Creativity Quote by Gerald Scarfe

Scarfe’s “Frightened Ones” aren’t fantasy creatures so much as a visual confession smuggled into spectacle. He describes them with the cool practicality of a production note - mask-like heads, tunneling underground - then snaps the metaphor shut with that blunt last clause: “Which is what in fact we did during the war.” The line lands because it refuses the comfort of allegory. It turns animation’s usual permission slip (it’s only symbolic) into an accusation: the grotesque is documentary.

The masks matter. They suggest identity erased by necessity, faces turned into survival gear. A mask is protection, but it’s also a sign you can’t safely be fully human in public. The choice to have them “run” and “hide” below ground isn’t just about fear; it’s about enforced invisibility, childhood memory translated into a recurring bodily impulse. Scarfe’s creatures literalize trauma as behavior: the war doesn’t end when the bombing stops; it persists as a reflex to disappear.

Contextually, Scarfe is drawing on Britain’s wartime underground life - shelters, Tube stations, the civic choreography of ducking away. But he’s also speaking as an artist who helped define the visual language of paranoia and authority (most famously through his work on The Wall). In that universe, the state, the school, and the crowd all manufacture the same outcome: people who cope by going under. Scarfe’s intent isn’t to decorate a narrative; it’s to show how fear becomes architecture, and how the body learns it.