For some reason its going around today on my main page headlines that twitter people are taken aback with the fact that Disney reuses identical animation sequences for multiple projects.
I’m not sure why this is alarming and “ruining people’s childhood” (why is everything with twitter people either the greatest thing or the worst thing??)
There’s a full Disney wiki page dedicated to it here.
Here’s a compilation video:
Maybe it’s because today we sometimes view little tricks and shortcuts as cheating – light boxes, camera obscura, straight up tracing, stencils – and with so much digital, using downloaded textures and materials, brushes, code libraries, walk cycles, skeletal rigs, full animation sequences…we sometimes don’t realize or want to accept these were done during the classic eras when it was all hand-drawn and pure.
Looking at the first appearances of the Joker, I’m almost certain some of those panels were traced from The Man Who Laughs. Video games like Mortal Kombat, every character in the game has the same rig and core animation set…except Goro…
Hell, even the old masters, Da Vinci, Vermeer, Velazquez used a camera obscura as a shortcut.
So looking at the old hand-drawn animations, every frame would still have to be drawn, unlike today where you would just take the animation sequence file and put a new character skin overtop. Plus with digital, it’s a bit easier to take a model or animation asset and tweak them here and there to change them enough.
Work hard, work smart.
Thanks for stopping by, I hope you enjoyed this post – that’s what the blog is, just little jaunts into art stuff. If you’d like to check out my art, you can go to my main page here and also my Etsy shop where I’m running 15% off on original pieces and starting to incorporate Wizard of Oz stuff. I hope you have a great day and I’ll be right back with another post.
hill art + graphics 