"In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line"
About this Quote
The phrasing does a lot of work. “Pencils and paper” isn’t nostalgia so much as a shorthand for tactile intuition: timing you feel in your wrist, lines you discover by mistake, character acting that emerges from a messy page. “Computer people” becomes shorthand for a different kind of literacy: systems, pipelines, optimization, repeatability. Bluth’s “usually” is the tell; he knows the categories are porous, but he’s naming an everyday hierarchy on studio floors where one side is treated as the soul and the other as the engine.
“Opposite sides of the line” isn’t just metaphorical office geography. It implies gatekeeping, mutual suspicion, and a quiet blame game when something looks off: artists accuse tech of sterility; tech accuses artists of inefficiency. The intent is a warning and a provocation: if animation is going to survive its own revolutions, the culture has to stop treating art and engineering as rival camps and start treating them as one language with two dialects.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bluth, Don. (2026, January 16). In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-the-animation-world-people-who-understand-88132/
Chicago Style
Bluth, Don. "In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-the-animation-world-people-who-understand-88132/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"In the animation world, people who understand pencils and paper usually aren't computer people, and the computer people usually aren't the artistic people, so they always stand on opposite sides of the line." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/in-the-animation-world-people-who-understand-88132/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.
