That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring.
Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
