“See that house with the Ivy on it? From that rooftop, what if you leapt onto the next rooftop, dashed over that blue & green wall, climbed and jumped up the pipe, ran across the roof and jumped to the next? You can, in animation.If you could walk along the cable, you could see the other side. When you look from above, so many things reveal themselves to you. Maybe race along the concrete wall. Suddenly, there in your humdrum town there is a magical movie. Isn’t it fun to see things that way? Feels like you could go somewhere far beyond……maybe you can…”

“Out of the ugliness of the ironworks lepers will eat, children will be born, their parents will grow old.”

“Watching John Lasseter's films, I think I can understand better than anyone that what he's doing, is going straight ahead with his vision and working really hard to get that vision into film form. And I feel that my understanding this of him is my friendship towards him.”

“I don't intentionally make deep movies.”

“We get strength and encouragement from watching children.”

“It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.”

“We live in an age when it is cheaper to buy the rights to movies than to make them.”

“Utopia exists only in one's childhood life.”

“There are so many things we can’t do anything about if we think about generalities. Things won’t go well because there is a huge gap between the generalities and the particulars. If we see generalities from the top of a mountain or from a plane, we feel it’s hopeless, but if we go down, there is a nice road running about fifty meters, we feel this is a nice road, and if the weather is fine and shining, we feel we can go on… Since the people in the community are cleaning up the river in my neighborhood, I join them when I have the time. A human can often be satisfied with the particulars. That’s what I like best these days.”

“Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.”

“The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.”