We Asked Four Animators: What's The Hardest Thing To Draw?

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Animation is constantly under siege. Despite animation keeping the industry afloat in times of trouble, the medium is always on the brink of disaster. During the early days of the pandemic, it was animation that saved countless productions — remember when live-action TV shows started adding seemingly random animated sequences because it was the only way to finish half-done episodes? 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. Of course, the hardships of making animation aren't limited to technological threats or studio politics. The mere act of animating an image and making it believable is a challenge in and of itself. 

To discover just how difficult it is, /Film spoke with several experts in the field of animation about the hardest thing to draw. We spoke to Derek Drymon, creative director for the first three seasons of "SpongeBob"; Genndy Tartakovsky, animation legend and creator of "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Primal"; Ryan C. Lopez, production coordinator at Lucasfilm Animation and director of the short film "Onnamusha"; and Jorge R. Gutierrez, director of "The Book of Life" and "Maya and the Three." 

While answers were as varied as the animation output of these experts, one answer stood out amongst the rest: expressions.

For casual viewers, acting and animation may feel incompatible. After all, there is no living person acting out a scene on screen, or even a puppet being controlled by a human. Yet, the best animated characters act and behave like living beings that make us feel for them. Whether it's a motion, or even just a static image of a particular look or expression, this is what separates a drawing from a character, and an image from a living, breathing fictional being.

Capturing an animated look makes all the difference

How does an animator capture regret in a single, silent look? How do you make a drawing or 3D creation express love, or longing, without hyper-realistic detail? Eyes are the windows to the soul, but what if a character doesn't have human-looking eyes? Therein lies the challenge.

Jorge R. Gutierrez points out to a moment in his film "The Book of Life" (a film that Lin-Manuel Miranda almost turned into a "hip-hop salsa reggaeton musical") in which Diego Luna's character Manolo sings "Can't Help Falling In Love With You" to his love, María (Zoe Saldaña). "She gives him this look," Gutierrez explains. "That look of falling in love, a subtle confession without saying any words. That look is the key to the entire film. Without it, it falls apart."

Drawing and animating that single expression was the hardest thing to do in the film, according to the director. "It's super easy to go too far and make it pastiche or too cartoony," he continued. "But if you don't go hard enough, no one notices."

Expressions in animation are crucial, and the best cartoons manage to convey a lot without any dialogue whatsoever. The legendary Chuck Jones was a master at this, with many of his cartoons having no dialogue yet clear emotions and intentions.

"The hardest thing is to capture the thought process of a character through an expression or face," said Derek Drymon, who directed 2025's "The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants."

"SpongeBob" is a show that's in many ways a successor to that Chuck Jones approach, with loud and expressive characters that embrace the elasticity of the medium. "We try not to do a lot of dialogue," Drymon added. "Instead, we try to get across the emotions of the characters just through their expressions."

Animated acting is still acting

A single silent expression is already a very difficult thing to draw, but to then add motion to a character and make them move and act like a real creature makes things even harder.

As Ryan C. Lopez, a short film animator who has worked for Lucasfilm Animation on titles like "Maul — Shadow Lord" and "Tales of the Underworld," puts it, there are no short cuts in animation acting. "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," he said. Lopez singles out the scene at the end of "Part of Your World" in "The Little Mermaid" where Ariel reaches toward the camera and we get close on her face, highlighting the pure longing she feels.

"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."

Cartoons and silent cinema, especially slapstick comedy, fit so well together because they both rely on broad movements and expressions in order to express without dialogue. Derek Drymon recalls "SpongeBob" creator Stephen Hillenburg being a big fan of Laurel and Hardy. "You just tell what they were thinking just by their acting, without any vocals, without any dialogue. You can really tell what these characters were thinking at all times, just through the body language and through the silhouettes."

"Primal" is a more recent example of this idea. Genndy Tartakovsky's masterpiece is entirely devoid of dialogue, yet it conveys everything you'd want to know about its world and characters and becomes as emotional as any heart-breaking drama.

Drawing animals remains the bane of animators' existences

Though making a character emote seems to be the consensus for hardest thing in animation, there's another simple fact that's remained true over the years: Animals are hard.

Not just fantastical creatures that defy physics, but historic creatures and even common animals. When asked, Genndy Tartakovsky acknowledged that "dinosaurs were hard." Meanwhile, Jorge R. Gutierrez had a more common answer, one that is kind of a cliche amongst artists. "As a kid, I always had a lot of trouble drawing horses. It's super hard to draw horses," he said. "The problem with horses is that if you do them right, no one notices. But they always notice if you do them wrong."

"As a five-year-old, I drew Zorro on his horse and a cousin told me it looked terrible. From that day on, I haven't drawn horses," Gutierrez continued. "If you look at 'The Book of Life,' there's only one horse in that whole movie, and I had to hire a designer named Andy Bialk to do the horse because I wouldn't do it."

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 the possibilities of animation and the different art styles that can co-exist in a project, it's also easy to default to replicating what's come before.

"I think the hardest thing in drawing is to be unique. You can learn to draw anything just by drawing it a lot," Tartakovsky said. "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."