"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"
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Bluth is drawing a battle line that’s less about tools than about tribal identity. Coming from an artist who built his reputation on hand-drawn features (and on resisting Disney’s industrial habits by walking out and starting anew), the quote carries the weary authority of someone who’s watched craft get reorganized by technology and corporate timelines. He’s not arguing that computers can’t make art; he’s pointing at a production culture that trains people into silos, then acts surprised when they can’t collaborate.
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.
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 |
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