Animation on Paper?

Animation desks. Pegboards. Hole-punched paper.

I saw all those things with my very own eyes inside the Disney hat building. Also actual animators, holding pencils and flipping paper. There's a bunch of test animation getting done on Princess and the Frog, and it was a rush to see pencil drawings moving, as if by magic.

The character designs are appealing but still evolving. One animator said: "Nothing is locked down, we're still tweaking characters. And nothing gets locked until John Lasseter signs off on final designs."

But it's sweet seeing the old disciplines back in action.

Up on the third floor, I fell into conversation with one of the board artists who groused about being categorized a storyboard person when he's a writer too. "The script writers get called writers, the rest of us get labeled something else, even through we write dialogue and draw action ..."

The long-simmering rivalry between feature animation script writers and board artists once more bubbles up. A tale as old as ... April, 1985.