What exactly does a director do in an animated feature?

In a normal movie a director would setup shots the way they wanted and direct the actors in such a way that ideally it would clearly have a certain imprint of that directors vision on it.

However in an animated film or show I don't know what a director would do exactly or how their vision would affect things that sometimes takes years to draw. There are artists who draw the scenes to follow the script. There are actors and voice talents who bring the characters to life.

production directors

Best Answer

The question focuses closely on the activities of the director that occur when on set shooting the movie, but this is actually quite a small part of the overall activities of making a movie. The overall process might be years long, with only a few weeks or months shooting 'film'.

To quote from the first few lines of wikipedia's definition of Film Director:

A film director is a person who directs the making of a film. Generally, a film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects, and visualizes the script while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfillment of that vision

This is absolutely no different for an animated movie from a live action movie - the director controls the entire artistic and dramatic aspects of the movie - from refining the script and casting actors through to the final refinements of editing, sounds and effects. However as @MeatTrademark says, the set and cameras and replaced by artists.

For more specifics of the role that the director performs on an animated movie, see the following article on slate.com. This article states that a director of an animated movie has even more control over the creative process than a live action movie because of the unlimited ability to micromanage every frame of the movie, and argues that an animated movie is more of a single person's vision than a live action equivalent.