Art & Creativity Quote by Ralph Bakshi

Bakshi’s optimism lands with the hard-earned credibility of someone who’s watched the medium get dismissed, domesticated, and then reborn anyway. Coming from a director who spent decades fighting the idea that animation is just “for kids,” the line reads less like a soothing mantra and more like a wager: the form can’t be kept in its box for long.

“Resilient” is a pointed word. It implies damage has been done - by studios chasing safe IP, by TV budgets that flatten ambition, by cultural gatekeepers who treat animation as a genre instead of a language. Bakshi doesn’t name the villains, but the subtext is clear: animation has been periodically hollowed out by commerce and taste-making, yet it survives because its tools are too flexible to stay constrained. When live-action trends harden into formula, animation can mutate faster, cheaper, stranger.

The second sentence pivots to a bigger claim: “as art always recovers.” That’s Bakshi smuggling a cyclical theory of culture into a pep talk. Art doesn’t progress in a straight line; it relapses into mediocrity and then snaps back when a new generation gets bored, broke, or angry enough to innovate. “There’s always cycles of good art” undercuts doomsaying without pretending the current moment isn’t compromised. It’s also a subtle call to persistence: if you’re making work in a down cycle, you’re not late - you’re early.

In an era of franchise animation and algorithmic taste, Bakshi’s faith is bracing precisely because it isn’t sentimental. It’s almost mechanical: the medium gets watered down, then somebody sharpens it again.