Creativity Quote by Marc Davis

There is a sly humility baked into Marc Davis's line, the kind that only lands when you know how mythmaking works. “What we were in on” sounds like a backroom confidence shared among insiders, but the punch is in the recalibration that follows: not the making of cartoons, not the production of movies, but “the invention of animation.” He’s quietly upgrading a job title into a historical act.

The intent is partly corrective. By the time Davis is reflecting, “animation” already reads as an established medium, a pipeline, a genre shelf at the video store. His phrasing pulls it back into the unstable period when the rules weren’t settled and the language wasn’t fixed. “Invention” frames animation less as a technique than as a new way of thinking: how to make drawings perform, how to choreograph emotion frame by frame, how to persuade an audience that graphite and paint have inner lives.

The subtext is also collective. Davis doesn’t say “I invented,” he says “we were in on,” a nod to the studio ecosystem that birthed modern character animation - directors, ink-and-paint artists, layout, effects, story, the whole industrial artistry of Disney’s mid-century machine. It’s pride without chest-thumping: a recognition that they weren’t merely refining an art form, they were defining its grammar - timing, silhouette, appeal, the illusion of thought.

Contextually, coming from an artist who helped shape Disney’s characters and later theme park worlds, the line hints at something bigger: animation as a total environment, a worldview where the designed object moves, reacts, and sells you on its reality.