Disney dumps 2D animation

As the way of landline telephones and desktop PCs.

"Disney turns away from hand-drawn animation"

Studio says none of its animation companies are working in the traditional 2D format, and there are no current plans to do so again

by

Ben Child   

March 7th, 2013

guardian.co.uk

Disney, the Hollywood titan which brought the world classics such as Fantasia, Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, has admitted it has no current plans to make hand drawn animated films.

Speaking at an annual shareholder's meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday, chief executive Bob Iger revealed that none of the studio's animation companies was working on 2D, hand-drawn material for the big screen. While Iger did not rule out returning in the future to the style which made the company famous, the long gestation period for Hollywood animated productions means a gap of several years before any new film might emerge.

"To my knowledge we're not developing a 2D or hand-drawn feature animated film right now," said Iger. "There is a fair amount of activity going on in hand-drawn animation but it's largely for television at this point. We're not necessarily ruling out the possibility [of] a feature but there isn't any in development at the company at the moment."
The news will upset fans of traditional hand-drawn animation, who had been cheered by the revival of the form under John Lasseter, the Pixar boss who also became Disney Animation's chief creative officer in 2006. Lasseter told a London audience for a 2009 screening of Bolt (a CGI animation) that he had re-hired many of the animators who were ditched by the previous regime because of the emergence of computer-generated technology in the 1990s.

"Unfortunately 2D became the excuse for poor storytelling," said Lasseter, who pioneered the CGI animation revolution with Toy Story in 1995. "The general consensus was that audiences did not want to watch hand-drawn animated films, which is of course completely ridiculous. The day I stepped in we got in touch with these guys and set about bringing back the artists that Disney had laid off."
The studio subsequently put the hand-drawn animation The Princess and the Frog into production. The traditional musical, based on the Brothers Grimm story the Frog Prince but relocating the action to 1920s New Orleans, was well-reviewed but failed to mirror the astounding success of Pixar at the box office with a middling return of $267m (£178m). Another hand-drawn animation – 2011's Winnie the Pooh – drew praise from critics but pulled in just $33m across the globe. Meanwhile, Disney CGI efforts such as 2009's Bolt and 2010's Tangled grossed $310m and $590m respectively.

It may not all be hard lines for the style that made the studio famous, however. One US blogger covering the news of hand-drawn animation's demise has pointed to rumours that Disney is planning a feature using similar techniques to the Oscar-winning short film Paperman. That film was produced by animators working with computers who were drawing rather than modelling images. The studio's animated film arm is also offering an eight-week intern program specifically in 2D animation this summer.


Something new in animation...Disney's "Paperman"

Something new in animation...Disney's "Paperman"

"Disney’s Innovative Animated Hybrid Paperman Debuts Online"

by

Graeme McMillan

January 30th, 2013

Wired

For those who didn’t catch it in theaters when it accompanied Wreck-It Ralph at the tail end of last year, Disney Animation’s Paperman has debuted online, giving everyone a chance to look at the Oscar-nominated animated short that blends hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery in a beautiful, innovative way that might just look like the future of animation as a whole. [See below]

The first thing you notice about Paperman is how different it seems from most modern cartoons, not just because of the limited color palette and retro styling of the characters and the world they live in, but because it doesn’t look like the generic, quasi-photo-realistic CGI animation of everything from Pixar’s Brave to, well, Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph. It actually looks as if real people have created it, not machines, and that’s something we haven’t really seen in feature animation for years.

That’s intentional, according to the man behind the short. Director John Kahrs told Cartoon Brew that the origin of Paperman “really came out of working so much with Glen [Keane] on Tangled.” After looking at the work of Keane — a classic Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, among many other projects – Kahrs found himself with a new appreciation for traditional animation and drawing techniques. “I thought, Why do we have to leave these drawings behind? Why can’t we bring them back up to the front of the image again? Is there a way that CG can kinda carry along the hand drawn line in a way that we haven’t done before?”

The answer was yes. It just required a technology that no one had actually created yet.

Paperman‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that Kahrs described as “just like painting on the surface of the CG.”

In practice, it successfully blends the best of both forms of animation together in way they’ve never been seen before. Depicting George and Meg as flat, drawn characters keeps them safely out of the uncanny valley that even the best CGI sometimes can’t avoid and somehow makes them seem more real; other sequences, like the multiple paper airplanes zooming through the air, would be far less convincing and far more time-consuming if rendered without the help of computer generated imagery.

Paperman is up for the Best Animated Short Film award at this year’s Academy Awards. It easily deserves to win; as good as the other nominees are, nothing manages to be quite as touching, quite as impressive, or quite as aware of the legacy of the past of animation while pointing towards the future of the medium, as this is. If we’re lucky, perhaps more films will make use of Meander in future, and bring some visual variety back to our animated fare. And if they could manage to be as charming as this short, I don’t think anyone would find themselves complaining too loudly.
 

Paperman

And, the old Disney Steamboat Willie [1928]...