As I continue to struggle with understanding a single character design, I also take time to muse from the armchair: drawing as is necessary for animation isn't really about the expression of what you see. It's about understanding ideas we don't have words for, systems of thought that allow you to generate drawings from the character designs you're following. Following this train, this handcar of thought, art is about finding ways to understand what you see: you generate one or many 'grammars of thought' (ie; ways of thinking about things) that allow you to process what you see and formulate ideas from it, which in turn allow you to generate new things from the initial thing. It makes sense: no artist replicates reality exactly, so there is always a process of perception and processing followed by depiction. It's training your eye, coordinating your hand, visualizing in your mind. Drawing makes you realize how disconnected from reality we are. Of course, this is just one way to understand what's happening–that's part of the artistic process, too, I imagine.

Still following this handcar, because the fellows on it aren't cranking too hard and so it's not out of sight yet, animators, who must draw other people's character designs in a uniform style, practice a very excellent form of art. They must bend themselves to perceive as the character designers do, and character designers to the animators. It's a comingling of perspectives. On the other hand, animation designs can be lowest common denominator–this is something I think anime's ornate, complex and at times seemingly masochistic designs have generally avoided more successfully than the west.

Once I asked Trigger illustrator MAGO, during a Studio Trigger livestream, if animators or illustrators were more skilled. I was kind of intending to egg her into saying illustrators were better. Instead she said that both are difficult and they require different skillsets, but that it's probably harder for animators to acquire the skills they need. It was a thoughtful answer, and she paused before speaking.

So yes, drawing can use and understand ideas that written language cannot. Sometimes I think we forget that language is very vague and unencompassing: language cannot, for example, express physical things as precisely as a photo, a 3D model, or the sense of sight. In language we constantly fill in with our imagination, generate images sometimes wildly different from the reality of things. I think there are such linguistic limits not only for the physical realities we can depict with language, but the abstract ones, too. Thoughts can become too complex or obscure for us to sustain in language: 'languages' like drawing, math and music might prove to be more elegant ways of interfacing with thoughts language fails to get at. One day, we'll make some kind of 'language' that will allow far more complex thought then we can currently conceive of. A 'language' or 'languages' that challenge and nurture and intimately touch us. Maybe I'm just describing a way of 'living.'

One might extrapolate that everything is 'language.' I'll take my Ph.D. now.