Yesterday i was feeling like this depressed squid (tired and sad) so it motivated me to do an art dump of him, that and also because he’s my favorite and he’s not appreciated enough.
I love animation history and one of the things that always baffled me was how did animators draw the cars in 101 Dalmatians before the advent of computer graphics?
Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.
Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).
But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?
The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:
They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣
That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.
That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.
btw if youre young and scared of doing adult things without your parents ive learned that like 90% of the time you can just tell the doctors office or the dmv “haha sorry ive never done this without help before… can you show me how to do this?” the employee will not care. if that means anything to you
while my mom was pregnant with me, she was delivering chinese food on bike in new orleans. i like to think that the music she heard in the streets made me the way i am now.
