"Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue"
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Wood is naming a quiet rule of the medium: in animation, the page has to do more of the heavy lifting because the camera, the actors, and even physics don’t exist yet. A live-action script can lean on what a location scout finds and what a performer communicates with an eyebrow. An animation script has to manufacture those advantages from scratch, translating an imagined world into actionable instructions for storyboard artists, layout, design, and animation crews. “Much more descriptive” isn’t literary flourish; it’s production infrastructure.
The second half, “lighter on dialogue,” signals a different kind of storytelling economy. Animation is expensive by the second, so the smartest scenes are built to communicate through motion, composition, timing, and visual gags rather than characters explaining themselves. Dialogue becomes seasoning, not the meal. It’s also a nod to animation’s global, multi-audience reality: visuals travel cleanly across languages and ages, while wordy scenes invite localization headaches and tonal drift.
Subtextually, Wood is pushing back on the lazy stereotype that animation is “just cartoons” and therefore simple. He’s implying the opposite: animation writing is both more collaborative and more technical, closer to blueprinting than to playwrighting. The line reads like advice to writers crossing over from live action: stop fetishizing clever banter and start thinking like a director, an editor, and a choreographer. If you can’t see the scene, the crew can’t build it.
The second half, “lighter on dialogue,” signals a different kind of storytelling economy. Animation is expensive by the second, so the smartest scenes are built to communicate through motion, composition, timing, and visual gags rather than characters explaining themselves. Dialogue becomes seasoning, not the meal. It’s also a nod to animation’s global, multi-audience reality: visuals travel cleanly across languages and ages, while wordy scenes invite localization headaches and tonal drift.
Subtextually, Wood is pushing back on the lazy stereotype that animation is “just cartoons” and therefore simple. He’s implying the opposite: animation writing is both more collaborative and more technical, closer to blueprinting than to playwrighting. The line reads like advice to writers crossing over from live action: stop fetishizing clever banter and start thinking like a director, an editor, and a choreographer. If you can’t see the scene, the crew can’t build it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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