Gerald Scarfe Quotations

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.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

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

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.

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.

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.

England was incredibly dull and everything exciting seemed to be in America.

And um, when I came back to England I put a very complex soundtrack on it, featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix, right through to Neil Diamond, you know, everybody that was kind of popular who was kind of popular at that time.

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

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.

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.

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

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

And then I think they asked me to work on Wish You Were Here, which was the next album coming up. And I didn't do anything for a long time. I had other projects, and I didn't get around to doing anything for a bit.

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

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.

So the whole of war, when you look at it is probably run by professional soldiers, and the rest of them are just recruits, or people who are just forced to join the army.

You know I have done about a dozen books.

But on the broader issues, the injustices in the world. You know, that would be something pretty much anyone would agree on I guess.

I simply got a phone call one day saying that Roger and Nick had both seen this on BBC Television and thought that they would like to meet me.

So when I make my drawings, although I may not be consciously basing it on somebody or basing it on my experiences, I expect to a certain extent I am.

There were shelters underneath the ground everywhere. They were called Anderson Shelters, and we would go down into them if the siren went.