Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael O'Donoghue

"It's very easy to make insects move. Because they do move mechanically without the rippling of flesh as you mentioned. They move more like real tinker toys and you can make models of them quite easily"

Michael O'Donoghue, Writer

About this Quote

There is a sneaky brutality hiding inside O'Donoghue's blandly technical tone. He talks like a patient craft instructor, but he's really selling a worldview: living things are easiest to represent when you treat them as machines. Insects become the perfect subjects not because they're beautiful, but because they don't demand empathy. "Without the rippling of flesh" is the tell - a phrase that flinches away from mess, warmth, and the unsettling reminder that bodies are soft, mortal, and hard to fake. Strip that away and animation becomes a problem of hinges and levers.

O'Donoghue's choice of "real tinker toys" isn't just a metaphor; it's a cultural downgrade. The language drags life from biology to hardware-store parts, implying that what we call "real" is often what can be controlled, simplified, and replicated. It's a deadpan inversion: the insect is "real" precisely because it can be reduced to a model. That is very O'Donoghue - the SNL-era satirist who specialized in puncturing sentimentality by making the grotesque sound procedural.

Context matters. This comes from a period when practical effects, stop-motion, and TV comedy were obsessed with the seams: how you make something move on camera, how you fake vitality. O'Donoghue's intent feels twofold: a literal observation about puppetry/animation mechanics, and a mordant joke about how modern media prefers bodies that behave. Humans ripple; insects click. One is harder to fake, and one is easier to dehumanize.

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Topic	Science
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About the Author

Michael O'Donoghue (January 5, 1940 - November 8, 1994) was a Writer from USA.

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