A long time ago I saw a rather good behind the scenes of Aladdin.
I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.
Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!
Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
It's no different to how the video games industry works, either.
It completely kills your employees though: all those crunches to scrap tons of good work and replace it with new ideas; tons of stressful overtime. Ugh.
Working on the new service, everything is involving independently while product is figuring out what they want to sell in reality. This out-of-order execution seems like a feature of modern production, while consistency is left behind and only synchronize when they absolutely has to.
I have no opinion on this however, can't think of a better way myself.
I have a few friends in the industry and their whole process just seems nuts. They earn good money from overtime but I'd just be so annoyed doing so much throwaway work even though a lot of it just seems like it could be avoided with planning, time management and more honest pricing when it comes to sub contracting.
The willingness to throw away work that, no matter how well done, is in service of a less enjoyable movie, is why some movies are great while others are, well, just movies. Producing 90 minutes of animation is a heck of a lot cheaper than producing 90 minutes of animation that hundreds of millions of people will cherish for generations.
Yeah. That amazing scene in terminator 2 with Sarah Connor's actor's twin sister is a great example. Just wasn't necessary to tell the story, movie was better without it.
It is chaotic compared to conventional film production. Most movies have a complete script before principal photography even starts, or at the very least all of the major story beats and set pieces planned out. Last minute rewrites and reshoots for big budget productions are a last resort if the studio feels the product just isn't shaping up into something that will put asses in seats.
>I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation
I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
Yup. I've recorded several albums, some in small home studios and others in pro environments. It's always been scratch track -> drums (me) -> guitars/bass (bass almost always direct to console) -> vocals.
Its basically like writing code. Aladdin was prototyped, Proof of concept, then put into production. So if anything needed a complete re-write, it wouldn't affect final production.
Hayao seems to doing continuous refactoring, so as long as you don't need to edit too many scenes already drawn you can potentially come out with a good final product while giving production as much time as possible.
It might sound odd, but it is not abnormal for a movie to be rewritten deep into production. Some infamous movies for this include Die Hard and Stripes, the endings for which were not written until after filming had begun. Given the much longer process for animated movies I'm not surprised this happens at Disney too.
This goes back to the days of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty! One of the pieces of old footage Disney likes to show off is animators sketching the movements of a girl dancing around the room and then merging that into the final product for Sleeping Beauty where she's in the dress and it's spinning around.
Dubbed means the actors say the lines while watching the characters lips move. The Disney way is exactly the opposite. The animators animate while charting and studying the audio.
I wonder what kind of challenges this introduces to the production - like what are the pros and cons of each method?
I also wonder if 3d animation changes anything about this approach. I enjoy watching Japanese anime but 3d productions can be hard to watch with an English dub because it's very apparent that mouth movements don't match, whereas with more traditional 2d-style animation the mouth flaps match more easily in the mind. Video games made by Japanese studios for Japanese audiences can be particularly hard to watch with an English dub.
The Japanese way is faster and cheaper, which is important when you're on a tight schedule. Simple mouth animations are easier to draw. They also have the benefit of looking less jarring when dubbed multiple languages, which is important as a lot of Anime is just as popular outside Japan as within.
There is a middle ground, seen in 2D western animation made on a lower budget than your typical Disney fare. Artists will create a mouth chart which includes drawings for a wide range of English phonemes. They are then used as a guide for drawing. There are software tools that assist in this process, making it a lot easier to do in a short amount of time. This is probably how South Park manages to do real accurate lip syncing while working on a 6 day production cycle.
I think they mean “western” animation typically records the voices first and then animates to them, where anime records the voices after the animation is complete. But I’m not familiar with either production practice, so this is just a guess.
>"My first exposure to the anime process was working with [Hayao] Miyazaki on Spirited Away," Chu said. "It was just very interesting watching him do the story. Like, he kind of thinks up the story, and then you don't really write it, you start sort of thumb-nailing out like, what key visual moments might be, and then you start storyboarding and then you start animating.
>
>"And I was like, 'OK, but what are you animated to?' He's like, 'Oh, we just make the mouths move.' And then I was like, 'But is there dialogue?" And he's like, 'No, no. We add the dialogue at the end.' And you're like, 'Oh, that's really weird.' And people always complain about, 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."
> 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."
At least personally, the voice acting seems just so different. My preference is not related to the differences there may be between dubbed or not.
Slight aside, but Encanto is a brilliant film, we watched it together as a family first but my 7yo daughter has watched a few more times since. We have had to listen to the sound track each way on the school run for the last couple of weeks, which to be honest is no bad thing as its so good.
The "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" sequence at the begging of the film is absolutely jaw dropping, if you don't watch the whole film at least watch that sequence to see what is now possible. The fabric simulation for her dress while dancing is so incredible.
I don't have kids at all and I found it a fun movie. It's not a heavy plot (there really is no villain) but so refreshing after a steady diet of superhero movies. Look at the average broadway musical and the plot is even lighter; every movie doesn't have to be Citizen Kane. The movie is a perfect embodiment of the culture (from people who are Columbian, not me), the music is very broadway but still in keeping with the country and well written and sung, and the animation is of course magical. There is no comparison with tripe such as Sing 2.
I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
i read an article about a month ago about how disney animation has steadily migrated away from a villain, to the self (or some other internal conflict) as the primary antagonist.
frozen
moana
frozen 2
encanto
during that time there were also traditional "villain" types:
big hero 6
zootopia
ralph breaks the internet
raya and the last drago
That's an interesting pattern, that seems pretty clear now that you mention it. I would also argue that Ralph Breaks the Internet falls squarely into the "self/internal conflict" class too, as the main antagonist is literally Ralph's own insecurity.
yeah, i agree. and zootopia is self vs societal norms, but each of them have a more "traditional" villain, so i included them in the traditional group.
i see your point, but hans and runeard were not the primary _antagonist_ in each of those movies, and te ka was actually a good being who acted negatively because of maui's actions.
hand and runeard were essentially "living" props and if anyone one moana was a villain, it was maui. again, i see your point, but i think the point of the article and how i parsed it was that the pure good v evil villain motif has gotten significantly more nuanced recently.
Hans was most definitely the primary antagonist. We just don't find out until the end. And same for the King. His actions drive the conflict, we just don't find out that it's his actions until the end.
> and te ka was actually a good being who acted negatively because of maui's actions.
Darth Vader is a good being who acts negatively because of the Emperor's actions, but he's still the villain. Just because the villain is redeemed doesn't make them not the villain.
Yes, they've moved away from the idea of establishing the villain in the first act and defeating them in the third, but that's just better storytelling, not removing the villain. Just ask a child who the "bad guy" is in each movie and they will tell you without hesitation. It's only more subtle to you because you're an adult.
Elsa is treated more like the primary antagonist (Anna is the protagonist.) Elsa is redeemed rather than defeated, but that's more a matter of ending than overall structural role.
> Really only Encanto doesn't.
Sure it does (at least, it has an antagonist responsible for the crisis that the story addresses and resolves.) Their identity is even announced at the climax of the film, just in case the viewer hasn't recognized it. (Like Frozen, and Moana—whether, in the latter case, you consider Te Kā or Maui the ultimate antagonist—the antagonist is redeemed and reconciled with the protagonist and the broader community rather than defeated.)
Tend to agree here, or if you were to ask one of my kids (5 and 8), they’d say the grandmother in general was the villain. They didn’t see the nuance of it or the end as a moment of redemption. They just saw her as mean to Maribel and the villain.
Encanto wasn't an internal conflict (I mean, other than the internal conflict inherent in the hero's journey), despite not having a traditional, irredeemable, villain.
Neither, come to think of it was Frozen; both are redemptive—where the antagonist is reformed—rather than irreconcilable—where the antagonist is defeated— intrafamilial conflicts, not internal conflicts.
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make
Organic is the best way I can put it. At least for software.
The largest project I've been on started in 1998 with a software team of 3 people (me and two others) and shipped V1.0 in 2003 with a team that varied in size over the years. Max was probably about 10 or 15 people. Total team size including electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, systems, technical writers, field service, training and QA was probably 70+.
It's like watching a child or a plant grow: you have this tiny kernel of functionality where you just need something to get started, not knowing how it's going to change and then guiding it in the right direction, growing all the time, as you figure out how to get where you need to go. Pruning the dead branches and rotten fruit and fertilizing it where it's growing right.
Then finally it's good enough to take to market. Then ship two major updates each year for 10 years.
It's fun in its own way, but I prefer shorter projects. I get bored easily.
I think we all need to have a talk about what a "heavy" plot is. You don't NEED a villain for a plot to be heavy - I would argue that Encanto's focus on internal, emotional stakes is far heavier (and darker!) than most movies with clear-cut heroes and villains. It also resonates with people in a much more personal way - the vast majority of people can't identify with Aladdin's battle against Jafar (As fun as it is), but I know several people who were on the verge of tears watching Encanto because they could identify with Mirabel's struggle with her place in her family.
This is really an interesting callout, because I also found it interesting that there is no "bad guy" for kids to anchor on, but yet seems to have no problem with it.
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
In software, automotive projects can come quite close to this. Building a modern high-end headunit ECU with software can take a couple of years, 100-150 dev teams, 2k engineers and coordinating with many other groups/departments around it.
> I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make
The active departments and the size scale a lot along those 5 years. The first few are usually a very small group of people. The weirdest part is that if you're targeting 5 year olds, they are just being born when you start the project.
Glad I am not the only one. Have even watched it without my kids and listen to the soundtrack when they’re not there! Haven’t done that with a Disney movie, aside from maybe Moana with the soundtrack, probably ever.
Aside on your aside, Kubo and the Two Strings is also really impressive. Until I saw the behind the scenes short video I had no idea it was done stop-motion.
Oh my goodness, the cloth animation is amazing. Watching "We Don't Talk about Bruno" again and again, watching how the skirts move as they're grabbed, tugged, and swirled. Even Mirabel's sleeve as her father gently pushes her aside to look at the vision, is amazing. (Yeah, I'm a hetero male, but that isn't the main attraction. At least I don't think so.)
That's my problem with Encanto: technically it's very impressive. All the rest: standard Disney movie with forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story that rushes from plot point to plot point with no time to breathe.
And given all the magic in it it's so highly unimaginative with it.
Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie (filled with emotion, meaning and imagination), but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
I kind of disagree. I found the elder sister being physically strong and an impressive leader and yet still a woman and also have vulnerability to be pretty new. Her arc didn’t involve her marrying a man or finding absolution in becoming less independent as is common when a strong independent woman has a character arc. The lack of any big bad and instead implications of danger because of complex family expectations and dynamics are also new. When I was young there was always some big evil person (scar in lion king, Ursula in little mermaid). Even more recent but older movies like Tangled had bad/evil people with no nuance. Now a days childrens movies are much more nuanced in good and evil and I really liked the diversity of characters in Encanto and the diversity of how these characters get validation.
> I found the elder sister being physically strong and an impressive leader and yet still a woman and also have vulnerability to be pretty new. Her arc didn’t involve
Well, I thought Encanto had good music and animation at the same time that the writing and plotting was a train wreck, and this is one of the best examples why.
Luisa sings a song about how she's stressed by all the responsibilities she has. Except that she doesn't have any responsibilities - they are not depicted before or after her song. She's not a leader and no one follows her. She doesn't run anything in the family or in the village. All she ever does is lift things and put them down at the direction of someone else. Her song makes no sense and her character has no arc.
The movie takes this same approach to the much more plot-central relationship between Mirabel and Isabela - we're told that they hate each other, and then they have to make up, so there's a song that accomplishes that by hand-waving. This level of writing makes the song worse so that the movie can also be worse.
I agree, I enjoyed the movie for what it was but I found the story pretty lacking compared to some of the other recent Disney (and Pixar) animated features. It kind of felt like the powers were chosen for the sake of pretty animation and/or good songs, with much less thought to how they work in the core story.
The sister that can hear everything is especially bad for the internal consistency of the story. Perhaps with a different personality it could have been pulled off, but it made no sense that she couldn't contain her excitement over the Bruno vision gossip, then later on casually mentions she always knew Bruno was living in the walls of the house.
> It kind of felt like the powers were chosen for the sake of pretty animation and/or good songs, with much less thought to how they work in the core story.
There is a home run in "how the powers would work in the setting" (though not the story - neither character matters to that) in the character of Felix. He's Pepa's husband, and a person with her "powers" (inadvertent influence over the weather) would, in reality, end up with a husband exactly like him. He sees the positive side of everything. If there is no positive side, he talks about something else that is positive. He never, ever contradicts her. This is exactly what the local countryside needs!
But this only shows up in one verse of "We Don't Talk About Bruno". And I'm surprised it happened at all - Pepa and Felix are so insignificant within the movie that nobody needed to think about either of them one way or the other.
Catching up with a couple of friends recently, it came up that our daughters, all of similar ages, are crazy about watching Encanto and even more keen on the songs. It's perfectly reasonable to have normal movie-criticism opinions about the film, but for the target audience, it's a smash. Another 'Frozen'.
Somewhere I read that Disney had to make submissions to the Academy Awards before finishing screenings of Encanto and weren't sure which song to submit (if they submit multiple songs it risks splitting the vote), so they submitted "Dos Oruguitas" and haven't had it nominated. Clearly picked the wrong song, should have gone with "We don't talk about Bruno", would have had a very good chance of getting an Oscar.
Part of the problem might have been that "Dos Oruguitas" is a smash in Spanish but doesn't as have much emotional impact if you don't understand the lyrics. I saw the movie in a local theater in Latin America and several people cried with that scene.
As a fun fact, every single voice actor is famous in Colombia because of their singing, for example Maribel is the leader of a popular girl band. The Spanish dub is incredible, one of the few movies I would recommend seeing in Spanish instead of English if you are bilingual.
> forgettable songs, forgettable characters, forgettable story
Strong disagree on all three. IMO this group of songs are some of the most memorable Disney animation tunes since Frozen, and maybe even since the mid-90s— don't ask me, look at how they're exploding all over Tiktok right now. For characters, I felt the movie does a pretty decent job of giving depth and personality to most members of a really large ensemble cast, particularly those closest to Mirabel. And even those with a lighter presence (Dolores, Camilo) still get their little moments that endeared them to me.
And as to the story, it's unique within the Disney canon in a number of ways; chief among them is that it doesn't have a conventional villain. Yes there is a character who is the "main" problem, but the real antagonist is the family dynamics and the grandmother's trauma. These are issues that are super relatable for a lot of people/families, much moreso than the over-the-topness of a clearly antagonistic and unredeemable character like Mother Gothel (Tangled) or Prince Hans (Frozen). The comparison is even more stark if you go back further to classic villains like Scar, Gaston, or Ursula.
> Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie[...], but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
Isabella's song ("What Else Can I Do") is pretty much the opposite of a lament and takes place after Mirabel has found Bruno. I don't know what "lament" you could be talking about, maybe "Waiting On a Miracle" which is Mirabel's classic Disney "I Want" song, in the same vein as "Part of Your World" or "Let It Go".
My kids have basically listened to the soundtrack on repeat for two months now and I assure you the songs are anything but "forgettable".
They're called "family" movies and not "children's" movies for a reason. Kids are usually watching these with their parents, and when they're done well, every age group gets something out of them.
Frozen, Up, and many others accomplish it well. I personally found Encanto completely boring.
Agreed. I'm repeatedly shocked as I hear adults report they loved this movie.
Of course my daughter is watching it over and over, and the songs are playing constantly. The music is fine, I'm a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan but I don't think this is his best work.
But the movie?!? There's no growth in any character, even the catharsis with the grandmother is "look how much I suffered, have sympathy that I ended up a tyrant". It's just eye/ear candy, fine for kids.
I genuinely don't get it, there are tons of relatively recent Pixar and Disney movies that I think are just better in all respects.
I don't mind a lack of character growth. I am extremely over the cliche Hollywood screenplay formula of:
1. Protagonist has problem and character flaw.
2. Tries to solve problem without fixing character flaw.
3. Solution blows up.
4. With help from friend, protagonist realizes flaw and fixes it.
5. Now able to solve problem.
But with Encanto, I really disliked how the plot undermined its own theme. The movie sets up an important moral statement that Mirabel doesn't need to be magically special to be valuable and valued. She can have worth because of who she is as a person. Then it throws that out at the climax by giving her some magic anyway because fuck it.
I have to say that the positive vibe and the Colombian village cliché are very entertaining in a time of emotional darkness (COVID, crisis, inflation, monopolies, etc). They just cheer us adults up.
IMHO it is an eye candy for everyone, not only kids. I mean there is a reason why romantic comedies just work telling the same kind of stories all over again with different actors.
I did appreciate that it was an hour and a half of good vibes and pretty pictures, though it felt a little try-hard to me.
> I mean there is a reason why romantic comedies just work telling the same kind of stories all over again with different actors.
As someone who loves romantic comedies, I don't think of them as the "same kinds of stories" any more than I think of my ex-girlfriends as the same experience even though they were all romantic relationships that ended.
Would you think of a travel documentary to Brazil and one to Spain to be the same because they are both travel docs with similar structures? Probably not, because the details of the place itself are what the doc is about and those differ. With romantic movies, it's about the details of the character's individual psychologies that make the movie.
Yes, the eye candy on the average cereal box marketed at children looks impressive too, for some definition of "impressive". A movie needs more than just good graphics.
Disney animated features are not cinema; they're visual entertainment. All you need for good visual entertainment is to be good at entertaining visually. On that score there is no argument that they're very good at what they do.
I really enjoy that Disney puts a lot of effort into making the "behind the scenes" edutainment to the point where it's a natural part of their brand.
I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal.
These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
> These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too.
An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further.
Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.
We recently took our daughter to see the Harry Potter Studio Tour.
With the magic of movies, it's easy to forget what goes into a film.
It was eye opening the amount of detail and thought that goes into every little thing. No wonder they can be so expensive to create.
This is really nice. Although Disney is only currently producing 3D animation films, it's a bit of a shame that nothing about 2D animation is included.
The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software.
Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth:
I own an amazing coffee table book called the illusion of life. It essentially lays out the history and key techniques of cell animation. I haven't opened it for a few years now, but it still has pride of place within my design books.
It's interesting hearing the Illusion of Life referred to as a coffee table book, since it's actually a learning resource and reference book for those in animation.
I know it wasn't meant as a diminutive etc... It just caught my eye because it made me think what the delineation would be between a coffee table book and a reference book
Yes, interesting point. I worked in book stores for years and use the term coffee table book specifically for the format. I'd certainly use it interchangeably with a certain style of reference book.
This is likely because the approaches and techniques are not measurably different with a "2D" animated movie in 2022 or recently, unless they're doing some retro cel animation.
Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time.
If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.
If this kind of stuff interests you, there is a good documentary on Disney+ about the making of Frozen 2. They filmed the documentary from the beginning of the process to the end with the intention of making a deeply detailed doc. The directors had a lot of access.
It's really interesting and I recommend it (but also make sure you watch Frozen 2 before you watch it if you aren't already familiar because it's more interesting if you can recall the scenes they are talking about).
I hate hate HATE this style of web site design. Great content but why does it all have to be scrollbar-triggered-dynamic? It never works right for me. It's completely unusable on mobile and incredibly tedious on desktop.
Could you imagine if Disney decided to open source one of their 3D films? How much fun would that be to play with?
It would be like when Doom was open sourced (I pick Doom because it's one of the first major video games that I can remember being open sourced, and the creative results have been vast)
I'd like to see Toy Story 1 re-rendered using the Toy Story 4 models (assuming Disney also made those available). Imagine all the technical challenges you'd face to do that: Write code to convert the models, sets, skeletons, animations. Upscale/create new textures, etc.
Pixar has already released production ready, rigged models of the toy story characters as well as the kid’s bedroom. You can download them into blender or maya as assets and animate them into scenes.
They have open sourced some assets: https://disneyanimation.com/data-sets/. Obviously not a full movie, but enough that a researcher/developer could begin to experience the kind of technical challenges that arise at "Disney-scale". IIRC a single frame from the movie Moana used something like 100GB of assets.
I can imagine. And I am pretty sure I know the industry which - as usual - will move first to new technology/data. And I am pretty sure, Disney will not like that.
When I was working in the industry around the turn of the century it was mostly just folders. One per scene. They'd start with just the scene number and the storyboard panels on them; they'd go off to layout and get drawings of key poses and background roughs, then go back to the set of shelves designated for that episode. After directorial approval they'd go on to further parts of the process - we were a Flash studio so the layout drawings would get inked, get approved, get scanned and cleaned up and put into a file (with a studio-wide standard for naming both the file and every single piece of art in the file so as to avoid conflicts when putting the final file together), get colored, then get handed off to the Flash crew who would make the animation happen.
If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone.
If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread.
Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.
Each studio has their own (usually crappy) tools. Sometimes it's just spreadsheets.
One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.
Its not the tooling keeping people away from wanting to work for Netflix though. People want to work where they have creative freedom and reasonable expectations.
This is exactly what I was looking for in it too. I've come to be a believer in custom tools and building your workflow so you can make your best product (bye Jira) and Disney did not disappoint on this front: here's a screenshot from their production management tool hidden deep in this website: https://disneyanimation.com/img/uploads/pipeline/production-...
Even with the old 2D movies, I've always liked the rough sketched animations even more. That rawness really makes you feel close to the artist and their process and is the most magical for me.
Beauty and the Beast has a feature on DVD (Blu ray too?) where you can watch the entire movie in animatic form. It's great! I don't know if Disney ever did that again with any of their other releases.
We absolutely experiment with 48, 60 and even 120fps. We’d use them if they looked good. They don’t, they make any content look atrocious. adding more (temporal) detail does indeed improve the realism but improving realism isn’t good when you’re delivering Impressionism.
Your question is very analogous to asking “Van Gogh’s work is great and all but it needs more (spatial) detail. I can’t believe he’s still using those broad brushes when now days you can buy fine brushes. His work would have much more detail and would look more realistic!”
Once you seriously ponder how naive such a statement is, you’ll understand why filmmakers stick with 24fps. It’s not reality. It’s not what our eyes see. Just like an impressionistic painting is not what our eyes see. And that’s a good thing.
There seems to be a lot of evidence that audiences that prefer 24fps do so because they’re so used to it, and for that reason, expert film makers seem to be even more strongly biased than general audiences.
24fps wasn’t chosen by animators, and wasn’t decided on for it’s Impressionism, right? If you want Impressionism, 1fps is better than 24, no? Disney used to animate on 1s, 2s, 3s for both economy and style reasons, and no longer do. Live action films are also 24fps, because all films are 24 by default, and many people complain about live action in higher frame rates. Suggesting that Disney consciously chose 24 for it’s impressionism seems revisionist and inaccurate.
Kids watching modern TVs, however, don’t seem as bothered by 60fps video, because they’re much more used to it.
BTW I used to prefer 24 fps categorically, back when I worked in film. Personally, 60fps looks weird to me, but it’s becoming better. I’ve started really disliking 24fps when there are horizontal pans, that kind of shot is now unwatchable for me, it’s awful. I don’t know why it used to seem tolerable.
I always feel like 24 fps, dropping to a lower effective rate as you start going on twos or using more eccentric, punchy timing, is an artifact that exists because it is really close to the absolute lowest framerate where the "illusion of life" breaks down and you are looking at slideshow of static drawings. My experience from when I still animated was that a sustained 10fps is right on the edge, it was real hard to get away with holds on the production I worked on that was on 10.
And animation is a fuckton of work. Anything you can do to not have to do a new drawing for every single frame is welcomed, unless you are Richard Williams endlessly iterating on The Thief And The Cobbler and sneaking around your studio at night slipping extra drawings into your animators' shots to put everything on ones, regardless of whether or not it works best for the shot. If you can make a computer inbetween it for you then it's easier to fuck around with much higher framerates than is sustainable with an all-human production, but there's still gonna be times when you just want to hold the heck out of an image to make damn sure it reads.
(hell, when I was doing stuff in Flash, we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made and putting it back on twos, because it just Looked Weird and we preferred to save going on ones for fast motion with a semi-hand-crafted smear.)
Totally, I agree, animating on 2s/3s is teetering on the edge of slideshow. Dropping to twos & threes probably really is much more about economy than style, but your last point is part of why I think it’s not only about economy, right? It definitely seems to help a lot when the animation rate changes dynamically and fluidly, using 2s and 3s for slow stuff and 1s for action. I never noticed as a kit watching cartoons how often the frame rate varies.
> we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made a putting it back on twos
There’s something interesting here, and maybe this does relate to @matt-attack’s point. In your case, I wonder if too smooth is a real thing, an actual animation quality problem with too much mushy motion and not enough detail. Like crappy CG has this problem a lot, it’s too smooth, which makes it ugly / fake looking. Reducing it to twos ironically does help sometimes because it hides the lack of motion detail, but it also helps
If you really wanna see some frame rate variation try watching anime; you'll see a very different set of choices. More complex character designs mean more time has to be spent per frame, but the budgets are generally similar so they've gotta find ways to make do with a lot fewer drawings because there's still only so much artist time available for the budget. So you'll end up with decisions like "let's move the camera elsewhere while this character talks instead of hassling with all that lip flap", and "let's just do a traceback of this drawing and flip it with the original on some eccentric timing to just barely keep it from going dead on the screen", and then at the end of the episode there's a really awesome scene with crazy camera movement and crazy dynamic action that is clearly where at least 50% of the budget went. And once you get into the vibe of this it's really amazing, and as GenX kids raised partially on cheaply-dubbed anime have gotten into the industry we've started seeing a lot of this kind of timing happening with Western projects. (Not that we don't have Western traditions of eccentric timing, go single-frame some forties WB shorts or some Ren and Stimpy[1]).
I do not have any studies to point to but my experience is also that a stylized cartoon drawing takes more time for the viewer's brain to process. There's fewer cues for the brain to grab, and the abstracted shapes don't help either. Going slower gives the brain more time to register what the hell's going on.
Originally the frame rate choice was largely from technical and budgetary considerations but now that the medium's a hundred years old and has had waves of inspiration and influence cross the entire world multiple times, frame rate is definitely something an animator can make deliberate aesthetic choices about. Budget's still a concern though!
1: the Buzzfeed article about John K is 100% true, I was a confused kid working under him during the time it covers. He's a horrible person who did some work that influenced a significant chunk of a generation.
Sorry didn’t mean to imply that it was intentional. History shows it was a combination of other random factors.
It’d be more accurate to describe it as a Happy Accident. I might even argue that had the founders not been concerned with film stock costs and that 60fps became the de facto standard, I’d wager film as a medium would not have been as successful. And at some point creatives would have discovered the eerie otherworldly, impressionistic feeling if slightly reduced capture rates.
I disagree with tue contention that “we’re just used to 24”. To reran my analogy, it’s like all those painters who, after photography because widespread as a means of reproducing portraits, began to experiment with forms beyond simply realism. I’m certain that it just struck them immediately as a compelling format. Honestly can you imagine witnessing the first impressionistic painting after a lifetime of consuming only realism? I think it’s impact would be significant.
You might be right, but this analogy to impressionism is an uncompelling argument for me, repeating it doesn’t help me. A lot of older people report feeling like 24fps looks higher quality and more realistic than 60fps, that 60fps feels campy or faked or just “strange”. That isn’t well explained by your posts at all. Being used to realism is a real confounding factor here, since realism doesn’t come in 24fps.
Like many people, I experience some negative reaction to high frames; watching LOTR in 48fps was like watching BBC. But I’m just not convinced that this is something true or fundamental about frame rates, it does feel like the preference might be learned.
And like I said, there seems to be real evidence for this learned association that your argument is completely ignoring. People growing up now who’ve watched 60fps TV and YouTube a lot don’t seem to have the same reaction. How do Brits feel about high frame rates? I’m going to ask a few, I’m not sure I ever have, and it might be informative here. Personally, the strangeness of 60fps has been waning over time, and that seems to support the idea that I was biased to 24 by years of moving watching.
Higher frame rates do result in smoother motion and animation.
The reason viewers prefer 24 FPS is that film is traditionally 24 FPS and video is 30 FPS (60 half-frame fields per second in NTSC). That has trained a generation of viewers to associate higher framerates with "cheap". The aesthetic carries an association that is counter to its actual quality.
Sort of like how people prefer "rustic" furniture because that implies "handmade" which implies "expensive" even though roughly-made things can often be mass produced more cheaply.
If it wasn't for the historical quirk that video was based on halving the AC rate which ended up being a few FPS faster than film, we'd all prefer higher framerates.
I suspect that thanks to the rise of gaming, that association will fade and eventually we will use higher framerates for movies. You already see trends in that direction: YouTube will stream 60 FPS because a lot of what people are watching on YouTube is gaming. But because of that, people get used to it, and I now see more non-gaming videos at 60 FPS too.
The low FPS also helps in disguising the theater. Lots of things in movies are fake, and if it was in 60 FPS you’d be able to see clearly what is happening. Additionally it helps in making still things stand out, like scenery or the main character in a crowd.
For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.
For live action I believe this is the case. For example the 48fps version of The Hobbit was very uncanny, and the makeup and SFX were too obvious.
But for purely animated films I don't think this is the case; there's no makeup or SFX to hide. The bigger issue would be budget I think, and tradition.
That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost.
I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
Not really, yes some interpolation is done automatically, but most character animation, especially for high budget films like Pixar is hyper finely tuned to the frame level, manually adjusting the interpolation curves to get the most expressive animation.
And then you have films like Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse where they did a mix of 24fps and 12fps for a more punchy and cartoony effect. In the end it’s not about realism but emotion and artistic representation
I saw The Hobbit in a theater playing at 60fps in 3D and several people in the theater laughed at points in the film that were not supposed to be funny just because how odd certain things looked. Although I personally enjoyed the unique presentation it kind of made me realize that 60fps would never take off.
On a similar note, I highly recommend the documentary "The Sweatbox", which is a behind-the-scenes look at the process behind the creation of "The Emperor's New Groove". It was originally meant to be a very different, more serious film, but despite all the effort into creating the storyboards, characters, music etc the producers rejected it and they had to change direction. The documentary was never supposed to be released, but it eventually was leaked.
Film is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and at the end of a film you throw everything away just to do it all again later. (I painfully know this as I've made films.)
With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action.
In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well.
I don’t know where you get those numbers from, but obviously animation price for both 2D and 3D are dependent on level of detail.
Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes.
I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
3d movies require a lot more technical r&d, experimentation and tool development.
This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software.
The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
I’m not really sure what you are arguing for, but if an expensive 3D film is only 1.75 times more expensive than a cheap 2D film, then that’s a pretty strong argument that 3D isn’t much more expensive than 2D (OP was saying it was 1000 to 15 ratio)
> The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification.
I disagree. There is a lot of great 2D cinema animation coming out of the East. It’s not just Ghibli that makes beautiful, well-told cartoons.
I missed that ratio part. I actually thought it they were saying 1.75x more expensive for 3d vs 2d. I wouldn't expect one art style to be thousands of times more expensive than the other. Good catch.
Also regarding 2d cinema animation, I'm speaking through a very American lens (considering the link points to Disney) so take what I say with a grain of salt.
As someone who recently began producing 2D animation, it seems like 2D has only gotten more rare and expensive as 3D/CG animation continues to proliferate.
"Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" is also a great read. Here is short video demonstrating 12 basic principles of animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiGY0qiy8fY
Not to denigrate the fine work of many great animators and storytellers, but the missing element from this Disney filmmaking story is also the worst part of Disney: its commercial and political choices over why films get made and stories bent and subjects avoided and to what end and whose benefit. Tell that story.
Many of us, or most of us, are probably not sure what you’re referring to, so it might be more useful to offer some focus to your argument rather than the vague suggestions you’re making.
Disney make films - as part of a filmmaking process we might want to know why they make film X and not Y, why they depict characters a certain way and not others. Are filmmakers limited or directed in any way? Enquiring minds would like to know. Presumably if you were to view Soviet or Nazi propaganda films, you wouldn't consider it off-topic to ask about their provenance, or if the political orientation of their sponsors was evident, and if that is morally acceptable. Do you think Disney is immune?
> why they depict characters a certain way and not others
The writers have ideas for characters and stories, they share them with each other, they refine them, change them a lot, and eventually try to get to a point where it's a cohesive story.
That's it -- that's the process. And if you ever get to work in an animation studio, you'll see just how much the story changes from the first pitch to the final product.
A kind of moot point, this is decision process happening in every studio all over the world. The only people who are truly independent are those who finance their movies themselves, and they are for a very different audience than Disney.
Not that I agree with certain Disney choices, but they are for-profit just like everybody else and if one doesn't like their production, voting with wallet is as usually the best course of action.
> "Disney make films - as part of a filmmaking process we might want to know why they make film X and not Y, why they depict characters a certain way and not others. Are filmmakers limited or directed in any way? Enquiring minds would like to know. Presumably if you were to view Soviet or Nazi propaganda films, you wouldn't consider it off-topic to ask about their provenance, or if the political orientation of their sponsors was evident, and if that is morally acceptable. Do you think Disney is immune?"
What are you trying to say exactly? We also don't know why Chopin and Bach wrote their music the way they did. Why Picasso, Vincent, Da Vinci and others chose the motives they did, and painted the exact way they did. Are you bothered by that too?
The answer you're looking for is "artistic freedoms", but I get the feeling you're looking for "ulterior motives" instead.
Disney is like any other BigCo. They have a million stakeholders pulling things a million different ways and they need to chart a course.
Finding Nemo could have been a hilarious comedy or it could have been a drama that criticizes modern society (depending on which way you want to spin it). Replace the clownfish with disabled vets. Replace the turtles with some hippies in a bus. Replace Dory with a stripper. Replace the sharks with a biker gang. Replace the whale with a rent-seeking small town police department. Replace the dentist's boat with a greyhound bus across the country. Etc, etc.
But they didn't, they chose to stick a kid's movie with what is a fairly heavy adult plot line at its core (and they distanced it even further by using animals). Why? That decision making process is its own story.
It seems you are circling around saying something that you don't want to say specifically, and I'm afraid I cannot follow the vague suggestion you are making.
It is false to equate Disney with soviet and nazi propaganda, because Disney has to make a profit and compete with movies made by other capitalistic companies.
State sponsored movies in dictatorships are different because viewers have no other choices but to view what’s made by the government and has no goal of making a profit.
Exactly. Disney having to make a profit certainly taints their productions with ideology:
- Obsession with royalty
- Obsession with absolute power
- Excuses for exceptionalism
- Binary morals (good / evil)
You might see it as simple entertainment, but seeing there is nothing to learn about in Disney stories, any worldview carried over to the real world _is_ propaganda.
I really don't agree. Just look at the history of Disney, and Walt himself.
Disney has a history of promoting socially conscious narratives and trying to promote peace and harmony. It's kitsch, but look at the message of 'It's a small world'. This is what Disney has always been about, from promoting animal welfare and an appreciation of the natural world, to telling stories of people from a variety of races and cultures and focusing on what should unite us.
The other thing that Disney is (and has always been) about, is pushing the boundaries of the visual arts. You might not see Disney films as art, but one goal of Disney from the very earliest days has been to change your mind.
They are also a public company, so they have the motive of being profitable in their endeavors. But the goal of that is the same - resonate with viewers, because viewers equal movie tickets or subscribers to Disney+, which is how profit is made. It's not good or evil, it's just also a factor as they're responsible to shareholders.
Yes, and crucially, there are competing companies that are trying to make even better films to make people watch their movies rather than Disney movies.
It's not good or evil, it's just whatever the people want to watch.
I get the point but most art needs funding. If we go down that route, maybe we should start with Mozart or Beethoven? Or some prominent classical writers? I guess what I am saying is that this is not a particular unique situation.
Why Beethoven? Wasn't he the first to fund the composition of a significant works with the return of bank shares, which was relatively progressive in that it freed the composer from the whims of the arisotcracy/church dichotomy which existed before?
AFAIK he used shares as collateral to get loans, but he generally had a fair amount of royal/aristocratic patronage from quite early on (with compositions dedicated to some of them, e.g., the Archduke Rudolf).
In the early days yes, as that was the only way at the time, but as his career progressed he actively pioneered new ways of financing his work, so I think it's a bit unreasonable to single him out.
I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.
Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!