Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Kricfalusi

Nostalgia always sounds cleaner when it comes with numbers. By insisting old movies are "a thousand times better", John Kricfalusi isnt making a measurable claim; hes throwing a cartoonish brick through the window of contemporary taste. The exaggeration is the point: it dramatizes a feeling many artists have when they look at modern screens and see not progress, but clutter - overlit images, overexplained scripts, and production pipelines that sand down idiosyncrasy in the name of "content."

Kricfalusi, as an animator and provocateur, is also defending a craft ethic. "Cinematography" and "writing" arent just departments here; theyre shorthand for discipline, restraint, and composition - the kind of decisions that used to be dictated by physical limits (film stock, lighting, studio blocking, runtimes) and by a shared grammar of storytelling. The subtext is that constraints created style, and style created conviction. Today, when you can fix anything in post, you can also postpone choices until they mean nothing.

Theres a second edge: he is mourning a cultural hierarchy where films aspired to be movies, not franchises. "Old movies" invokes an era when directors and cinematographers were granted room to be formalists, and writers were allowed to trust audiences to keep up. The complaint isnt just "things are worse now". Its that the system now rewards volume and safety, while the past - at least in his telling - rewarded taste, risk, and clarity.