Alex. He/Him. 25. I tend to queue and unholy number of posts several days in advance. Feel free to message me for random conversations but please forgive me if I take a while to respond.
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.
Because The Sword in the Stone was drawn on physical paper whereas Song of the Sea was not.
(especially the backgrounds because you physically cannot put that many layers of watercolour on paper without it dissolving).
The techniques, however, are fundamentally the same - you draw each frame and then you layer and flip them very fast. (Massively oversimplified)
3D animation for both CGI and stop-motion both require you to build a model and a set and then move them. It’s not just running a computer program, you have to build that program in the first place and you have to build and layer a new character just the same as stop-motion.
“But there can be presets”, stop-motion has presets too - swappable faces and heads for example.
Yes, different mediums, but not different animation techniques. Both are 3D animations.
3D stands for three dimensional. It does not mean Computer Generated Images - CGI.
Now, you don’t have to agree with my logic - but that is why I included Pinocchio because I think it’s important to note that 3D animation can include stop-motion and claymation and that we often unfairly deride CGI when it’s just as much as an art form.
There are instances where CGI ages gracefully, and I think the best examples are stylized 2D animation from the 2000’s or so.
Go rewatch Invader Zim. The show still looks shockingly good for being 20 years old, and none of the CGI looks dated, because it’s stylized to fit the look of the show.
Disney’s Atlantis
Lilo & Stitch
The Iron Giant
This is less a defense of CGI and more a defense of bringing back computer-assisted 2D animation.
I need everyone who responds to “we need to stop remaking animated films as live action with bad cgi” with “yeah, they should use practical effects instead!” to kindly shut the fuck up because
1) the vast majority of the time, practical effects alone are simply not enough to replicate what 2D animation can accomplish. and when done well, cgi in conjunction with practical elements can get the strongest result! there is no dichotomy of practical OR digital, it’s usually both.
2) more importantly, saying this is still disrespecting the original animated films!!! The real problem is that we need to stop treating animating like it’s “for kids” or that animation doesn’t have enough merit on its own. is it so hard to just appreciate animation for what it is?? why does it need to be remade at all?
If you’re someone who has tried to praise practical effects in response to animation, I don’t blame you. I think effects makeup and animatronics and puppets and physical sets are cool too. In fact, if you haven’t seen what Studio Swaybox is doing, you should take a look:
this is not stop motion!! This is filmed in real time!! Isn’t that incredible??
But before you say “we should use THAT to remake animated films instead!” how about…. we just let the existing films be? We need more original films, not remakes of existing ones, using this kind of ingenuity. Yes, we need more of a demand for both animation & puppetry, but above all, we need more of a demand for human touch in art.
If you want to support animation,
Demand existing animated films be re-screened in theaters!
Follow a few small indie studios, and promote their projects like your life depends on it!! Toss em a few bucks if you can afford it!
Try animating something yourself! It’s so accessible nowadays. Try out making a puppet using nothing but a sock and some buttons. Get a cheap marionette and try to make it dance. Get some face paints and make yourself look crazy in your bathroom mirror. Do all of this even if it looks bad— especially if it looks bad. Doing it bad will give you a newfound appreciation for the amount of skill it takes to make it good!
Great moments in corporate synergy: Disney released their Super Bowl ad imagining what the world would be like without Iconic Disney Moments and it included a single Disney animated film. Frozen obviously. Otherwise it's entirely films made by companies they bought and one live action remake. "Remember when Disney brought you Star Wars" and it's the original and no. Bc they very much did not bring us that one
There's two things here. For one it's weird how Hollywood's baffling distaste for animation has spread to Disney now. But also the way they retroactively claim things they bought were not just made by them, but are core aspects of their identity.
Without Disney, would Star Wars exist? And like. Yes. There are three trilogies of films and the two best-liked were not made by Disney. But now "Disney Took You to a Galaxy Far, Far Away" is A Thing. We all remember that right. We all remember when Disney gave us Star Wars (the 1977 one and not Rise of Skywalker & the Star Wars Hotel)
Marvel was bought by Disney earlier but: the first phase of the MCU, so everything up to The Avengers, wasn't made by Disney. It was made by Marvel themselves, and then they entered into distribution deals with various studios (mainly Paramount, one by Universal). Anyway now Disney brought you Marvel. It's one of the main things they brought you, remember? Look at this clip from The Avengers (a film already in production that Disney bought out the distribution rights for when they bought Marvel). That's what people think of when they think of Disney: Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Hulu, and live action remakes
Tbh the actual worst moment of "Disney has always been responsible for the exciting IP 'war with Eastasia'" synergy was when Disney bought Fox and they started retroactively calling Anastasia a Disney movie
You know that movie everyone in 1997 & for decades afterward had to keep explaining wasn't a Disney movie? There's now official Disney anniversary merch of it
This looks so much worse in retrospect too because the biggest animated movie of the summer is fucking KPop Demon Hunters, a niche story with 0 white characters that never explains anything to the audience at all. Like god. I would be so humiliated. They're trying to blame their failures as a loss of mass appeal while Sony's two biggest films are one about Korean pop-stars fighting demons and another about a black + latino superhero like I'm sorry Disney/Pixar idk if it's unsustainable levels of executives meddling or bad marketing or obsession with mass appeal or what but y'all truly seem to have forgotten how to make and market a good movie and it's wild to blame that on non-white creatives making stories based on their own cultures and histories.
Like it's crazy the Best Animated Picture Oscar has been a thing for the last like 23 years and I can count on just my hands the amount of movies that have won that were not Disney films(only 9), that thing used to essentially belong to Disney, and they haven't won it since 2021. The winners instead have been a Ghibli movie set in post-WWII Japan(The Boy and The Heron), a Latvian indie film made in Blender starring exclusively animals with no spoken dialog(Flow), and Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion Pinocchio which is set during WWI that pulled exactly 0 punches on the topic and is explicitly based on a version of Pinocchio that almost none of the intended audience was familiar with. Just. Where the hell are they getting the idea it's niche cultural films that are the problem, they're clearly very much not. Something at Disney is just fucking broken and until they fix it we're just gonna get incoherent sequels no one asked for and occasional original films which get left to fucking drown by Disney's marketing department like they're trying to Treasure Planet their entire animation department and/or Pixar as a studio.
Oh yeah, I always go to the movies to see my life played out in front of me. Like when the biggest film of the year was about that very relatable experience of going on a cruise liner in the 1910s. Or visiting a park with real dinosaurs. Or being a young, poor Indian boy who wins millions. Or a weather-worn pirate being tracked down by his cursed, undead former shipmates. YOU KNOW, everyday, relatable stuff. Apart from the fact, as discussed above, that POC deserve to see their lives in pixar films too, seeing other people’s lives is LITERALLY WHY I WATCH MOVIES YOU DUMB PIECES OF SHIT. I’M NOT AN ORPHANED PRINCESS WITH ICE POWERS EITHER BUT THAT SEEMED TO HIT BIG.
Hi I grew up in the Cult of Disney and I can tell you exactly what's going on.
Nothing is broken at Disney. Disney has always, always been highly controlling and christofascist. The Disney Renaissance happened because by then the animation department was mostly left alone as a failure and the company was focussed on acquisitions and mergers, and the Renaissance was led by a GAY MAN more familiar with BROADWAY than animation or film (Howard Ashman). He died of AIDS after writing and composing Beauty and the Beast from his hospital bed. It is his opus.
The main animators were able to make the renaissance linger on for a little while after that, but Eisner was NOTORIOUSLY shitty about screenings, not paying attention and then not admitting he wasn't paying attention and foisting the blame on the film itself. Despite this, Eisner's hyperfocus on Number Go Up meant that as long as the film was bringing in money, he let them alone. This was also before instant communication other than telephone and fax, so things could go less disturbed.
Iger was not much better than Eisner, still focussing on mergers and acquisitions. The advent of social media has both exposed how controlling and dictatorial Disney is AND made it easier for them to constantly meddle in the production of everything they make.
But nothing "broke" at Disney. There has never been a version of Disney that wasn't hyper-controlling of its animated features; for fuck's sake, Disney STILL holds the copyright on an actual human being's voice--the voice of Snow White's career was fucking ENDED by Walt Disney. She was never able to work again as a performer because he OWNED HER VOICE. She was an OPERA SINGER. He DESTROYED HER LIFE. So no, the studio hasn't changed; it's just a matter of how easy being controlling was or wasn't, and how much the people in charge cared to spend time doing it.
If you want that to change, you have to fundamentally make Disney NOT Disney anymore.
What makes me so mad is that snow queen is such a lovely tale and there was an evil mirror that shattered and froze the queen’s heart. So the first thing the newly evil queen does is PLUNGE THE KINGDOM INTO ETERNAL WINTER.
And the kid Anna is based off of is actually this sweet peasant girl who is rescuing her best friend whom everyone else thought drowned and whom no one cared for because mirror shards got in his eyes and he only saw beauty in snowflakes while everything else was just disgustingly foul to him. Except he didn’t drown because he was whisked away by the snow queen.
Like this girl gives her shoes to the river to find out he didn’t drown. Her hair ribbons to the birds to find out who took him. Works her hands raw to get to him and has to suffer a mental breakdown because she got SO FUCKING CLOSE to saving him and he won’t even look at her because he wants to solve this puzzle the snow queen gave him.
And then her sobbing wakes him up and he cries and washes the shards from his eyes and the fact that she saved him is enough to melt the snow queens heart and she brings spring back to the kingdom.
Let’s not forget Gerda’s journey takes her along a long road that includes meetings with multiple women, many of them old, most of whom are not evil witches but wise women who aid her in her quest. She’s also at one point held captive by a bandit princess who swaps clothes with her and insists on sleeping in the same bed and routinely threatens her with a knife, but she eventually lets Gerda go with a magic talking reindeer she was also holding captive. The bandit princess cries because goddamn Gerda you’re so NICE and PRETTY and BRAVE and you clearly care about this stupid guy I GUESS and I can’t bear it just GO ok just GO and also you better fucking take care of her reindeer or I will CUT YOU.
The story is full of interesting complex women of many ages and magical talking animals and it’s a real shame we didn’t get an adaptation closer to the original ‘cause it’s really cool.
There was a Soviet animated movie from 1957, that doesn’t brush over any of the things you just listed.
You get Gerda on her journey, meeting all of those people that both hinder her quest and help her, with older women from different regions of northern europe, as well as several princesses who aid her
also the art style and animation is absolutely gorgeous and I always feel like it’s a shame that older Soviet animation is barely recognized around the world
you can see the entire thing with english subtitles here
There is probably ONE thing Soviet Russia did right and ARGUABLY BETTER than anyone else in the entire world in the past 100 years of human history: ANIMATION.
And this is something that unfortunately is literally a case of “dumping the baby with water”. The art, the vision, the designs, the storytelling and the approach to olden tales, fairytale, folk tales, children’s books and poems etc, is beyond FAR BEYOND than you may imagine.
Some notable moments of Soviet Russian Animation include (not in any particular order but my own brains spitting images):
The Hedgehof In The Fog (1975)
Which is considered revolutionary and is still a staple of Russian speaking cultures and is regarded as an important piece of Animation in freaking Japan (aka the nation of Animation). If you want to deep dive into the unique stop motion art and the importance of this piece, Google away.
Another animation I love is “Fedora’s Grief” (1974).
A short animation about how objects left unattended and uncared for will not serve you, the human. It’s such an essential part of the Soviet Experience of the common person, which is hard to describe to people who were born to abundance.
I would also love to cite The Cat Leopold (1975-1987), which, for me, forever describes the naiveté of the simple, common soviet person, as we today love citing, “People Are Not Their Governments”.
This one is the antithesis to Tom & Jerry, for all it’s worth: there are tow mice forever taunting the cat, and in each episode the cat asks them, “let’s live in friendship”.
YouTube had a whole archive of the old Soviet animations. If you are looking for beauty and design, and art - these were all state sponsored, and thus - had funds for their visions. No, not all of soviet animation and film was any kind of USSR propoganda (looking at you, US cinema, 30s Batman in black and white), and to some very confusing extent, you see many animations honoring source material or being innovative in their own right, regardless of authority.
Some beautiful animations I would love people to know about:
This series, named “Kitten Named Gav” (1976-1982)
“Gav” is literally “how” as in barking sound. So it’s about a Kitten named “bark” and his little cat adventures with his friend, a puppy.
Sleeping Beauty (and 7 princes) (1951)
The Frog Queen (1954)
The Cat, That Wanders By Itself (1964)
[Yes, cats feature often, and in positive context]
All in all. Yes, the Soviet Animation, in context of today, is the baby thrown out of the window of history with the muddy water, and I, for one, will not stand for it.
I wish more people knew about those beautiful artworks.
I wish people knew that techniques that were tried out and pioneered in those animations way back in the 40s inspired Walt Disney works. I wish people made more art and less war.
