Its output might be pretty much entirely CGI these days, but Disney is arguably most famous for its classic hand-drawn animations. Starting with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the studio produced over 40 traditionally animated films over the six decades – but a new viral Twitter video is showing some of them in a surprising new light.
Viewed over 11M times, the video (below) shows various classic Disney clips side-by-side, revealing several instances of recycled animations. Characters precisely mirror one-another’s actions,
The montage beings with a clip of Winnie the Pooh’s Christopher Robin alongside one of The Jungle Book’s Mowgli, both clambering over rocks. Although the films were released 10 years apart (1977 and 1967 respectively), the characters’ actions are eerily identical. The clip also reveals the Jungle Book also borrowed animations from The Sword in the Stone, released a year previously.
According to Huffpost, the practice of reusing animations was indeed used to cut costs. Known as rotoscoping, the technique was originally conceived to help portray movement, with animators tracing or drawing over live footage. But as Disney’s bank of animated films grew, artists could soon trace over previous animated characters to save time. And as the below video by Cartoon Hangover shows, there are many more examples of recycled animations to be found in Disney’s hand-drawn films.
We don’t blame Disney’s animators for seeking to speed up their workflow. With the painstaking process of hand-drawing an entire animated film, finding a few ways to cut corners makes sense – and rotoscoping sounds like a pretty creative way of doing it. (Plus, Disney probably wasn’t counting on Twitter popping up forty years later to expose its methods.)
But while crafting traditional animated films was certainly a drawn-out process (sorry), that’s not to say CGI is a walk in the park. As these mind-boggling facts about the making of Toy Story 4 prove, it takes a ton of skill and creativity to achieve such an impressive level of computerised detail.
Join us in helping to bring reality and decency back by SUBSCRIBING to our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ1Ll1ylCg8U19AhNl-NoTg and SUPPORTING US where you can: Award Winning Independent Citizen Media Needs Your Help. PLEASE SUPPORT US FOR JUST £2 A MONTH https://dorseteye.com/donate/
