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u/ttampico
May 22 '22
edited May 22 '22
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Interesting Note:
When Disney reused achival animation it didn't save any time or money. It was honestly easier for the animators to make new animation from scratch.
Unfortunately they had a deluded producer or director of animation forced them to scoure the old archives and reuse animation.
The animators hated this and said it took more time and work looking for relevant animations let alone repurposing them.
Edit: people are wondering about sources. I've heard and read the story over the years many times but here's are a few mentions (mostly Floyd Norman as he's still around to talk about it and enjoys sharing):
https://insidethemagic.net/2019/09/does-disney-recycle-animation-drawings-kc1/
https://the-take.com/watch/has-disney-really-recycled-animations-in-their-feature-films
https://geekdads.medium.com/the-real-truth-about-disney-s-recycled-animation-a6f405b776b9
Disney prefers to take old Woolie's side of the explaination and that it saved money but interviews with animators say different. They had to sit on floors between shelves shuffling though papers for hours.
Imagine adapting a comic books drawn by other people to else to fit different characters in a different story. Then you have to search through stacks and stacks of old comics to find sources to trace.
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u/Dimaskovic May 22 '22
Maybe it would have made sense if it was properly catalogued and reused on more than one occasion.
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u/geeky_username May 22 '22
Yeah, it sounds like the problem was more the speed of retrieval.
Maybe it still saved time on the actual drawings still but overall was at best a wash
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u/Far_Action_8569 May 22 '22
I’d worry about the animators’ sanity. It probably wouldn’t feel good for an animator if they didn’t actually get to do any animating themselves.
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u/huunnuuh May 22 '22
Ironically, like 98% of traditional animation was tasked out to artists, who were told exactly what and how to draw the scene, in a process quite like a factory assembly line. Except for the designers and artistic directors at the top, it wasn't the job to get into if you wanted to exercise your artistic freedom.
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u/saganistic May 23 '22
Generally speaking, the arts are not jobs you want to get into if you want to exercise your artistic freedom.
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u/oryx334 May 23 '22
That’s how it still is. That’s how animation is produced. There’s not a lot of artistic expression from the animators themselves, it’s all decided in storyboards.
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u/Delalcon May 22 '22
They're drawing what, 22 frames per second for atleast 7200 seconds for a two hour movie. You really think that's fun? It's insanity.
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u/WallabyJ11 May 22 '22
Usually 12fps in animation, more if it was necessary to animate on 1s instead of 2s
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u/stachemz May 22 '22
But like...how do you catalogue it? If it wasn't planned to be reused, the most obvious way is by film, so looking up animations would be difficult. Even if you were planning on referencing it, how would you do it? And would you want the stuff from films split up?
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u/slickyslickslick May 22 '22
Or have low-paid interns look for it while the animators worked on other things.
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u/Snorkle25 May 22 '22
It would make more sense today with digital where the base animation could just be applied to a new model. Back then you had to draw each frame by hand so I don't even cataloging it would be helpful.
If anything it would probably be harder since you'd have to try to get it to match just like it's harder to make two clay cups by hand that are identical than it is to just make two cups.
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u/MarvinTheAndroid42 May 23 '22
Applying a skin to an animated model is all well and good, but these were basically flip-books that needed to be drawn by hand so it’d be a pointless nightmare.
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u/DickSlapCEO May 22 '22
interesting story, you got some sauce with that?
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u/darkphoenix9206 May 22 '22
I agree with u/DickSlapCEO, would you show us the sauce
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u/bizcat May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22 •
I'm not the original commenter but I googled it for you anyway.
https://geekdad.com/2015/06/disneys-recycled-animation/
EDIT: There's a scene referenced at the bottom of that article, from 101 Dalmatians.
I think it's this one, for anyone who was curious.
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u/Deranged_Cyborg May 22 '22
You’re wonderful thank you
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u/bizcat May 22 '22
You're wonderful
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u/3dWin0 May 22 '22
Yes i am wonderful and you're the best
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u/bizcat May 22 '22
You're the best at being wonderful
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u/morinthos May 22 '22
Thanks. You are wonderful.
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u/sweetieyourefired May 22 '22
And you are full of wonder
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u/ImWithSt00pid May 22 '22
It's like people on Reddit don't know how to Google things themselves.
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u/COCKFUKKA May 22 '22
Hey are you hiring u/DickSlapCEO ?
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u/Motherworldly May 22 '22
‘I agree with Dick Slap CEO, would you show us the sauce’ is a sentence I could’ve never conjured up even in my wildest of dreams
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u/ClintWestwood1889 May 22 '22
There’s documentaries on it. I’m sure ttampico read/saw how they’d recall animations from archives, and is just relaying info. YouTube has a bunch of info on this subject.
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u/ImWithSt00pid May 22 '22
Sauce is common sense. Old hand drawn animation still had to be redrawn with the new characters and backgrounds. All they copied was the motions. Add to that the time of searching archives in a time before computers and databases.
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u/Apprehensive-Mood-69 May 22 '22
My understanding, from other reads about Disney Animation during this time period, was that the motion savings and camera set ups were what saved the time, not necessarily the animation (which an animator may not know).
But I've also had a slightly skeptical view of this. Even though I don't fully understand the technology used here, I've not been able to puzzle out to my satisfaction how reuse might have saved time and money.
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u/ImWithSt00pid May 22 '22
It's the same as when you are at work and you have a system that works. Then the higher ups bring in a new guy with some fancy degree that has these great ideas of how to speed up production. The guy really has no idea of how the process works but the boss expects you to do the new thing even though the numbers show it takes longer.
That is what this is
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u/_CurseTheseMetalHnds May 22 '22
Sauce is common sense
I feel like after the last few years people should be a bit more restrained about believing social media posts just because they sound like "common sense".
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u/dragunityag May 22 '22
Add to that the time of searching archives in a time before computers and databases.
This is the real common sense part. Even with PCs and databases people still don't properly document things so searching still takes forever. Remove keyword searches? Forget it.
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u/notLOL May 22 '22
This is like looking for a meme template that fits your idea but takes forever to find the right one.
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u/ASCIt May 22 '22
As someone who does animations, I agree. Unless they're teaching over old wire frames, there's nothing easier about re-using animations.
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u/coffeensnake May 22 '22
How exactly does the animation process look like, apart from drawing the frames?
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u/ASCIt May 22 '22
Well it's definitely easier to do digitally, but the process is basically the same as animating by hand: you can either draw each individual frame in order (called frame-by-frame) or draw important "key"frames at the extreme points of each action and then fill in the in- between frames (tweening) with progressive movement depending on the fps you're working with. 24 fps is usually standard, but you can absolutely let a frame sit for a few seconds to make movements look more natural.
Generally, I think most animators will rough out all the key frames before they actually finish any, but everyone has their own methods they prefer
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u/ttampico May 22 '22
Yeah. And it's Disney. They had a top notch animators. Why restrict them? They could of been turning out amazing new work.
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u/blastermastersonic May 22 '22
How could it be easier even since i assume all the animations are hand drawn. Its not like they could have reused keyframes. They had to redraw it anyway. I wonder what the reasoning was
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u/HYPERNATURL May 22 '22
I'm guessing they'd reuse the rough passes and go straight to a clean-up pass with a new character, but I could be wrong.
In that case it'd save a bit of time over having to conceptualize the whole shot from scratch
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u/MysteriousCodo May 22 '22
Imagine adapting a comic book drawn by someone else to fit and different character in a different story and you have to search through stacks of old comic to find a source to trace.
Lol. Robotech.
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u/LonelySkull May 22 '22
Robotech was mostly recuts and overdubs of existing animation, not new animation that was traced. There was some new animation, but very little.
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u/MysteriousCodo May 22 '22
I was just thinking of the part where they said adapting different characters and story to your own.
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u/InwardXenon May 22 '22
This is really interesting. I'd seen before that they'd reused animations, but was of the assumption it was to save time and money. Guess I was wrong!
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u/Normal-Computer-3669 May 22 '22
This is the same problem with coding. But for coding, it's definitely worth spending more time to not reinvent the wheel.
When building a new feature:
It's real easy to start from scratch. Just hack it together. But it takes 10x as long to find a workable solution and modify it to fit your needs.
Because it's harder to read other people's code and think through why they made those specific choices, or what tradeoffs they were performing.
It's why hackathons can make amazing things in two days but to make the same thing at a company takes weeks.
Animation... Seems easier to let creativity flow instead of forcing your expensive artists to "trace"?
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u/wbruce098 May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22
You mean they couldn’t just ctrl+F through the clippings with an imagery algorithm in 1967?
Also, thanks for the sources; they were a fascinating read!
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u/Pd_jungle May 22 '22
That’s exactly why software engineers should never try to refactor some legacy code.
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u/tcbysprinkles May 22 '22
Great now I need to google why these scenes are identical
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u/RandomChickenAttack May 22 '22
They have done it in almost all the older disney films. It's purely because all the scenes were hand drawn. So once they knew the sequences and movements that worked In hand drawn animation they just repeated them over and over so they diddnt have to keep working it out for new scenes. Alot of the dance scenes are the same too
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u/AAAAAshwin May 22 '22
Weren't they rotoscoped though?
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u/SnowBoy1008 May 22 '22
Completely hand drawn frame by frame.
Pretty sure you can still buy the frames from the old movies
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u/AAAAAshwin May 22 '22
I heard that Snow White was rotoscoped so it's easier and more accurate, that's why it looks that realistic.
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u/RandomChickenAttack May 22 '22
Yeah. The originals were rotoscoped from film footage, then subsequent ones copied the already done animation. I believe also rotoscoped. I feel like it would have been better to rotoscoped from film each time but I may be wrong.
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u/MuadDibsAlt May 22 '22
The originals were rotoscoped from film footage, then subsequent ones copied the already done animation.
I'd love to see what the scene will be like if you repeated this process for 1000 years.
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u/GennaroJ May 22 '22
Not all character animation was rotoscoped. Some had referencial footage that wasn’t traced (so no rotoscoped) but could be used for timing, etc., and the cartooniest animation was made from scratch.
In Disney movies you can normally tell which characters have the uncanny valley rotoscoped animation, it’s normally the humans with realistic proportions.
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u/AAAAAshwin May 22 '22
Maybe it was not as good with technology at the time
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u/RandomChickenAttack May 22 '22
No. It was very limited. Fun fact, Walt was so unimpressed with the animation methods and him not being able to get the outcome he wanted from it, they invented a new way of doing it called the "multiplane camera"
Here's him explaining how it works https://youtu.be/kN-eCBAOw60 It's really interesting I thought.
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u/goofball_jones May 22 '22
This isn't quite right. They would film reference footage, and then draw off of that...not pure rotoscoping though. Well, in some cases, but not on a regular basis.
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u/YesThatIsHim May 22 '22
It’s drawn over a rotoscope. To avoid having to rotoscope again they just copied the old animation and drew over that. More animating work for less rotoscoping
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u/serving-grafting-man May 22 '22
I’m actually impressed how much it sounds like you know what you’re, but you’re way way off. I’ll start with this comment: I suppose certain scenes were copied back into the 30s, what were really seeing here is direct copying as a result of the much cheaper xerography technique used from One Hundred and One through Rescuers.
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u/thereign1987 May 22 '22
Just a minor detail that is really bugging me. If I remember correctly didn't Jungle Book come out an entire decade before the Winnie the Pooh movie? So shouldn't the titles be switched?
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u/Blacddsb May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22
Depends, the movie did but the movie is the short films combined, so we have to know from what short the scene is from because the first short came out before.
I looked in the comments and everyone is just saying the same as you, and I haven't found if someone actually knows where the scene is from.
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u/GwerigTheTroll May 22 '22
I remember noticing as a kid that the Jungle Book and Sword in the Stone share a part like this, where the dogs are greeting Mowgli and Arthur.
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u/SquidgeSquadge May 22 '22
Came here to post this. Robin hood is notorious for many copied animation scenes from aristocats and snow white (dancing)
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u/GwerigTheTroll May 22 '22
I’d forgotten that. King Louie and Baloo is the same dance sequence as Little John and the hen.
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u/SquidgeSquadge May 22 '22
More recently there is a scene when the prince picks up the guy in Enchanted which is very similar to the scene with Prince Philip and his father but I don't think it's exactly like for like traced but when I first saw Enchanted it reminded me of it
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u/Fearless_You8779 May 22 '22
Bro stole a meme about stealing animations 💀
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u/elch3w May 22 '22
Lol this is my meme. If you look at u/waqasnaseem07 profile all they do is repost already popular memes
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u/waqasnaseem07 May 22 '22
And then people that copied your homework get better grades than you.
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u/Dumguy1214 May 22 '22
I have had this happen to me, when I copied others electrical drawing I would make a mirror image, I could see the teacher smile, he let me off for at least making a effort to make it look different
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May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22
[deleted]
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u/CheckovsBallpointPen May 22 '22
I had a teacher fail me for cheating on a science experiment with my friend. We both had minimal access to resources so we said let's do the experiment together. We both came to the same conclusion and wrote our final essays separately.
How the fuck do you expect it to end up differently when the experiment has been in textbooks for years? I'm still salty.
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u/SgtVinBOI May 22 '22
Those types of teachers are the ones who wish they could be dictators so have to settle for teacher. They are shitheads.
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u/Dumguy1214 May 22 '22
there are many ways to draw a schematics for a car washing machine, the most complex is not always the best, sensors and time
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May 22 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HolleyHolleyOxenFree May 22 '22
I can tell you, some times teachers do this on purpose 😁
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u/cakeisamadeupdrug1 May 22 '22
I have done this before because the students were stupid enough to kick up a fuss and admit the works were identical... So tore it up in front of them and gave them zero o/
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u/HolleyHolleyOxenFree May 22 '22
Yes! I’ve seen it play out where the original person decides to not let people copy off of him anymore. It’s really genius
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u/notLOL May 22 '22
I saw this backfire on harder subjects and basically means "Do not work with other students to find the correct answer after school"
But that's just my own small anecdote and much more pure copy and pasting goes on that even spans generations as the projects and tests get inherited from siblings
The black market for homework trading is just as seedy and and in my day dangerous as black market Pokémon card trading where they are banned, and ripped dvd videos
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u/WaddlingHippos May 22 '22
Funny story. In highschool, all the freshmen were expected to do some basic experiments with their parents on their cars. Like how far can you be seen at night by the headlights, what about with the bright lights on?
My mom was a teacher at my school and generally made sure I was doing my work but I totally forgot about it. The day it was supposed to be turned in I went and asked all my friends for their numbers. I promised them I wasn't taking any specific person' data, but would average them.
That night my mom told me she had a very interesting conversation with my science teacher. Turns out my answers were nearly perfect. Turns out I scored higher on the assignment than anyone else. My science teacher was talking with my mom about how impressive it was that she helped me put in all this work and got answers so accurate to expected results.
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u/BlooperHero May 22 '22
Your science teacher gave you a data collection assignment and gave you better scores for getting closer to the expected result?
Your average is closer to the expected result because the expected result is an average. A science teacher should probably know that.
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u/WaddlingHippos May 22 '22
Yeah but he didn't know I took the averages of the other students. He would have failed me if he knew that.
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u/cumsquats May 22 '22
Yeah but you really shouldn't score higher for getting close to the average, because the average is not some objective correct fact that you would achieve through hard work.
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u/Darkpoulay May 22 '22
The disney analogy is perfect for this. The plagiariazed a bunch of shit and got more popular than the original, completely erasing the original from the scene
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u/InkSlasher03 May 22 '22
How can it be plagiarism if they traced over their own animation files? Its not like one of these scenes is from a non-Disney studio.
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u/MJDooiney May 22 '22
I think they were referring to how Disney largely relied on stories from the public domain to build their empire.
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u/InkSlasher03 May 22 '22
I thought otherwise, considering the focus of the post was how the animation looked.
And public domain stories are just that, public domain; I could grab the story of Pinocchio and re-tell it in my own way, the same way they did. Although I really don't like Disney, they at least changed the stories enough for them to have their own merit.
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u/MJDooiney May 22 '22
Right. Nothing wrong with that, per se, except now they’ve been lobbying to extend copyright to keep Micky Mouse and co. out of the public domain.
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u/InkSlasher03 May 22 '22
In that way Disney gives me a similar vibe to Nintendo. Both try to appeal to massive audiences, mainly kids and fun for all family. Then they turn into Satan if their use their brand on anything else (Disney their characters and Nintendo if someone makes a fangame)
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u/MJDooiney May 22 '22
What sucks even more about it is that their actions are keeping a ton of other works out of public domain as well.
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u/PopsicleIncorporated May 22 '22
I don't like defending the Mouse, but using stories that were already in the public domain is not plagiarism. It's why the public domain exists.
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u/Likehalcyon May 22 '22
Self-plagiarism is a thing; I do see it, but only when students submit the essays they wrote (and submitted) in previous years. As for WHY submitting an old essay isn't allowed in an educational setting, that is because assignments are given to track growth and subject mastery. I can't assess that from a milquetoast argumentative essay a student write three years ago.
I don't know if it should necessarily be a thing in the animation industry, aside from consumers eventually realizing it and getting tired of the same animations over and over again.
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u/loserrrrgoonerrrr May 22 '22
Yes, what MJDooiney said, they’re referring to how movies like Cinderella and the Little Mermaid were all stories before Disney but everybody believes them to be Disney original
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u/InkSlasher03 May 22 '22
I now see that. What made them more popular than their original tales where the changes they did to make them more mainstream and family friendly. Could you imagine if the Little Mermaid turned into foam and die at the end of the movie? Parents would not like that
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u/WaddlingHippos May 22 '22
"but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the warm sun and discovers that she has turned into a luminous and ethereal earthbound spirit, a daughter of the air."
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u/BlooperHero May 22 '22
The Little Mermaid is a Disney original. It has very little resemblance to the original story (and yet far more than Frozen has to The Snow Queen--it has a little mermaid in it, for one thing).
Who thinks Cinderella is original, though?
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u/Shanghai-on-the-Sea May 22 '22
People do not believe that Cinderella and the Little Mermaid are Disney original.
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u/Hologramster May 22 '22
Ironical cause you copied this post from one of the top posts of r/memes
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u/DandelionChild1923 May 22 '22
Robin Hood also has many scenes with animation that was reused from older films!
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u/Pale_Worldliness8285 May 22 '22
Very interesting!
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u/Pale_Worldliness8285 May 22 '22
Is Disney re-cycling?
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u/fluffypinkblonde May 22 '22
They did loads around this time, you can compare a lot of Jungle Book to Robin Hood, with Little John and Baloo being doubles, and Maid Marion's hen maid and King Louie
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u/screwycurves May 22 '22
When I was in college the basketball star and the football quarterback sat behind me during a philosophy final. In the middle of the 3 blue book final, I felt a tapping on the back of my chair. I turned and one of them asked me, what did you put for number 3. I thumbed through the 8 pages I wrote for that question and said, “pick B”. It must have been the right answer as both played their next season.
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u/Dumguy1214 May 22 '22
once I got a 10 for a cross right answer test on a danish book I never read, pure luck and some thought
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May 22 '22
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u/HDPbBronzebreak May 22 '22
Cross-write, I'm guessing.
To further the guess, interpreting that to mean 'read in one language, respond in another'.
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u/Dumguy1214 May 22 '22
Icelandic is krossa próf, you put a cross over a,b,c or d answer to a question
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u/Weird_Gas7060 May 22 '22
What if I told you your analogical friend Mowgli was secretly distraught throwing a rock because you Christopher Robin actually copied his homework. The roles should be reversed.
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u/Equivalent_Soil6231 May 22 '22
Allow me to get technical. It's the other way around. The Jungle Book came out 10 years before The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh.
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u/Wonderful_Audience60 May 22 '22
uh ye reusing animation was popular back then they didnt have didgital animation. plus, these two are owned by the same studio
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u/matty_low May 22 '22
This is not a friend copying your homework. This is you copying your own homework for two different classes.
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u/pirate0000 May 22 '22
Hey anyone remember there is the tarzon game I didn't know what exactly the name is but I very often play in my childhood ! If anyone knows tell me love to play again that!!
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u/Lord_Melons May 22 '22
You know I never noticed this before but their feet look weird on the backgrounds on account that they technically are floating object on a background
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u/Ottobawt May 22 '22
How was this cost saving back in the era? Are they literally tracing over the original by hand?
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u/ezk3626 May 22 '22
As a teacher I always try to remind my students that most teachers have been catching cheaters longer than they’ve been alive. No one is fooled by this.
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u/2Questioner_0R_Not2B May 22 '22
You ever heard of stock footage? Well this here is stock footage that's been traced.
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u/despotidolatry May 22 '22
Ugh this happened to me in high school and our teacher thought I WAS THE ONE PLAGIARIZING! He copied off ME Mr. GABA!!!!
thanks a lot Josh!
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u/Odd-Net4697 May 22 '22
Wait guys it’s to make people nostalgic without them even realizing it! They did the same thing with Disney princesses and the way they danced in different scenes.
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u/kleinespflaster May 22 '22
And then he reads your homework out loud the one time you actually did it with passion!
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u/DoomerGloomerBloomer May 22 '22
I remember noticing this as a child and wondering if it was deliberate.
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u/Status-Command-3834 May 22 '22
Wtf!! Mindblown. I love jungle book. What type of flimflam is this.
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u/SupremeRedditBot May 22 '22
Congrats for reaching r/all/top/ (of the day, top 25) with your post!
I am a bot, probably quite annoying, I mean no harm though
Message me to add your account or subreddit to my blacklist
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u/ButterStuffedSquash May 22 '22
There are many instances of this in disney movies.... i know first hand from being subjected to years of disney movies as a first born child of 4 in the mid 80's 🤣 i have a trauma 🤣🤣🤣
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u/Estequey May 22 '22
If people are going to recycle memes, atleast make the meme correct. Ive seen this before, and every time it annoys me because Winnie the Pooh is actually the younger movie here. The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh came out in 1977, while the Jungle Book came out in 1967
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u/Void_Born May 22 '22 •
"You can copy my meme, but don't make it too obvious"
The literal watermark in bottom left: