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Creativity Quote by John Kricfalusi

"One guy records the voices, another guy times the storyboard, another guy times the sheets, one guy is the story editor. All these jobs should be covered by the director"

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Kricfalusi is doing what animators with a chip on their shoulder do best: turning production logistics into a moral argument. On the surface, he is complaining about a pipeline where labor is atomized into specialist silos. Underneath, he is making a claim about authorship - that animation works best when one sensibility controls the rhythm of everything, from a line read to the exact length of a blink. Timing isnt clerical here; it is performance. If you outsource it, you outsource the joke, the mood, the gut feeling.

The phrasing is revealingly blunt: "one guy... another guy..". like a weary roll call of middlemen. It reads less like organizational critique than like an accusation that modern studios have replaced taste with process. The director, in his view, should be the gravitational center, not a manager coordinating other peoples instincts. It is a throwback to the animator-director as auteur, the person who hears the voice and already sees the mouth shapes, who understands that a pause is as authored as a punchline.

Context matters because Kricfalusi comes out of a world where TV animation often runs on speed, hierarchy, and compromise - and where his own career is tied to the idea that obsessive control produces electricity on screen. The line doubles as a manifesto and a warning: when you slice creation into departments, you get efficiency; when you keep it in one head, you get a point of view. He is not just asking for more power. He is arguing that animation without unified timing becomes politely correct, and dead.

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Director should cover voices storyboard timing and editing
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John Kricfalusi

John Kricfalusi (born September 9, 1955) is a Artist from Canada.

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