Science & Tech Quote by Gerald Scarfe

A mild-sounding lament that lands like a barb: Scarfe isn’t simply noting a workflow change, he’s flagging a cultural shift in who gets to leave fingerprints on an image. “Straight on the computer” carries the double charge of efficiency and erasure. The line compresses a whole argument about authorship into a technical detail: when the pipeline becomes seamless, it also becomes anonymous. Animation stops looking like a craft practiced by visible hands and starts looking like a product emitted by a system.

The choice of Disney matters. This is the studio that built its mythology on artisanal wonder - ink-and-paint rooms, painstaking labor, the romance of the frame. Scarfe’s phrasing quietly punctures that nostalgia. “Painted on the computer” isn’t just a different tool; it’s a different relationship to risk, accident, and texture. Hand work carries imperfections that read as personality. Digital color promises control, consistency, and easy revision - which, in big-corporation terms, also means easier standardization and fewer opportunities for idiosyncrasy to survive.

There’s also a subtext of displacement. “Not by hand anymore” implies not just “not in the old way,” but “not by the same people.” The sentence mourns labor and a certain kind of expertise, without turning into a soapbox. Scarfe, famous for jagged, human-edged satire, is implicitly defending the expressive value of the irregular line against the smooth tyranny of the upgrade.