In touting his Golden Globe nomination for DreamWorks' HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, director Chris Sanders told AWN that he is most excited about the fact that "people have been treating it like a movie. Animators or not, people are talking about it in terms of the lighting and the acting, which is really thrilling because animation has come into its own."

Sanders emphasized the importance of lighting as well on DRAGON (in consultation with acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins, who has also helped out on Sanders' latest, THE CROODS).

"It was lit interactively, which means that Roger Deakins and our visual guys would virtually walk onto our set and light it as though they were walking onto any other real set. In yet another aspect, you could say that this has been treated much more like a live-action film… I will speak for Dean [DeBlois] and myself: We can leave more to the acting and less to the dialog in a lot of our scenes now because when you get together with the animators, you can ask for something that is obscure or subtle out of a moment -- and there's a lot of that going on in DRAGON."