specialised advice on what they would do with something then we can, all together, as a big collaborative group, all work together to achieve something together.

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].

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.