Creativity Quote by Joe Murray

There is a quiet flex hiding inside Murray's modesty: by admitting he didn't know the "normal" studio environment, he also implies he never let that normal set the terms. The scare quotes around "Normal" do real work. They signal skepticism toward an industry baseline that often gets treated like natural law - hierarchy, pipeline thinking, managerial distance - when it's really just accumulated habit. Murray positions himself as an outsider not because he lacks competence, but because his reference point is a different culture of making.

The pivot is the second sentence: "I tried to run it as I did in my SF studio". "Tried" softens what could read as defiance, yet the intent is clear. He attempted to port an artist-led model into a machine built for standardization. That single detail - SF, shorthand for San Francisco - is context with an ethos attached: indie sensibilities, small teams, a proximity to craft, a suspicion of corporate sheen. In animation, where production can become an assembly line, "running it like my studio" suggests a bid to protect voice and experimentation even as the scale balloons.

Subtext: creative leadership is often accidental. Murray isn't describing a strategic management philosophy so much as a collision between worlds, where ignorance becomes leverage. Not knowing the rules can be a way of refusing them, and in a medium that rewards the repeatable, that refusal is sometimes how genuinely strange, personal work gets made.