Daily Inspiration Quote by Tex Avery

Avery’s line sounds like a shrug, but it’s really a manifesto: not “let’s make cartoons,” not “let’s tell a story,” just “funny pictures.” The modesty is the point. It disarms you into thinking the work is disposable, then uses that looseness to smuggle in a radical approach to animation where logic is optional and the gag is sovereign.

“Let’s” matters. Avery isn’t the lone genius carving art from marble; he’s the ringleader of a studio scrum where timing, voice acting, layout, music cues, and the brutality of the edit all have veto power. Comedy here is industrial teamwork with an auteur’s nerve. The phrase also reads like a preemptive rebuttal to respectability politics: if you insist cartoons must behave like “serious” cinema, Avery’s inviting you to watch him break the medium open anyway.

Context sharpens the edge. Working in the 1930s-50s studio system (Warner, then MGM), Avery helped define the American cartoon as speed, exaggeration, and metatextual cheek: characters mugging at the audience, the laws of physics treated like a soft suggestion, desire and violence pushed into absurdity. “Funny pictures” is a tactical downgrade that frees him from prestige expectations and narrative piety. Once you grant him “just” pictures, he can stretch time, snap the fourth wall, and turn censorship and formula into part of the joke.

It’s a creative instruction disguised as small talk: prioritize impact over refinement, surprise over coherence, and trust that a perfectly timed visual can say more than a page of dialogue ever could.