Parenting & Family Quote by Dave Rowntree

There’s a quiet thrill in how Dave Rowntree draws the line: not defensive, not nostalgic, just bluntly corrective. “We certainly weren’t making a cartoon show for kids” isn’t really about animation at all; it’s about audience, permission, and the way culture keeps trying to shove new forms back into old boxes. The emphasis on “certainly” does the heavy lifting. It signals that someone, somewhere, keeps misunderstanding the project as childish because it looks like a cartoon, and Rowntree is pushing back against that lazy equivalence.

The subtext is a musician’s frustration with being reduced to format. Blur lived in a Britpop era obsessed with surfaces and categories, and the band’s flirtations with visual media (most famously the Gorillaz-adjacent universe Rowntree had proximity to, culturally if not directly) landed in a moment when “cartoons” were still treated as a genre rather than a medium. Rowntree’s phrasing treats that assumption like an insult: the work is “a completely different kind of idea,” meaning it’s conceptual, cross-platform, maybe even a comment on celebrity itself.

Intent matters here: he’s not claiming animation is too sophisticated for kids; he’s claiming the project was never designed to be safely consumable. It’s an assertion of adult complexity hiding in plain sight, using the bright language of pop visuals to smuggle in darker humor, sharper satire, or messier emotions. The point isn’t to exclude children; it’s to refuse the cultural reflex that equates style with simplicity.