I feel this quote is actually a fairly simplistic observation. It's kind of like saying "We can't make an ocean of pudding until we find out how pudding moves." There is a more philosophical point of view you can take. You could question what he means by real. Is he speaking of reality as we comprehend it visually, or "real" as the incomprehensible force behind Lacanian perception? Well, Walt Disney wasn't really that kind of man. His characters expressed forcibly through motion and expression rather than subtlety with open interpretations. Walt was that kind of man as well.
It should be said that every artist does hit a limit of what they can do with their skills. I believe this is what Walt Disney was trying to emphasize. As an artist myself I find myself that I cannot draw what I don't know how to. Or rather, it is hard to draw a realistic hole in the wall, unless someone has seen how the hole looks. Then you have to imagine what the exposed brick looks like or whether or not there should be plumbing or insulation or whatever. Without a firm understanding of these textures, shapes and construction, you couldn't tell what you drew from a hole in the wall.
Making the object fantastic is the next step after "knowing the real". If you can draw a door (I just wanted to get the hole in the wall joke out of the way) inside and out, then you should have problem animating a door that twists about and moves. There are times when I think you know something only to find that problems arise when you need to get it to do something unusual. For example, most people can draw a closed door, but they may have trouble drawing one that is half-way open. Unless there is a firm understanding of how a thing operates in space, errors of reality may occur. Someone may draw an ornate door that leads to a church, but forgets a door handle, or they may not overextend the edges when they draw in perspective and make the door hard to open (this is all assuming that the door is pulled opened).
During the time of the quote animation was still in it's discovery phases, "fantastic" could mean making things look like they come from a fantasy world, but more likely Walt just meant the technique. To an audience still new to the medium, a realistic flying bird would be just a "fantastic" to see on the screen as, say, a dancing door. Thus the knowledge of how objects behaved and moved in the world must first be mastered before it can be brought to life in animated form.
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