"There is something I feel when I animate something; you can never really understand the character you're animating unless you've had the opportunity to turn it around. Once you've done that, you know it is a three-dimensional object"
About this Quote
Marc Davis is talking about a deceptively physical truth: animation only looks like drawing until you try to make a figure exist from every angle. “Turn it around” is both a literal studio test and a moral challenge. The moment you rotate a character in your mind, you stop treating it as a set of appealing poses and start treating it as a body with mass, balance, and consequences. That’s why he begins with “something I feel” - the craft is tactile even when the medium is paper. It’s not just technique; it’s recognition.
The subtext is a gentle indictment of surface-level character work. You can fake charm in a single strong drawing, but you can’t fake coherence across time. Turning a character forces continuity: how the jaw hinges, how weight sits on a hip, how clothing drapes when the torso twists. Davis is pointing at the animator’s real job, which isn’t illustration but sustained belief. The “three-dimensional object” line sounds clinical, yet it’s basically a manifesto: the audience senses when a character has an interior logic, even if they can’t name it.
Context matters here. Davis was a key Disney animator during the era when the studio was professionalizing “the illusion of life,” absorbing lessons from live-action reference, sculpture maquettes, and an industrial pipeline built to make drawings behave like actors. His comment captures the bridge between draftsmanship and performance: a character becomes understandable not when it’s prettiest, but when it survives rotation without breaking.
The subtext is a gentle indictment of surface-level character work. You can fake charm in a single strong drawing, but you can’t fake coherence across time. Turning a character forces continuity: how the jaw hinges, how weight sits on a hip, how clothing drapes when the torso twists. Davis is pointing at the animator’s real job, which isn’t illustration but sustained belief. The “three-dimensional object” line sounds clinical, yet it’s basically a manifesto: the audience senses when a character has an interior logic, even if they can’t name it.
Context matters here. Davis was a key Disney animator during the era when the studio was professionalizing “the illusion of life,” absorbing lessons from live-action reference, sculpture maquettes, and an industrial pipeline built to make drawings behave like actors. His comment captures the bridge between draftsmanship and performance: a character becomes understandable not when it’s prettiest, but when it survives rotation without breaking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Marc
Add to List
