Politics & Power Quote by John Kricfalusi

Kricfalusi’s line lands like a shrug that’s secretly a challenge: stop pretending North American culture is a single visual dialect. Coming from an animator who built a career on loud, rubbery exaggeration and the politics of taste inside studios, it’s less a geography lesson than a jab at complacency. “Generic” does the heavy lifting here. He’s not praising a refined national school; he’s pointing at the default settings people fall into when they’re rushing, conforming, or working under market pressure.

The subtext is about pipelines and permission. A “generic American style” implies an industry gravity well: bigger budgets, cleaner branding, standardized proportions, the look that survives committee notes and toy-aisle logic. A “generic Canadian style,” by contrast, hints at a parallel ecosystem shaped by smaller markets, public funding, and a slightly different relationship to sincerity and weirdness. Not “better,” but differently constrained; differently free.

It also reads as a quiet shot at the myth that style is purely individual. Kricfalusi is saying your hand is trained by the jobs you can get, the broadcasters you pitch to, the schools you attend, the aesthetic your peers reward. National borders matter less as flags than as infrastructure.

There’s irony in how he frames it: two “generic” styles, both generic, both distinct. That paradox is the point. Even blandness has an accent, and in commercial art the accent reveals who’s holding the money, who’s setting the standards, and what kind of risk a culture will tolerate before it calls something “off-model.”