Creativity Quote by Gerald Scarfe

Scarfe’s offhand “kind of” does a lot of work: it shrinks the supposedly magical world of animation down to its most unglamorous truth, the grind of “in-between” drawings that turn an idea into motion. The line isn’t selling animation as a mystical art; it’s demystifying it as labor, process, and patience. That matters coming from Scarfe, whose jagged, satirical draftsmanship (and high-profile work in film and political caricature) trades on immediacy. His images often feel like they’ve been yanked straight from the nervous system. Animation, by contrast, requires you to manufacture that immediacy frame by frame.

The specific intent reads like a practical explanation, almost a shrug toward craft: movement isn’t “performed” so much as built. But the subtext is a quiet argument about authorship and control. In-betweening isn’t just filling space; it’s where style can get diluted or amplified, where the animator’s hand becomes either invisible (smooth, “natural” motion) or aggressively present (a twitchy, Scarfe-esque stutter). By naming the in-betweens, Scarfe points to the hidden workforce and the invisible decisions that audiences rarely credit.

Contextually, it echoes the broader tension between single-panel illustration and time-based media: caricature can land a punch in one frame; animation has to earn the punch through continuity. Scarfe’s sentence frames that gap without romance, implying a respect for the craft while also signaling why an artist built on sharp, instant commentary might find animation both fascinating and faintly maddening.