Creativity Quote by Don Bluth

Bluth is selling a fantasy that’s equal parts artistic and technological: the dream of stepping inside a cartoon and steering it with your hands. Coming from the animator who helped define the lush, hand-drawn look of late-20th-century American animation, the line isn’t just marketing copy for a game title. It’s a quiet thesis statement about authorship. Animation is typically a locked reel: every frame preordained, every gesture nailed down before the audience arrives. Interactivity threatens that control. So Bluth frames Dragon’s Lair 3D as a near-miracle, a compromise where the player gets agency without breaking the spell of a feature film.

The phrasing “as close as you can come” matters. It concedes limits while still claiming a frontier. In the early 2000s, 3D games were chasing cinematic legitimacy with motion capture, cutscenes, and Hollywood-style camera language. Bluth flips the hierarchy: games aren’t aspiring to cinema; they’re the only medium that can let you “control” it. That verb carries the subtext of empowerment, but also the artist’s anxiety: control is what the animator normally possesses, not the viewer. The promise is seductive precisely because it steals a little authority from the auteur.

Contextually, it’s also a rehabilitation of Dragon’s Lair’s legacy. The original game was famous for feeling like a cartoon you could play, and infamous for how little you actually could: a memorization-heavy gauntlet of quick-time prompts. By invoking the “animated feature film,” Bluth leans into the brand’s strongest cultural memory and recasts interactivity as immersion, not punishment.