Creativity Quote by Don Bluth

Bluth is triangulating a third space between two mediums that people love to flatten into each other: games as movies, animation as “just” drawings. He rejects the lazy comparison to an animated film because, in his view, film is authored from the top down: every gesture is pre-decided, every expression is a controlled performance. Games, by contrast, are bodies in motion under a player’s partial command. That difference matters to an animator obsessed with timing. Movement isn’t merely the vehicle for character; it’s the raw material out of which character can accidentally emerge.

The stuttered phrasing - “This, this is really movement” - reads like an artist thinking in real time, feeling for the right distinction. He’s pointing to an underrated pleasure of games: the tiny unplanned comedy of physics, input, and constraint. A micro-swerve, a delayed jump, a weird pause at the edge of an animation cycle - the “funny little things” that aren’t scripted punchlines but still reveal personality. It’s humor as a byproduct of interaction, not a gag.

Contextually, this is Bluth the traditional animator grappling with an interactive future he helped shape (think Dragon’s Lair’s attempt to make games feel like cartoons). The subtext is a challenge to both camps: animators should stop treating games as lesser cinema, and game-makers should stop chasing filmic realism at the expense of readable, expressive motion. “They’re actually getting to the character” is less compliment than benchmark: games earn character not through dialogue or lore dumps, but through how a figure moves when a human hand is on the controls.