People, Ideas, Machines - In That Order
Jeffrey Katzenberg on AI for creativity:
In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell.We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not.
This is making the work legible: codify the principles and the tools become replaceable.
Disney went on to co-develop CAPS with Pixar, swapping hand-painted cels for digital ink and paint. A few years later, Toy Story.
The essay lands where you'd expect:
Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: "It's not the how, it's the why."
The interview on The Town is blunter:
Toy Story and Pixar never, ever could have been launched out of Disney in the 1980s.Like, that's a non-starter.
We did not have the culture.
We did not have the expertise.
We did not have the forward brilliance of Ed Catmull and John Lasseter.
They had a vision for something that was different.
And they had tools that were different.
The archive carried Walt's ideas.
The machines made them cheaper to try.
Neither supplied the people.