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When I was in high school, I read this book called The Art of Animation by Bob Thomas. It's all about the Walt Disney studio and the making of Dornröschen und der Prinz (1959). I read this and it dawned on me - wait a minute, people do animation for a living?

We make the kind of movies we want to see, we love to laugh, but I also believe what Walt Disney said "For every laugh there should be a tear." I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards "How did they do that?".

From the beginning, I kept saying it's not the technology that's going to entertain audiences, it's the story. When you go and see a really great live-action film, you don't walk out and say "That new Panavision camera was staggering, it made the film so good." The computer is a tool, and it's in the service of the story.

Andrew Stanton always said that 2-D animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling. But you can make just as bad of a movie in 3-D.

Let me tell you a funny story. I took the family to see this film one weekend - I'll go to see almost any film that's good for the whole family. And so we're sitting there watching this film, which I won't name, and there are long stretches that are just not very entertaining. My little son - he was probably six at the time - was sitting next to me, and right in the middle of this dull section, he turns to me and says, "Dad? How many letters are in my name?" I must have laughed for five minutes. I thought, "Oh, man, this movie has lost this little boy." His mind has been wandering, trying to figure out how many letters there are in his name. So I told my wife, Nancy, what he said, and she started laughing, and then the story went down the row through my whole family, our four other sons, and we're sitting there as a family giggling and laughing. And I thought to myself, If ever a child anywhere in the world leans over to their daddy during one of my movies and asks, "How many letters are in my name?" I'll quit.

[on Hayao Miyazaki] Miyazaki is one of the greatest filmmakers of our time and he has been a tremendous inspiration to generations of animators at Pixar, when we have a problem and we can't seem to solve it, we often look at one of his films in our screening room. Toy Story (1995) owes a huge debt of gratitude to the films of Mr. Miyazaki.

[on Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge (1937)] The animation of the dwarfs themselves is something pretty much impossible to achieve in computer animation. That fluidity, that squash and stretch, that kind of stuff - it just works in hand-drawn animation.

Everything I do in my life is because of Walt Disney, and how he entertained me as a child and as a young adult growing up.

The previous [Disney] regime had decided that their audience didn't want to look at hand-drawn art anymore and that they wanted computer animation. They didn't care about the artists, the history, the art form. They thought the world had grown too cynical for traditional fairy tales, but I was sitting at Pixar thinking, "No! Hollywood's grown too cynical for them! the rest of the world loves them!".

[on new directions in animated storytelling] You've got to tell them for today's audiences, You can't have a female character sitting around for a guy to come save her. There's not one woman I know - my mom, my wife - who is waiting around for guy to save them. For Rapunzel - Neu verföhnt (2010), the story had to have a little something extra. This was a challenging story that involves child abduction and a poor girl raised in one room for her whole life. But her decision not to wait for someone to save her was what ended up driving the story. We switched Rapunzel from a damsel to an aspirational character.

Every technology that comes into filmmaking is first a gimmick. Think about sound with Der Jazzsänger (1927) or the first colour or surround sound - it takes a while for filmmakers to understand how to use it.

I loved animation and cartoons, even when it was not cool when you were in high school. I raced home to see the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

One of the big moments of my life was watching Krieg der Sterne (1977) on its opening weekend in Hollywood. I was watching all these people enjoy this film, and I thought: animation can do this.

My father pulled into Pearl Harbor four days after the bombing, and he said, everything was still burning. He said they never told the public how bad it was. It was really bad.

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.

Pixar is not about computers, it's about people.

I was born in 1957, so when I was a kid, there wasn't anything called a video game. When Pong (1972) came out, it was awesome.