Creativity Quote by John Kricfalusi

Kricfalusi’s line sounds like a friendly shrug, but it’s also a manifesto with teeth. “Everybody” isn’t a demographic; it’s a dare. In an industry that’s spent decades treating animation as a fenced-off genre (either kiddie babysitting or niche nerd culture), he frames cartoons as a basic human medium, closer to music or slapstick than to age-gated “content.” The phrasing matters: not “viewers,” not “fans,” not “consumers” - “human beings.” That’s a jab at market logic, at the way executives and standards boards slice audiences into sellable chunks and sand off anything weird, intense, or bodily.

The subtext is classic Kricfalusi: a mix of sincerity and provocation. He’s defending the right to be grotesque, loud, sentimental, and technically obsessive all at once - the full emotional range kids actually have and adults pretend they’ve outgrown. It also smuggles in a claim about craft. If you’re really drawing for “human beings,” you can’t hide behind irony or brand; you have to hit instinct: timing, expression, discomfort, delight.

Context sharpens the edge. Coming out of late-20th-century TV animation, where merchandising and “family friendly” rules were often the real auteurs, Kricfalusi positioned his work as a return to animation’s anarchic roots (Fleischer rubber-hose energy, Tex Avery violence-as-poetry) updated for a media landscape newly willing to let cartoons be abrasive. “Everybody” is aspirational, even utopian - and it’s also how you justify taking risks: if it’s honest enough, it’ll land somewhere in the shared messy circuitry of being alive.