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Animania

I walk in through the heavy double glass doors; in front of me is a large open area

dotted with people chatting and eating lunch. To my left is the check-in table occupied by

Lego Woody and Buzz waving hello; to my right is an area filled with modern styled

tables, chairs, and a ping pong table. Ahead of me is the in-office shop, mailroom, Luxo

cafe, and an entire space dedicated to breakfast foods. Sunlight is pouring in from the

windowed ceiling over my head. I turn to my right towards two large glass doors and

head inside.

The space is now darker, but filled with color. This is no ordinary office space.

Instead of your standard cubicles, there are various garden sheds, small houses, and

castles each with their own unique decoration. One room looks like a crashed airplane

amidst a jungle with two desks and computers peeking out from the wreckage. Another is

a temple straight out of Indiana Jones. Some are more standard looking, one looks like

the inside of a house, fitted with a nice sofa, hardwood flooring, and a TV. Some are

crammed from top to bottom with shelves of toys, old and new. At the moment, the place

is virtually silent while everyone is busy at work. The maze of hallways are filled with

posters, lights, various decorations; a poster for Sleeping Beauty, a cardboard cutout of

Frozone from The Incredibles, and a wall of vinyl. Theres also a fancy old-fashioned bar

with a small stage, a row of arcade games, and several scooters lying around. This is

where the magic happens.

I head straight back and take another right through the maze of offices. Finally I

end up at office number 566. The back wall is full of shelves with toys ranging from Ren

and Stimpy to Space Ghost; underneath is a small mid-century modern sofa and my dad,

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sitting at his desk. I take a peek over his shoulder and see a mother and daughter dressed

in fancy Spanish clothing; the mother slips a boot onto the daughters foot as she leaps

upwards and dances off the screen. The file is called Coco Introduction. My dad

notices my presence and quickly covers up his computer screen; Hey, youre not

allowed to see any of this!

Having a dad that works for Pixar Animation Studios is pretty cool. Sure I get to

see movies before they come out in theaters, but what I find most intriguing is getting to

see the process of how these movies are made. Storyboards, character models, concept

art, and dailies are all part of the movie making process that are rarely seen by the public.

Looking back at older Pixar movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc and comparing them

with their sequels, Ive noticed that there has been a significant advancement in the way

these characters look and move; the movies themselves have become more finely detailed

as well as having more realistic looking backgrounds. Every so often Id hear of some

new program like Renderman or Presto being used, but I have no idea what that means.

This led me to the question: How has technology advanced different styles of animation

in the past quarter century?

All forms of animation, CG, hand-drawn, and stop-motion, have been affected by

advancing technology. Each process differs today from what it was years ago. Movies

today look more realistic, smooth, and are produced much faster. Technology has

changed the way animation looks and has made the process of animating faster and more

complex.

Traditional or hand-drawn animation has been the slowest form to advance.

Beginning with Disneys first feature film Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs in 1937,

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the process of drawing, inking, and painting cells was very complicated and took a long

time. In an interview with Bob Scott, an animator for Disney TV, he described the

process:

We drew on paper at an animation table that had a light box underneath. You
could see through the paper and roll through several drawings at a time. Hundreds
of individual drawings could make up one scene. I drew the first rough drawings
and an assistant animator or clean up artist would draw over my drawings to give
the characters a nice clean line. Those drawings were then inked or Xeroxed onto
celluloid and painted on the back in full color. Each drawing had to be
photographed over a background painting individually, using a special camera
rigged to an Oxberry Animation Stand. Youd have to wait sometimes several
days for the film to be developed to see the finished product. It was certainly a
team effort.

This process of inking and painting cells lasted a long time; it wasnt until the 1990s and

the invention of a program called CAPS that the process of traditional animation

changed. To help increase the production of painting cells the Walt Disney Studio

worked with a very young Pixar to produce CAPS. CAPS, which stands for Computer

Animated Production System, allows for the painting of cells to be much more efficient.

Each drawing for the animation can be scanned into the computer, colored, and then

composited with a background digitally (History of Cel Animation). This gave way to

a variety of different effects and scrapped the use of cells altogether. The Little Mermaid

was the final Disney film to be made using hand painted cels; afterwards, starting with

The Rescuers Down Under in 1990, the studio used CAPS to hasten the process of

coloring cels (Fenlon). In an interview with Tony Fucile, a character design artist who

worked as an animator for Disney on films such as The Lion King and Aladdin, he stated,

[The animation process] was almost exactly the way it was on Snow White, except we

had video reel-to-reel machines, so we could shoot our stuff on tape.... It wasnt until

after Little Mermaid, we had one shot in Little Mermaid where they used computer

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paint. The use of CAPS to digitalize animation commenced the switch from traditional

animation to the 2D digital animation we all know today.

Even though many say that traditional animation is dying, 2D animation is still

seen in cartoons and rough stages of movies. Fucile describes the new tools used at Pixar

during rough stages of a scene, Drawing is a big deal now because we have these sketch

tools with the Cintiqs right on the scene. You can draw over the shot and it lives in the

scene as a sketch layer.... So you can actually animate, and a lot of people are doing this,

with the sketch tool. Today many artists use Wacom tablets, a tool that allows people to

draw on a trackpad that connects to their computer, or Cintiqs, where the artist draws

directly on their monitor. Digitally drawing each shot on a Wacom tablet or Cintiq is now

much faster than having to scan and upload each drawing individually. Most cartoons

today are made almost entirely on the computer using programs like ToonBoom or Flash.

An article on hand drawn animation today states,

ToonBoom is consistently hailed as the animation industry standard. It has been used

on a number of 2D-animated projects that range everywhere from TV productions like

Wander Over Yonder, Adventure Time, Archer, Futurama, and SpongeBob SquarePants to

short films like this years Oscar-nominated Me and My Moulton (Smith). Sadly,

traditional animation is scarce today as many film companies have made the move to CG

computer animation.

Computer animation has come a long way since Toy Story became the very first

feature length CG film in 1995. As time goes on it is easy to witness the rapidly

advancing technology that makes animated films look more detailed and realistic. Mike

Stocker, an animator at Pixar states, I think that computer animation has advanced the

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most because technology advances so fast. If you watch Toy Story and then Toy Story 3

you can actually see the quality difference.... you can actually see the advancements in

computer animation on the screen in all of the movies over the last 20 years. It is harder

to notice advances in technology when looking at films like The Little Mermaid and

Beauty and the Beast because the majority of the style is still the same; however, looking

at the amount of added detail and quality in Monsters University compared to Monsters

Inc shows how quickly technology has changed in the past 12 years. In my interview with

Tony Fucile, he mentioned what it is like to be working on The Incredibles 2:

If you think about where [animation] was just ten years ago, looking at
Incredibles, theres still good animation in it, its not the animators fault or the
artists fault or anybodys fault; the technology itself just wasnt there. This one is
going to be kind of a jaw dropping difference, because Ive seen some stuff, its
going to be interesting. Because usually sequels arent this far apart, this will be a
fourteen-year difference....We just saw a test of Violet, our first one, we went to a
render, not even fully in-betweened, but Im thinking, Oh my gosh. Its still her,
no ones going to be asking, Whos that? but when her mouth moves every
detail does the right thing. It really knocked me out.

One of the best series of films for showing the progression of animation has got to be the

Toy Story series; which, from Toy Story to Toy Story 3 is a 15-year difference. In The Art

of Toy Story 3, by Charles Solomon, character designer Daniel Arriaga states, With Toy

Story and Toy Story 2, Andy was the best we could do at the time. Since then, humans

have come a long way in 3D animation....Theres a fine line, tweaking it just enough to

make it work by todays standards, but staying true to the original young Andy (65-66).

In Toy Story, Pixar originally stayed away from human characters because of the limited

technology and crudely animated human features, but eventually created the beloved

Andy (Zorthian). Andys evolution through the trilogy shows how much animation has

changed and become more realistic and detailed.

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One of the many different programs and techniques used that make CG animation

what it is today is the realistic lighting system called global illumination. This system

can accurately simulate light, creating realistic light sources, highlights and shadows

throughout a scene. It can even bounce light around multiple times to create even more

shadows and bright spots which are all in the right place (Takahashi). Fucile explained,

Rendering time is actually longer now than its ever been because of the resolution and

complexity of the lighting systems. It used to be that they would have these kind of fake

lights; only until a couple pictures ago they were still using the fake, invisible lights. That

would be faster, but now the computer figures out all the physics of the light and where it

bounces... One would think that with the advancement of technology, making movies

would become faster, and while old techniques that used to take days can now be done in

seconds, the process of rendering more complex, detailed shots take much longer now

than they used to. In Monsters University it took 29 hours to render one frame; to render

the entire movie in only a couple years it took the entirety of Pixars 2,000 computers in

their data center (Takahashi). As time goes on the time it takes to render one frame of a

movie will continue to grow. This is because of the increasing amount of detail and

realistic effects that are now available to use. From Monsters Inc to Monsters University

Sully gained 4.4 million more individual hairs of fur, along with the 127 newly simulated

garments and cloth compared to only Boos shirt in the original film (Takahashi). With

new software like global illumination making CG animation more effortless and detailed,

stop-motion animation has started incorporating it in its films.

Although stop-motion animation may not be the first thing that comes to mind

when thinking about new technology, there have been some mind blowing advancements.

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When asked what style of animation has advanced the most, Fucile said, ...up until The

Nightmare Before Christmas you couldnt see what you were doing while you were

moving the puppet around. Nightmare was the first time they had reel-to-reel where they

had video playback for only two frames....Now you can see everything, like one of the

Laika films, anything stop-motion. You can watch your scene as youre doing it.

Furthermore, stop-motion films didnt start using digital cameras until Tim Burtons

Corpse Bride in 2005; The other breakthrough for Corpse Bride was the first use of

digital still cameras for shooting all the animation....The entire film was shot with Canon

EOS-ID Mark IIs and provided instant feedback of each scene, which made dailies easy

to view and approve on the spot (Priebe 48). Like hand-drawn animation before

computers became so widely used, stop-motion animators would have to wait days before

they could see their shot played back; if there was a mistake, then theyd have to do it all

over again. Now animators can watch their scene instantaneously.

Laika is one animation studio that has consistently pushed the boundaries of stop-

motion through films such as Coraline, Paranorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Laika actually uses a form of CG animation in their puppet-making process. The

Advanced Art of Stop-Motion states, [Coraline] was the first to use two new

technologies for stop-motion filmmaking: rapid prototyping and stereoscopic

photography. Rapid prototyping was a method for printing out 3D computer models of

replacement animation and props into physical resin materials in order to combine the

technical smoothness of CG into a stylized stop-motion set (Preibe 57). Ever since

Coraline was made in 2009 Laika has been improving on this technique. In Coraline

rapid prototyping was used to create every characters expressions, hundreds of

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attachable faces were printed for each character and hand painted to look exactly the

same. In Laikas next film Paranorman they were able to print these faces in color.

Similar to the use of CAPS to eliminate hand painting cels, Laika was able to bake the

color into the material eliminating the need to hand paint each face and creating a more

realistic, skin-like texture (Alger 50). In an interview with Rej Bourdages, a story artist

who has worked for both stop-motion and CG animation studios, he stated, Having

worked on several stop motion puppet films, I've noticed that even they have adapted and

incorporated computer animation....lip sync in stop motion is now done on a 3D printer

then those parts are put on the puppet and the seams are taken out later using Photoshop.

Water effects are no longer done by hand, but also done on the computer and then

blended into the final shot afterwards. Using CG in stop-motion animation has made the

process look more realistic and smoother.

Whether it hand-drawn, CG, or stop-motion, all styles of animation have

advanced through new technology. With the process of hand-drawn animation, it no

longer takes days to complete one shot. Both CG and stop-motion are looking more and

more realistic with each film. As the amount of detail increases, so does its rendering

time. Even stop-motion has progressed through the use of CG animation and 3D printing.

With technology advancing at a rate faster than ever before, who knows what the future

holds. Bourdages states, I hope animation keeps pushing the limits of things we have

never seen before. Effects and storylines of things that cannot be copied in live action

films. I hope animation pushes the artistic side of the technique and not the practical

side. Animation will always continue to surpass its previous boundaries as technology

continues to progress.

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In the future I hope that all forms of animation will continue to expand and

enthrall people all over the world. Before beginning my research I thought I was going to

focus on more software and programs that are being used in animation today, but after my

interview with my mentor, I realized that hand drawn animation has come a very long

way since Disney started making films in the 1930s. The process of drawing, inking,

painting, and photographing cels slowly became digital over the past 30 years. Many of

the animators I interviewed mentioned watching morning cartoons like Hanna Barbera

and Looney Toons as a kid as part of what inspired them to learn animation. It is strange

to think that the people who work on CG animated films today grew up with only

traditional and stop-motion animation. Sadly these styles of animation are less common

today; CG animation has become the standard format for creating family friendly flicks

that anyone can enjoy. While CG animation is great, I often find myself in awe at the

endless hours of work that went into creating stop-motion films or traditional Disney

classics. Theres a tangible quality to those films that is missing with CG; the small

mistakes and imperfections make films seem more real and handmade. Today, I

sometimes find it difficult to distinguish CG animated movies from their studios. Large

studios like Disney, Illumination, and Dreamworks use similar styles, especially for their

human characters. I hope to see more uniquely styled characters in the future of

filmmaking that lean more towards the artistic and cartoon-like manner, rather than

looking realistic. While CG films are looking more and more realistic, I still find it hard

to watch a film with CG humans in it without reaching the uncanny valley, where the

characters look too realistic to be a cartoon, but too artificial to be real. With CG

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animation being used so widely throughout the movie industry today, I hope to see more

films that stand out from what has become normal.

I can still remember the cool breeze of the morning in Emeryville as I walked

down the tree-lined pathway into the red-brick Steve Jobs Building. Just outside the front

doors is a larger-than-life sized Luxo lamp and ball that tower over everyone as they

come and go. Inside it smells like lunchtime and the atrium is alive with different artists

chatting and collaborating over their food from the Luxo Cafe. My dad guides us upstairs

past the No Photography Allowed sign to the art gallery where different stages of

concept art from Pixars latest movie is displayed for the public to see. There are the

perfectly hand-crafted sculptures of the characters from Finding Dory, paintings of

different sets and scenes from the movie with vibrant blues, pinks, and oranges. I stop to

watch a video illustrating how the octopus with seven legs, Hank, was rigged and

animated while my dad discusses how there was a team of animators who worked almost

solely on Hanks scenes because he was such a complicated character. The screen shows

Hank in his simplest, unrendered form, which looks like the top of an umbrella with

beaded strings hanging off it and a pair of floating eyes.

Then its time for the screening to begin and we are welcomed into the main

screening theater hidden behind large wooden double-doors. Inside, rows of square, red

velvet seats fill the room while the bright red curtains rise up to reveal the movie screen.

The lights go out and the ceiling is suddenly a night sky dotted with stars; I can hear

crickets chirping. The audience grows quiet watching shooting stars in the artificial night

sky. Then our attention is turned towards the screen as the Disney logo commences the

movie.

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Works Cited

Electronic

Fenlon, Wesley. 2D Animation in the Digital Era: Interview with Japanese Director Makoto

Shinkai. Tested, 20 Sept. 2012, www.tested.com/art/movies/442545-2d-animation

-digital-era-interview-japanese-director-makoto-shinkai/. Accessed 12 March 2017.

History of Cel Animation. YouTube, uploaded by TomPreston6, 20 May 2011, www.youtube.

com/watch?v=dRKWRMbTvWs

Smith, Brandon. What is Hand-Drawn Animation in the Age of Technology? Rotoscopers, 18

March 2015, www.rotoscopers.com/2015/03/18/what-is-hand-drawn-animation-in-

the-age-of-technology/. Accessed 12 March 2017.

Takahashi, Dean. How Pixar Made Monsters University, its latest technological marvel.

VentureBeat, 24 April 2014, venturebeat.com/2013/04/24/the-making-of-pixars-latest-

technological-marvel-monsters-university/. Accessed 19 March 2017.

Zorthian, Julia. Toy Story at 20: How the Pixar Film Changed Movie History. Time, 19 Nov.

2015, http://time.com/4118006/20-years-toy-story-pixar/. Accessed 19 March 2017.

Books

Alger, Jed. The Art and Making of Paranorman. Chronicle Books, 2012.

Priebe, Ken A. The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation.Course Technology, 2011.

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Solomon, Charles. The Art of Toy Story 3. Chronicle Books 2010.

Primary

Bourdages, Rejean. Re: Interview Questions. Received by Kaylee Zorman, 4 March

2017.

Fucile, Tony. Personal Interview. 11 March 2017.

Scott, Bob. Re: Interview Questions. Received by Kaylee Zorman, 3 March 2017.

Stocker, Mike. Re: Interview Questions. Received by Kaylee Zorman, 3 March 2017.

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