Creativity Quote by John Hench

Hench is talking about image-making the way an engineer talks about infrastructure: not decoration, but a system that moves meaning at scale. When he says the studio had “enormous power,” he’s naming a very specific 20th-century phenomenon: places like Disney didn’t just draw pictures; they industrialized visual persuasion. Animation, design, and storyboarding became a kind of mass literacy, a private institution that could teach people how to feel, what to desire, what “good” looks like, and even what childhood is supposed to be.

The line about “skill with images to communicate” is modest on its face, but the subtext is bolder: images bypass argument. They don’t need consent in the same way text does. You can resist a paragraph; it’s harder to resist a symbol that lands before you’ve articulated why. Hench’s phrasing implies admiration for that craft, but also a quiet warning about its asymmetry. If one studio can speak fluently in the language of the unconscious, everyone else is conversing with an accent.

His most haunting claim is that “the need” for such images is greater now because we’re “losing our life symbols.” That’s a diagnosis of cultural fragmentation: shared rituals, religions, civic myths, and stable narratives thinning out under modernity’s churn. In that vacuum, corporate imagery doesn’t merely entertain; it competes to become the symbolic glue. Hench isn’t nostalgic so much as pragmatic: if societies run on symbols, and the old ones are fading, someone will manufacture the new ones. The question is who gets to, and to what end.