Out with the New, In with the Old
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Out with the New, In with the Old

I get inspired every time I dust my Disney movies. Some of my most passionate columns have been written after gently pushing away the dust from VHS and DVD cases, having granted myself a moment to remember in the midst of an ever-busy life why it is I own all these movies in the first place. During this time, favorite scene and characters, songs and visuals never fail to ignite something within me—the Mary Blair visuals of “Once Upon a Wintertime�? from Melody Time, the romantic coloring of “So This is Love�? from Cinderella, “Scales and Arpeggios�? from The AristoCats, Marahute’s flight from The Rescuers Down Under, Kenai’s flashback in Brother Bear . . . The list of beloved scenes could go on and on.

When Walt Disney Feature Animation ceased producing traditional animation, I had to do some serious animation soul-searching. No, it wasn’t exactly life-threatening along the lines of educating the masses or fixing corruption in Washington D.C., but as someone who has loved traditional animation since my 1988 Oliver & Company revelation, it was devastating news. I had come to enjoy anticipating a new traditional animation feature from Disney every year, always climaxed by the unveiling opening day viewing.

Frankly, CGI animation just doesn’t do it for me, unless it happens to be something like a CGI robot perfectly blended with hand-drawn humans and aliens. I own all forty-four hand-drawn Disney features from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs through Home on the Range. I was not a big fan of Home on the Range, but I have even watched that several times on DVD simply because I think it’s a beautiful piece of traditional animation. On the other hand, I own only three CGI films, all of which I like very much, but great CGI films are to me an enjoyable film-going experience, not much unlike many others I’ve had with other great films I saw once, highly recommended to friends, and never saw again. It’s the same concept as traditional animation—fluid character animation telling great stories with rich characters—and yet, to me, there is something missing. Obviously I’m in the minority on this, all box office grosses considered, but there is something unique about traditional animation that makes me thrilled at the recent news that Walt Disney Feature Animation will once again return to creating crown jewels.

One important factor in all this is the visual appeal of hand-drawn animation. As of right now, hand-drawn animation appears to allow for a greater flexibility in visual development. There have been some variation in the art direction of CGI animation—compare Toy Story to Monster’s Inc. to Madagascar, for example—but there has yet to be anything to show that CGI can touch the capacity that hand-drawn art has in creating the vast differences found between, say, the warmth of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ European illustration style, the distinctiveness of the Mary Blair influences used for the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow�? segment of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad, the brilliant vertical designs for Sleeping Beauty, or the sketchy, vibrant quality of the ink lines that are the trademark for One-Hundred-and-One Dalmatians. Unlike in traditional animation, very often CGI films seem to have a cookie-cutter feel to the art direction with humans having big chins on big heads and backgrounds so real they look photographic. As of now, there seems to be the lack of anything as fresh as the art direction of Hercules, the zany quality of The Emperor’s New Groove, or the softness of Brother Bear.

I can also better appreciate the art behind hand-drawn animation. Computer animation appears to be manipulating models, while traditional animation requires not only a talented animator but a strong draftsman as well. If the person at the table can’t draw Jim Hawkins to model in any perspective, then they’re kind of stuck in the water. Both forms of animation obviously require a great amount of talent, but my affection for animation comes not only from the effect but also from the process. Traditional animation—starting with a blank page and creating something that lives and breathes from scratch—excites me. Animation has always entertained and delighted me on two levels—the storytelling level and the artistic level. When I watch Tarzan, for example, I’m not just laughing at Jane Porter’s character, but I am also appreciating how she was animated, the background behind her, and the process of assembling it all together, among many other things. Knowing that any scene with Jane started from scratch on a piece of blank paper and ended as Tarzan’s endearing love interest amazes me on both those levels.

The effect of hand-drawn animation is also a strong appeal. I like the fluidity of movement and realism allowed by hand-drawing humans in traditional animation. I’m excited to see what Glen Keane does with Rapunzel, but as of now, there has yet to be a CGI human character that convinces me that the medium could ever compare to Aurora dancing with Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty, Roger reviving a puppy in One-Hundred-and-One Dalmatians, or Ariel singing about her dreams in The Little Mermaid. Visually, CGI humans always look, to me, like puppets and always seem to move like marionettes. In lesser animation studios, the effect seems to be what I call the drunken marionette syndrome, where the character seems to move in full animation but without full control of motor functions. The standard for realistic human animation in traditional animation requires a strong understanding of human anatomy—muscles, skeletal structure, the effects of gravity on all of the above—plus the ability to apply traditional animation skills like squash and stretch, but the realism most audiences require from traditional feature animation gets a pass when it comes to CGI feature animation.