THIS WILL BLOW YOUR MIND.

[theweaselking]

(Summary: "classic" Disney was LAZY, yo. Why make a new scene when you can just paint new characters on an old one?)

Comments

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[publius1.livejournal.com]

I honestly think I understand why regarding this -- when you're having to paint each frame individually, seriously, why waste the animation efforts? Especially since, y'know, the vast majority of people will never notice.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. But the side-by-side comparison is very neat!

[wherever.livejournal.com]

Meh, most animation companies do that. That's why all the characters in a particular series never change their clothes... so they can re-use key parts of animation over and over again.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

I shouldn't be surprised but I still boggle

[jerril]

Its a bit like using the same actors over and over again. I wonder how much the animators desire to use old footage as a model drove character design (the tall dog dancing with Maid Marrian vs the dwarves in the long coat), or whether it was a directive "from the top" to re-use footage for stylistic reasons, or whether it was a solution invented to fit within schedule/budget constraints.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not really the same as using the same actors in multiple roles. It's more like using the same recording of a voice actor's line-read in multiple movies.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

It's even more like using a library of stock footage for scenes in a live-action movie, which was pretty common even in big-budget productions well into the '80s, and even crops up now and then today.

[jerril]

I don't like either analogy much, because each scene is visibly different, even if the motions and camera angles are the same. It's not stock footage - someone had to repaint those characters for every frame of the animation - turning dwaves stacked up in a longcoat into a long bodied dog, turning sleeping beauty into Maid Marrian.

Stock footage and stock sound effects require NO work other than editing them in. This still requires a lot of technical work - this is before CGI, they're not just saving the animation movements from one figure and loading them into another... It's saving some creative work planning the scene, but the long hard work of animating each cell still has to be done.

Otherwise King Louis and the chicken who's name escapes me right now would have to be MUCH more similar in character design - (either both fat white chickens or fat orange orangutangs, and either way one movie would be pretty different!)

It's tracing, of course, but this isn't "tracing in lieu of photocopying".

Better comparison would be two artists using the same reference picture of a model in a pose - so they end up with two portraits in the same pose at the same camera angle, but one could be a Pieta scene, and the other could be a grieving minotaur soldier cradling his wounded comerade (seen it).

Yes, the angle and posture is identical. It's hardly stock footage though.

Almost stock footage

[frith]

There are two scenes from Bambi that were pasted virtually unchanged from Bambi into The Rescuers. One was the (robin) landing on its nest in Drip Drip Drop Little April Showers and the other was Bambi and Mother in the Fresh Spring Grass scene. Both of those ended up in the swamp sequences in The Rescuers. The colours in the bird were changed, but that's about it.

The hardest part in animation is the elasticity of the characters as well as the timing and the expressions, thus the tracing.

[fengi.livejournal.com]

That's something to see. As animation history buff I'd read Robin Hood was close to the nadir of Disney's budgeting for cinema quality animation, but seeing it's notorious retracing on display is mindblowing.

Yet the voice work and humor - plus the age I was when I saw it - make it the last Disney animated feature I found fully engaging until Lilo and Stitch. No, I can't explain why I liked that one so much.

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

I find your lack of interest in the Lion King... disturbing.

[allysonsedai.livejournal.com]

Agreed - Robin Hood has always been my favorite - and I have seen LOTS of Disney animations over and over again.

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

There is also a scene from Aladdin (during the song Never Had a Friend Like Me) where he and a veiled dancer bend in to kiss each other that I'm sure is traced from Peter Pan, where he and Tiger Lily kiss (IIRC during the song What Makes The Red Man Red). I don't know how I recognized this, except that I've seen both movies dozens of times (albeit during different decades).

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, although a lot of live-action filmmakers will repeat shots and sequence ideas (not to mention actors) from film to film, too. (But this gets an A+ for the presentation, I must say.)

[andrewducker]

Robin Hood is classic Disney?

I always figured it as the start of the slump that continued until Oliver and Company, before the renaissance that started with The Little Mermaid.

[allysonsedai.livejournal.com]

It has to do with a particular label, not just the era. The earlier animations were released with a black diamond logo that said "Classics". The later films were purple logos with "Masterpiece". [The original Classics were eventually re-released as Masterpieces with a slightly different cover design.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Classics

[andrewducker]

Cheers for the linkage!

[corruptedjasper.livejournal.com]

I was watching Jungle Book with the commentary track yesterday, and they explicitly mentioned that several of the wolf pups in the first sequence are reused from 101 Dalmatians.

[montoya.livejournal.com]

Clearly, they need to hire a new choreoanimator.