Tuesday, June 11, 2013

the Hand-Drawn Version

Wreck-It Ralph has he might have appeared in ... oh ... 1993.



The Mouse will likely take the above down in ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ...

But before that happens, imagine what the CG film might have looked like in the mid '90s. Use the test animation to help you.

Mr. Ranieri and others did a lot of test animation for some of the CG features because they could animate to the voice tracks faster than CG animators who hadn't gotten the rigged models yet. It gave the director(s) an idea how the character would move and act. (And it'd be nice if Disney would put these tests out on the interwebs so animation fans could savor, if only in small bits and pieces, the glories of hand-drawn animation.)

Enjoy it before it's taken down. I'm not going to bother looking what other sites have put it up. I don't care.

5 comments:

David said...

1993 ? Oh, yeah, they barely did any hand drawn animation at Disney from 1993 to 2004. (and an all-too-brief revival 2007 - 2011, before the execs -- including Lasseter -- lost their nerve and backpedaled from all that noble talk about "preserving the grand tradition of Disney animation" and how "it's not the medium , it's all about the story" )

Steve Hulett said...

I used '93 for a reason. It was right in the midst of "Aladdin" and "Lion King," the two biggest hand-drawn box office hits.

But 2004 is good. "Home on the Range" was a block-buster, right?

Anonymous said...

Judging from Nik Ranieri's comments, it seems Disney has abandoned 2D animation for good. He said Disney's not interested in making 2D features neither fully 2D nor in hybrid form.

Steve, what do you think is the future of 2D animation at the studio? Is it as bleak as everyone says? Has Disney really given up on the medium?

Steve Hulett said...

I don't know of any hand-drawn feature projects at Disney. (Doesn't mean there's not something percolating somewhere, just that I don't know about it.)

I've always thought that a hand-drawn feature on the level of Beauty and the Beast, Lion King or Aladdin would do well at the box office. I just don't see any entertainment conglomerate that's interested in making one.

They consider CG animation a much better bet, and that's the way they all seem to be going. Will that change? Not in the near term. But something can always come out of left field.

I never say never, but I don't hold my breath.

JD Ryan said...

This is beautiful! I liked the movie that came out, but I feel that there's so much more emotion with a 2D performance than the CGI. It's like doing PreViz instead of Story Boards, you can lose emotion. Am I wrong?

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