“Animation can be a full spectrum of different storytelling techniques and different genres.”

Negotiating with Disney isn’t like good cop/bad cop; it’s like bad cop/Antichrist.

I think it reflects well on the state of animation that people are knowledgeable about it and love the fantasy and imagination that goes into it.

Each film I make gets more popular, more press and makes more money. So it’s amazing that I’ve survived and actually prospered doing that sort of homegrown, cottage-industry filmmaking.

America is behind Europe and Japan in terms of accepting adult ideas in animation.

When are you ever settled enough to have kids?

I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I’d always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.

I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing – not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

When we work to end childhood hunger, we are giving our love to kids who need it so much they will never ask for it.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife’s a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

I certainly was a geeky kid myself, but to me, math and science were always these magical things- powerful tools you could use in incredible ways.

And then I got into sports and gave my guitar to my brother Jeff who was just a little kid at that time.