Creativity Quote by Don Bluth

Bluth is talking like an old-school animator who’s watched a new tool arrive, get fetishized, and then misunderstood. By calling 3D “a great brush,” he refuses the culture-war framing that pits hand-drawn purity against digital progress. The compliment is real, but it’s also a boundary line: 3D is “fabulous” for some stories, not a default upgrade for all of them.

The subtext is craft politics. “Brush” is a deliberately tactile metaphor, smuggling computers back into the language of the studio: choice, texture, intention. He’s reminding audiences (and executives) that style isn’t a skin you slap on a screenplay; it’s part of the storytelling grammar. When he says other brushes are “exclusive to a different kind of story,” he’s defending the idea that certain emotional registers - softness, lyricism, melancholy, even menace - can be native to specific visual languages. Not because 3D can’t do feeling, but because every medium carries its own habits: what it emphasizes, what it shortcuts, what it flatters.

Context matters: Bluth came up in Disney’s hand-drawn tradition, then built a career on lush, expressive 2D features that often leaned darker and more romantic than the studio norm. He lived through the industry’s pivot where 3D became synonymous with “modern,” and 2D got treated like a nostalgia act. This quote pushes back without sounding reactionary. It’s an argument for pluralism in animation - and a quiet warning against letting market momentum dictate aesthetics.