Panda Hand-Drawn Animation

Kevin's put up a couple of Kung Fu Panda posts, commenting on the hand drawn opening sequence and closing credits. He writes about the end credits:

I knew this character animation was done by DreamWorks animators, and what struck me was that I was able to guess who animated what in about half of them. I guess all those years working together on Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado, Sinbad, and Spirit had something to do with that.

I particularly like the Tigress (by my El Dorado supervisor, Rodolphe Guenoden, who choreographed all the fight scenes in the film), Tai Lung (by another superb French animator, Philippe Le Brun), and the Duck (Alessandro Carloni). Simon Otto, who did the Eagle animation in Spirit, got to return to some avian animation with the crane, and everyone did a great job. It’s hard not to miss hand-drawn animation when looking at this stuff.

The post includes a quicktime of the animated portion of the end credits, so it can be stepped through and learned from.

And then Kevin follows with a post about the animated opening:

How about a little equal time for Kung Fu Panda opening sequence hand-drawn goodness?! If you haven’t seen this yet, I recommend you see it on the big screen first ...

A friend sent me a link to the two and a half minute James Baxter-animated opener to KFP, and as a follow-up to the last post ... I’ve turned it into a movie file so you could step through it.

Oh, and for those of you who just love the animation highlighted in the last two posts, word is that DreamWorks has a bunch of very talented animators hard at work on a hand-drawn KFP short (that’s REALLY long from what I hear) that will come out on the Kung Fu Panda DVD.

(Yes, there's animation desks and light boards at DreamWorks animation again. For the visuals and links for Kevin's posts, kindly click on through to Synchrolux.)