Gerald Scarfe Quotes

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

All the children had to wear a gas mask in case of a gas attack by the Germans. They tried to make the masks like Mickey Mouse faces so the children would like them. But I didn't. They had big ears on them.

I just recently did a film with Disney, and they put the drawings straight on the computer. And it's all painted on the computer now and not by hand anymore.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

So, I created these creatures called The Frightened Ones which in the film you see do have mask like kind of heads and they run beneath the ground to hide. Which is what in fact we did during the war.

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement.

I haven't done a book for about 3 or 4 years now.

And when Roger talks about the frightened ones running away from the bombs, I immediately thought of my days when I was young and I had to wear these gas masks.

How do I feel about war? Well anybody I guess, I hope, I don't like it.

I mean when I was working shall we say with Disney, you know they sent me the script for the film Hercules and I had to imagine what all the characters looked like. And to develop those characters, so nothing exists visually when I get the script.

I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left there, I suppose after about five or six years, I then went to the other extreme and started telling to me what seemed to me at the time the ultra-truth about the world around me - social life, and the politicians, and so forth.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.