Leading Animators Reveal the Hardest Thing to Draw

Animation has long served as the backbone of the entertainment industry, particularly during crisis periods when live-action production halts. Despite its crucial role in sustaining studios through events like the early pandemic—when animated sequences were inserted into live-action shows simply to complete episodes—the medium faces persistent threats from AI development and corporate budget cuts that see completed films discarded for tax breaks. Yet beyond these external pressures, practitioners consistently point to fundamental artistic challenges that have defined the craft for decades. In a recent roundtable discussion, four distinguished animation veterans shared their perspectives on the single most difficult element to render, revealing surprising consensus around the complexity of human expression and the technical demands of creature design.

The roundtable featured four distinct voices from different corners of the animation landscape:

• Derek Drymon: Creative director for the first three seasons of “SpongeBob SquarePants” and director of 2025’s “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants”
• Genndy Tartakovsky: Creator of “Dexter’s Laboratory” and the dialogue-free Adult Swim series “Primal”
• Ryan C. Lopez: Production coordinator at Lucasfilm Animation and director of the short film “Onnamusha”
• Jorge R. Gutierrez: Director of “The Book of Life” and the Netflix miniseries “Maya and the Three”

Capturing the Invisible: Why Facial Expressions Top the List

Across decades of collective experience spanning television series and feature films, the interviewed experts arrived at a striking consensus regarding animation’s greatest challenge: the human face. Specifically, capturing subtle emotional states without dialogue emerged as the craft’s most demanding feat. Jorge R. Gutierrez pointed to a pivotal moment in his 2014 film “The Book of Life” when Diego Luna’s character Manolo sings “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” to María, voiced by Zoe Saldaña. According to Gutierrez, animating María’s silent reaction—that specific look of falling in love—represented the production’s most difficult task. “That look is the key to the entire film,” he explained. “Without it, it falls apart.”

The difficulty lies in calibration. Push the expression too far, and the moment becomes cartoonish parody; insufficient emphasis renders the emotion invisible to audiences. “It’s super easy to go too far and make it pastiche or too cartoony,” Gutierrez noted. “But if you don’t go hard enough, no one notices.” This tightrope between subtlety and readability defines the animator’s burden when conveying interior states through exterior markers.

Derek Drymon echoed this sentiment regarding the complexity of non-verbal communication. “The hardest thing is to capture the thought process of a character through an expression or face,” Drymon stated. His work on the iconic Nickelodeon series emphasized visual storytelling over exposition, following in the tradition of silent cinema masters. The show’s approach relies heavily on what Drymon describes as getting across the emotions of the characters just through their expressions rather than dialogue-heavy scenes.

Ryan C. Lopez identified close-up character acting as the one area where technical shortcuts prove impossible. “You can cheat with other shots, but when it’s just a camera on someone’s face and they need to act, you can’t get around it,” Lopez noted. He cited the conclusion of “Part of Your World” in Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” as the gold standard of difficulty—the moment where Ariel reaches toward the camera, her face filling the frame with pure longing. “That’s what I would say is the hardest, most difficult thing to draw,” Lopez continued. “Because you just have to convince the audience that this person’s alive and with us with every single little idiosyncrasy that a person does—every little twitch of the eye.”

The Silent Cinema Tradition and Modern Applications

This emphasis on wordless performance connects contemporary animation to the medium’s historical roots in silent film comedy. Drymon recalled that “SpongeBob” creator Stephen Hillenburg maintained a particular affinity for Laurel and Hardy, studying their ability to communicate narrative and emotional context purely through body language and silhouette. “You just tell what they were thinking just by their acting, without any vocals, without any dialogue,” Drymon observed, noting that this physical performance tradition remains vital to modern series work. Clear silhouettes and deliberate body language allow audiences to read character intention instantly, a technique as relevant to underwater sponge cartoons as it was to early twentieth-century slapstick.

The legacy of Chuck Jones, the legendary Warner Bros. director behind countless dialogue-free “Looney Tunes” shorts, continues to influence how animators approach character interiority. Jones demonstrated that clear emotional intention requires no spoken words—only precise control over facial musculature and posture. Cartoons and silent cinema fit so well together because they both rely on broad movements and expressions in order to express without dialogue.

Tartakovsky has perhaps pushed this philosophy furthest in contemporary television. His prehistoric drama “Primal” operates entirely without dialogue, yet conveys complex narrative arcs and devastating emotional beats through pure visual storytelling. The series demonstrates that sophisticated character acting transcends language barriers, relying instead on universal physical cues that predate spoken communication. As Drymon noted regarding his own work, “We try not to do a lot of dialogue. Instead, we try to get across the emotions of the characters just through their expressions.”

Biological Challenges: The Complexity of Creature Design

While human emotion dominated the conversation, several veterans identified biological accuracy—particularly regarding animals—as a parallel source of difficulty. Tartakovsky acknowledged that prehistoric creatures presented unique obstacles, simply stating that “dinosaurs were hard.” However, more mundane fauna generated equally passionate responses from the directors.

Gutierrez confessed to a lifelong struggle with equine anatomy that began in childhood when a cousin criticized his five-year-old attempt at drawing Zorro’s horse. The trauma proved so lasting that “The Book of Life” contains exactly one horse, which Gutierrez refused to draw himself, instead hiring designer Andy Bialk to handle the sequence. “As a kid, I always had a lot of trouble drawing horses. It’s super hard to draw horses,” Gutierrez admitted. “The problem with horses is that if you do them right, no one notices. But they always notice if you do them wrong.” This asymmetry between accurate rendering and audience perception makes animal animation particularly thankless—perfect execution earns no praise, while minor anatomical errors immediately break immersion.

Fantastical creatures that defy physics present their own challenges, but historic creatures and common animals require a different kind of precision. The animator must understand musculature and movement patterns deeply enough to replicate them convincingly, whether the subject is a domestic horse or an extinct predator. Unlike stylized characters where exaggeration serves the comedy, realistic animals demand biological truth.

The Ultimate Challenge: Cultivating Unique Style

Beyond technical execution of specific subjects, Tartakovsky identified a more existential difficulty facing modern practitioners: originality itself. While mechanical skill develops through repetition, developing a distinctive visual language that separates an artist from their influences presents an increasingly difficult hurdle in an industry saturated with content. “I think the hardest thing in drawing is to be unique,” Tartakovsky reflected. “You can learn to draw anything just by drawing it a lot. But to be unique and to have your own point of view on your drawing and your own style that’s unique to yourself […] It’s harder and harder to be an individual with a unique style that nobody else has.”

This observation addresses the tension between animation’s infinite formal possibilities—worlds and visuals impossible in live-action—and the tendency toward derivative replication of successful formulas. The medium of animation is full of possibilities, fantastical worlds, and visuals that can break your brain and would never work in live-action. Because of these possibilities and the different art styles that can co-exist in a project, it’s also easy to default to replicating what’s come before. Standing out requires not just technical mastery, but a point of view that colors every line drawn.

Industry Context: Animation’s Perpetual Crisis

The artistic challenges discussed occur against a backdrop of institutional instability. Animation has repeatedly proven its economic value to major studios, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when it became the only viable production pipeline, allowing shows to complete episodes through animated segments when live-action filming ceased. During the early days of the pandemic, it was animation that saved countless productions, with live-action TV shows adding seemingly random animated sequences because it was the only way to finish half-done episodes.

Yet the medium continues facing existential threats from generative AI tools and corporate strategies that prioritize tax write-offs over cultural preservation. Whether it’s facing the rise of AI or deranged studio heads decimating budgets and throwing entire finished films into the garbage for a tax break, making animation is a herculean task. These pressures make the craft challenges discussed by Drymon, Tartakovsky, Lopez, and Gutierrez all the more significant. As the industry navigates technological disruption and budgetary constraints, the fundamental difficulty of making a drawing breathe with genuine human feeling—or capturing the specific gait of a horse—remains animation’s irreplaceable value proposition.

What’s After the Movie: Your Animation Resource

For fans looking to explore the world of animation further, from box office performance to behind-the-scenes craft analysis, comprehensive resources are available. Whether you’re tracking the latest releases or diving deep into classic film techniques, understanding the artistry behind your favorite characters enhances the viewing experience. Check out detailed coverage of film industry news, box office data, and cinematic summaries at What’s After the Movie, where you can explore everything from upcoming releases to award season coverage and detailed breakdowns of the films mentioned here.