Hand-Drawn Animation Dead at Disney

[DisneyFan09]

I hate how this project gets passed around as an official Disney production. It was not. A couple of Disney fans who were in no way affiliated with Disney put together materials to pitch their short film idea to Disney and - surprise - didn't even manage to do that, let alone having Disney option their pitch. There's a thread dedicated to this project here with more information for anyone interested.

Really? What a pity. I'm sorry.

[Sotiris]

Brad Bird: ‘I Want to Do Another Hand-Drawn Animated Feature’
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/animators/br ... 13377.html

Brad Bird mentioned this again in a few other interviews but I highly doubt anything real will come out of this.

Q: Are there other original animated films you’d want to do?

Brad Bird: Yes, I would love to do a hand-drawn thing at some point in the future. But there are also other live action ideas that I have. And it’s more about the idea than it is about the medium. Everybody thought when I moved to live action with Mission: Impossible that I’d never go back to animation. Like, why would you go back to the kids’ table? But I’ve never looked at animation that way. I think it’s an amazing art form and for me it’s all about film and that’s just another way to do film.

Source: http://blogs.disney.com/insider/2015/05 ... edibles-2/

I'm sad that people think of hand-drawn animation as old-fashioned Hollywood thinks that only computer-animated films can make money. But I don't think it's true; hand-drawn has its own look and all it's waiting for is a good idea. I love it in a way I don't love anything else: I especially love the hand-crafted quality of Disney's dog movies, Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians, and the work of Miyazaki. I'm working on the next Incredibles now, but somewhere down the line I'll do hand-drawn again.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peopl ... 67699.html

Q: What are your thoughts on where 2D is right now? Do you think it feels like it’s vanished completely?

Brad Bird: I actually think it’s a lot more valid than other people do. I think the industry tends to like to think in the narrow sort of mindset of a businessman, and businessman absolutes, and movies really exist in a much grayer region of dreams and stuff like that, and instinct is prized in movies, it’s not prized with the businessmen in movies, but movies themselves often reward instinct rather than pie charts. And what has not been done is that there’s been no American animation done on Disney-level quality that has really gone into different genres. For instance, there’s never been a horror movie in animation executed at Disney-level quality and hand-drawn, I’m not talking about CG I’m talking about hand-drawn, but it doesn’t take a lot to imagine how cool that would be. If you think of the scariest parts of Snow White or Pinocchio or Fantasia with Night on Bald Mountain, you could do something really scary in animation and I think if you did it right, if you did it with all the art that Spielberg did Jaws, I think that it would be an amazing experience because there’s something intuitive about when people are drawing directly with their hands.

The problem is that every time people have deviated from the Disney playbook in hand-drawn animation, they’ve done so with staff that are nowhere near Disney-level talent or Disney-level budgets. So you have things like Heavy Metal, which not all of them are great, but a couple of them are really interesting, but they didn’t have the money or the artists to pull them off at the level that maybe they should’ve been pulled off. Where as in live-action film there are all kinds of new films being done in different genres where people can really execute an idea at a top level. It’s just that animation rewards grooming a team and keeping a team in place. That’s why when studios try to emulate Disney on the quick-and-cheap they always fail, because Disney has refined their animation team over years, they have a history of it, people go to Disney and know that there’s going to be a job after the movie, there’s going to be another movie. And when you assemble animation teams the way you do a live-action film, you’re often struggling a bit to get a cohesive team together, so if you have a team that works well together, you’re hoping for another film so that you can refine the team.

But for someone like me who wants to move back and forth between animation and live-action, that becomes its own challenge, but I absolutely think that hand-drawn animation is valid and I actually hope to do one in the future with a large budget and a longer schedule than we had on Iron Giant.

Source: http://collider.com/brad-bird-wants-to- ... ated-film/

One element of the film he would like to get back to is 2D animation. Though he is happy to continue making films with 3D computer animation, like the upcoming Incredibles 2, he said he has a “fondness” for what hand-drawn animation brings to the table. “There’s a truth to them and personal feel to them that I love and miss” he explained. “There’s several projects I want to make and I’d love to do another hand-drawn film.”

Source: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/07/22/ ... animation/

Q: I know you’ve been a huge champion of hand-drawn, 2D animation. Would you ever want to direct another hand-drawn film?

Brad Bird: Yes! Absolutely. I think that one of the side benefits of computer generated animation is that at least initially, it broke people away from the public domain, fairytales-as-musicals thing that was the only thing that they would back for a while. But the inadvertent thing is that people now believe that computer animation is the only kind of animation that can really succeed. And I don’t believe that. I believe that there is a magic to hand-drawn animation that is exclusive to hand-drawn animation. I love it. And while I love computer graphics animation just as much, I don’t think it’s the only way to tell a story in animation. And I love it when people like Henry Selick and Nick Park and Miyazaki and others go in different directions and use the medium in different ways.

I would love the opportunity to do hand-drawn. But I also have other films that I want to do and other live-action films that I want to do, and it’s just trying to get all of them made before I move on to the next dimension. Whatever that is. [Laughs]

Source: http://www.ew.com/article/2016/08/29/ir ... -brad-bird

[DisneyJedi]

"'Princess Academy' Concept Art Shows All of Your Favorite Disney Princesses Together in One Place"
http://moviepilot.com/posts/2015/05/18/ ... ce-2940248

I hate how this project gets passed around as an official Disney production. It was not. A couple of Disney fans who were in no way affiliated with Disney put together materials to pitch their short film idea to Disney and - surprise - didn't even manage to do that, let alone having Disney option their pitch. There's a thread dedicated to this project here with more information for anyone interested.

The reason, I'm sure, they turned down the project is because it was from fans and Disney doesn't want to solicite ideas from fans. Trust me, I tried pitching a storyline to them once and they turned it away for that reason. Because I don't even work at the studios.

[DancingCrab]

I hate how this project gets passed around as an official Disney production. It was not. A couple of Disney fans who were in no way affiliated with Disney put together materials to pitch their short film idea to Disney and - surprise - didn't even manage to do that, let alone having Disney option their pitch. There's a thread dedicated to this project here with more information for anyone interested.

The reason, I'm sure, they turned down the project is because it was from fans and Disney doesn't want to solicite ideas from fans. Trust me, I tried pitching a storyline to them once and they turned it away for that reason. Because I don't even work at the studios.

Correct, if they agreed to take a pitch from outside the studio employment they are making themselves liable for any similarities that may accidentally happen with another project at the studio. It's not just Disney either, this is a standard legal protection ALL studios take.

Also, both of these artists are now at legal odds with each other as Olivier has since stolen and claimed artwork created by David and passed it off as his own. David has made a pretty big scene about it on his social media outlets: https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-ka ... 9050151054

[Disney's Divinity]

Brad Bird: Yes, I would love to do a hand-drawn thing at some point in the future. But there are also other live action ideas that I have. And it’s more about the idea than it is about the medium.

It's too bad he sounds non-committal to having hand-drawn specifically, because he might be one of the few who could make it happen (and that I would also be interested in seeing his film). I doubt non-PIXAR employees like Musker and Clements had any pull at all with Lasseter.

[Sotiris]

A hand-drawn commercial produced by Psyop and animated by Duncan Studio is gaining traction on the web.

Augmented Canine-reality for Coke “Man and Dog”
http://www.stashmedia.tv/?p=24147

See the world through a dog's eyes in Psyop's hand-drawn animated Coke ad
http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news ... -for-coke/

Coke and the revamp of classical animation: Is 2D the new cool factor?
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/05/26/ ... ool-factor

[Sotiris]

The creators behind the new 2D-animated feature Moomins on the Riviera talk about why they chose 2D animation for their film, the difficulties they went through to produce and distribute a 2D film and the bias they had to face from people who view 2D animation as old-fashioned and irrelevant in today's market.

Picard's film of the family's ill-starred adventure in the South of France preserves a defiantly flat, print-based style. Sophia [Jansson] recalls that previous bids for big-screen adaptations had wheeled out the animatronic heavy weapons. "We got lots of proposals for 3D films. They just didn't look right." Then Picard came along with his hand-crafted, low-tech vision. Sceptics scoffed, saying that "you can't do that, it's old-fashioned. Nobody makes films like that any more."

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 61960.html

Q: There’s a film coming out of the Peanuts comics, that have gone for a new CG look. Did you feel you any pressure to update the medium, or was it always going to be this beautiful, traditional hand drawn look?

Sophia Jansson: I had somewhere in the back of my mind the idea that I would really like to make a 2D, traditional film if we were to make one again, because it somehow suits Tove’s style of illustration better, for me. So though we had seen a couple of pitches for 3D or CG films, in fact a couple of pitches that were nearly there, I was very hesitant to go with that style. When Hanna and Xavier suggested 2D I said, yes, please, I’d be very happy to look at this.

Q: I’m glad you did, it’s beautiful. It feels in ­keeping with Moomin ideology, somehow, to be a bit different from everyone else.

Sophia Jansson: I’m glad you say that. I mean, I’m very happy with it, but then, it was our choice to begin with. Sometimes people ask me, ‘well you are going against the grain, most animation is different, have you thought about this?’ The point was never to be like everybody else! The main point is to make, hopefully, a beautiful and fun film based on these comic strips that will stand alone in its own right as a film, not compared to whatever else is being made. Because it’s really an interpretation of Tove’s Moomin stories, and that’s the whole point of it, not whether or not it fits in with other animation styles.

Source: http://www.filmdivider.com/10345/discus ... in-empire/

Q: The film is unique in that it’s animated in a hand-drawn style that has become increasingly rare in contrast to digital. Was it always going to be hand-drawn, and if so, why?

Hanna Hemilä: When we were originally discussing the strips and how we would treat them, it became clear for us that it can be done in 3D on the computer, though it would look too ‘perfect’. We wanted to retain the hand-drawn style in order to be faithful to Tove’s work, which of course didn’t help us out at all when we were trying to raise the funding with distributors, with most of the companies we approached telling us that they only do 3D now.

Q: How did you come upon Sandman Animation Studios in China, and how did you work alongside them?

Xavier Picard: Sandman was founded about ten years ago, but I knew some of the people there a long time beforehand that had gone to different animation companies before setting up their own together. I really wanted to work with them, and Moomins on the Riviera was the perfect first project to do that.

Hanna Hemilä: We had a really tight schedule in order to get it finished in time to commemorate Tove’s one-hundredth birthday, so I was happy that Xavier knew the company and trusted them, especially in a time where, in China, most animation studios have closed down their hand-drawn department because it’s no longer in fashion to make films like that. This meant that there were very limited alternatives. The same goes for Europe, as there’s not that many people who can do organised hand-drawn animation anymore because you need tons and tons of people doing the drawings because it’s such a huge job.

Q: Xavier, what are your thoughts on the current state of hand-drawn animation? Which style do you prefer to work in, as a filmmaker?

Xavier Picard: I think it depends on the project. In the past, I have directed a series that was one of the first of its kind to be made using CGI. However, with this film I had real difficulty ever imagining the Moomins being in CGI. It wouldn’t look right. I do love hand-drawn animation, and am open to the old techniques, but again I don’t mind which style I work in just as long as it serves the story well.

Source: http://www.film3sixtymagazine.com/index ... ra-page-2/

Q: In the era of 3D animation is it unusual to carry out the 2D tradition in the Western world, as opposed to the the way it is established in the Japanese anime nowadays?

Xavier Picard: Moomins on the Riviera is maybe one of the last movie fully hand-drawn on paper sheets with pencil as they still do in Japan. 3D animation is another world.

Source: http://www.kingsroad.it/?p=12617

Xavier Picard, who is making his feature film directorial debut, has been a fan of the Finnish author’s work for many years and was particularly fascinated by the Moomin comic strips: “I wanted to do justice to Jansson because even though a TV series already exists they don’t exactly reflect what I’ve seen when reading the comic strip. I really wanted to translate the art of Tove Jansson into animation.”

In order to achieve this ambition, the animators employed a distinctive hand-drawn technique inspired by the original comic strips. “We’ve drawn around 120,000 drawings. It’s very unique right now because a lot of animation directors use 3D or different computer software. If you look at a Moomin, it’s very, very 'pure line', so for me it was evidence to do that on to animation.”

Source: http://gbtimes.com/life/french-director ... ns-riviera

[Sotiris]

Veteran Disney animator Randy Haycock produced an animation test to explore possible new looks for 2D animation. Of course, as expected from Disney, nothing came out of this in the end. You can watch the clip, here.

This is a project I led at work several years ago to explore new looks for hand-drawn animation. It was based on a vis dev piece done by the amazing Paul Felix. (I will post the piece above.) It’s fairly conservative and there are technical flaws, but I felt like we were successful in capturing the look of the original vis-dev piece including brush strokes and textures. We used a combination of traditional animation, cleanup and ink and paint, then Houdini and After Effects for the final look. I did the character animation. Thanks to Paul Felix for the art, Eric Daniels and Todd Laplant for the technical assist, and Dan Tanaka and Rachel Bibb for cleanup and ink and paint.

Source: http://randyhaycock.tumblr.com/post/119 ... -years-ago

[DisneyFan09]

Haha, that was cute

[Semaj]

Veteran Disney animator Randy Haycock produced an animation test to explore possible new looks for 2D animation. Of course, as expected from Disney, nothing came out of this in the end. You can watch the clip, here.

This is a project I led at work several years ago to explore new looks for hand-drawn animation. It was based on a vis dev piece done by the amazing Paul Felix. (I will post the piece above.) It’s fairly conservative and there are technical flaws, but I felt like we were successful in capturing the look of the original vis-dev piece including brush strokes and textures. We used a combination of traditional animation, cleanup and ink and paint, then Houdini and After Effects for the final look. I did the character animation. Thanks to Paul Felix for the art, Eric Daniels and Todd Laplant for the technical assist, and Dan Tanaka and Rachel Bibb for cleanup and ink and paint.

Source: http://randyhaycock.tumblr.com/post/119 ... -years-ago

NICE! The backgrounds looks like it was inspired by Eyvind Earle.

[unprincess]

oh gosh the Coke ad is so awesome! Reminds me of the Iron Giant animation. And the Randy Haycock test is really cute, Id love to see something like that as a feature length film. Its interesting that tv ads are more willing to use 2d animation, Ive especially noticed a lot big Pharma companies(oddly) using 2d for their ads. I wonder if its b/c 2d looks more "comfy" and makes the person watching feel more secure and safe towards the product being advertised.

The Moomins article is very interesting, and sad to know that the same fate for 2d is happening overseas as well, sigh. BTW is that guy's name really Xavier Picard?

as for Bird, I'm sure someones given him "the talk" by now:

Hey Brad, you know, we love hand drawn animation too! But see, well, things have changed.

[Sotiris]

We now get a new "reason" why Disney isn't doing 2D anymore. I wonder what else they'll come up with.

Directing in 3D is much more interactive, and the footage is much more polishable. There’s a lot of notes that you can make that are not worth completely destroying the footage you have. In 2D, acting on a lot of notes would mean redrawing the sequence again from scratch. I like the idea of honing a performance through several different iterations, and that’s the way we work in 3D. It’s very easy to make nudges to the animation, starting broad and the refining, but in 2D it would just have to be “Well, you’ve got to draw it all again to take my note.”

Source: http://www.filmdivider.com/9085/an-anim ... eys-feast/


Of course, we still get our classic excuses: "it's up to the director" and "but we use 2D to make CG".

It’s up to each director to make the choices of how their film will look.

Source: http://www.filmdivider.com/9085/an-anim ... eys-feast/

The way we do things, we do embed 2D animators in the animation department. Mark Henn, who is one of my favourite animators and I worked with him on Winnie the Pooh, he was also on Big Hero 6. He didn’t animate necessarily, but he was there as a resource. Animators would come and show him scenes and Mark would do them draw-overs. He was there in dailies, sitting right next to a Wacom Cintiq tablet, so I would describe what I’m thinking and he would do a sketch in real time so the animators had that as a reference.

Source: http://www.filmdivider.com/10337/don-ha ... ing-moana/

[DisneyFan09]

What a vague and lame excuse.

[unprincess]

sigh, yeah...

I did like this though

I felt that if we used a naturalistic, photographically inspired colour palette and lighting effects there would a tangible, real feel even though the actual image is just simple planes of colour. I don’t think you need all of the spectacle and layers and layers of simulation on top of a character’s performance to connect with it, and I really wanted to push forward on that. Our look also lets the animators work on character through silhouette and shape rather than thinking about animating the details of a 3D simulated world.

and this
I’m interested in making something that’s different. It could easily feel that every feature, every short and every experiment done with ‘modern’ technology is starting to be the same, that my parents couldn’t tell the difference between what’s coming out of one studio or another. So my instinct is to go the other way, to create something that is beautiful and which connects to people but doesn’t look the same as everything else. That’s the art school student in my coming back, saying “What makes my film stand out? What can make the story we tell appealing and attractive in a different way to everybody else?”



I agree they need to start pushing the art/graphic sense in these cgi films a bit more, a bit more line colour and shape, a bit less ultrareal texture and hyperrealism.


its funny, when they start asking him about Moana he suddenly gets tight-lipped. I guess he doesn't want to give people certain expectations of what its gonna actually look like.

[Sotiris]

Great news, everyone! There's an exciting new hand-drawn feature coming from former Disney animator Sergio Pablos.

Sergio Pablos Talks About His Stunning Hand-Drawn Project ‘Klaus’ [Exclusive]
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/interviews/s ... 13621.html

Annecy: Sergio Pablos Preps Directorial Debut ‘Klaus’
http://variety.com/2015/film/markets-fe ... 201522307/

Animation Podcast #27 – Sergio Pablos – Making Animation at Large and Small Studios
http://taughtbyapro.com/podcast-27-serg ... l-studios/

Sergio Pablos Interview
http://animateducated.blogspot.com/2016 ... rview.html

Toon Boom and The SPA Studios Sign Technology Collaboration Agreement to Push the Limits of Animation, Design and Concept Art
http://globenewswire.com/news-release/2 ... t-Art.html

Cinesite Opens Major Animation Studio in Montréal, Canada
http://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/ci ... 37871.html

Cinesite Animation Becomes a Feature Production Powerhouse with ‘Klaus’
http://www.awn.com/animationworld/cines ... ouse-klaus

[PatrickvD]

Now that is stunning.

[unprincess]

I cant believe what I was watching! and that's...hand- drawn? Thats the exact look I think CGI should be striving for... and yet this guy pulled it off with 2d!!!???

however Id imagine that it must have been really expensive. I cant see major studios wanting to back an expensive hand-drawn film even if it looks very CGI-esque.

On a brighter note, I love that despite all the odds against them there are so many artist who are still not giving up on hand-drawn animation.

theres also this that might be coming from South Africa:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film ... 13129.html

[2Disney4Ever]

Great news, everyone! There's an exciting new hand-drawn feature coming from former Disney animator Sergio Pablos.

Sergio Pablos Talks About His Stunning Hand-Drawn Project ‘Klaus’ [Exclusive]
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/interviews/s ... 13621.html

No, you're not seeing things. 2Disney4Ever is back from the dead here, but only for this one brief moment at least. That's because something this beautiful and unexpected just can't go by without my praise.

Sergio Pablos, you're now doing a great service for hand-drawn animation, and I wish this film nothing but the very best of luck. I just wish that you didn't help give birth to the franchise that is Despicable Me, cause whenever former 2D animators/directors let themselves get coaxed into doing CGI, it's just the sort of thing that keeps this kind of animation from coming back at all (looks at Chris Sanders over at DreamWorks). Still, this definitely redeems him as far as I'm concerned.

You watching this, Disney? This is what your precious new CG films should REALLY look like! Stuff like this and Hullabaloo have been doing so good at capturing the true art of Disney animation for a studio that now fails incompetently at doing it themselves. Bravo!

[unprincess]

i want to be really excited and hopeful when I read good news like this but at the same time I know the reality of the situation and that its very unlikely most of these 2d projects will get funding beyond maybe a short. Also Bird's Tomorrowland not doing well make me think that he'll have more trouble if he ever does want to pursue a 2d film(that apart from the probable "brainwashing" he'll receive from Disney/Pixar.)

[2Disney4Ever]

i want to be really excited and hopeful when I read good news like this but at the same time I know the reality of the situation and that its very unlikely most of these 2d projects will get funding beyond maybe a short. Also Bird's Tomorrowland not doing well make me think that he'll have more trouble if he ever does want to pursue a 2d film(that apart from the probable "brainwashing" he'll receive from Disney/Pixar.)

Let's just hope that Brad has a stronger will when it comes to 2D animation than Chris Sanders did when he went to DreamWorks to direct CGI. The only two CG movies Brad made were with Pixar, who in turn made them for Disney to distribute, and Pixar's only specialty is with CGI anyway.