"Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally"
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Animation looks like pure play, but Barbera is letting you in on the industrial secret: fantasy is intimate work done in public, under deadline, with a roomful of opinions. The line hinges on a neat contradiction. “Very personal” grants the artist full ownership of the imaginative spark - the private reservoir of taste, childhood memory, and instinct that makes a character snap alive. Then he swivels: “but you can’t take the process too personally.” Not the art. The process.
That distinction is the whole survival kit of mid-century American cartoons, where Barbera and Hanna built worlds (Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones) inside a factory system: story conferences, network notes, censors, budget constraints, recycled animation cycles. In that environment, if every rejected gag feels like a rejection of you, you burn out fast. Barbera is advising a professional detachment that protects the fragile core of invention from the necessary roughness of collaboration.
Subtext: ego is both fuel and hazard. Fantasy demands vulnerability - you have to care enough to make something that didn’t exist. But production demands elasticity: take the note, cut the scene, retool the character, move on. The “can’t” isn’t moralizing; it’s practical. Barbera isn’t romantic about genius. He’s describing craft as an ongoing negotiation between inner vision and external friction, where the only way to keep making magic is to stop treating every bruise as a betrayal.
That distinction is the whole survival kit of mid-century American cartoons, where Barbera and Hanna built worlds (Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones) inside a factory system: story conferences, network notes, censors, budget constraints, recycled animation cycles. In that environment, if every rejected gag feels like a rejection of you, you burn out fast. Barbera is advising a professional detachment that protects the fragile core of invention from the necessary roughness of collaboration.
Subtext: ego is both fuel and hazard. Fantasy demands vulnerability - you have to care enough to make something that didn’t exist. But production demands elasticity: take the note, cut the scene, retool the character, move on. The “can’t” isn’t moralizing; it’s practical. Barbera isn’t romantic about genius. He’s describing craft as an ongoing negotiation between inner vision and external friction, where the only way to keep making magic is to stop treating every bruise as a betrayal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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