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.
It occurs to me that there are people who weren’t on this website in 2012 and therefore never saw the magical gif that you can actually hear:
It’s been over five years and that still impresses the hell out of me.
wdym you can hear it?
Basically, it’s a form of synesthesia, movement-hearing. In this case, you expect to hear a thud, so you do. It’s estimated that 20% of people experience this type of synesthesia, as opposed to 2-4% for other kinds.
YO what the FUXK
The longer you watch it the more you get convinced that you can hear a distant thud and the air displace.
I heard the thud. I closed my eyes and the thud stopped. I opened my eyes and I heard the thud. My goodness but human brains are a mess.
This was easily the first ever viral post on Tumblr back in 2011/12. Perhaps even before the great “what your leg feels like after falling asleep” followed by a picture of a static teevee channel.
