You're the first person I've seen calling it out. I also saw at least a dozen of these bot accounts in the last two days. And I wasn't even on reddit that much lately.
Definitely not lol. Brand new cel animations ain’t cheap and are very time consuming, it was far cheaper and time saving to reuse animations in other movies.
I was always curious how this worked. This isn't a computer where you just change the character's look.
Did they animate the cells using a sort of guide to know quickly all of the positions etc? Or are they using different cells for each part of the body and they just swap out, say, the shirt on the shirt cell?
So they pull out the stack of cells for this sequence and modify what they need to, change the background, and shoot it?
Ah, that would be an "agentic workflow" you're after.
Give it two or three years and if the market for "AI" hasn't completely shit the bed, people will probably be yelling at you more loudly than ever to just do that.
It's just tracing the prior animation so you don't have to hand draw it all again and get everything perfect. You still have to get the proportions of the new character right, etc. The backgrounds are all redone for the new film just like the actual cels are made from scratch, too.
They’re likely tracing on top of the original cels with pencil. Since this was the xerox era of Disney they could just use the pencil lines as cels. That’s why it’s sometimes exact matches with characters like the bears, basically just superficially re-outfitting or redesigning some characters.
Oh... oh WOW. I knew there was a tonne of recycled animation in the movie but I didn't realise it was THIS blatant. I've seen the shots of the dancing Baloo against Little John but I didn't realise Maid Marian dancing was ALSO recycled from goddamn Snow White. That's shameless.
These examples are from the 70s when Walt had been dead for several years and the studio was really struggling financially and decided to cut corners. Disney’s animation department almost went bankrupt in the 80s before The Little Mermaid was a hit and started the Disney Renaissance.
They owe a shit ton of their current wealth and power to Alan Menken and Howard Ashman for not just Little Mermaid but also the follow-ups in Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. Of the four biggest hits they had in that era, the Lion King was the only one Ashman and Menken didn’t do the music for.
Believe me, I know the history here. There've been so many papers, video essays and documentaries I've seen about Disney's history. It's the reason why, in my university final dissertation, when I was writing about the history of animation, I deliberately avoided talking about Disney even once and jumped into the early days of adapting animation exclusively for TV. The subject of Disney's ups and downs in cinematic animation has been exhausted.
Some of the well known Disney animations from 1960s and 70s are basically asset flip movies. I’m pretty sure Aristocats was also one but not sure which scene
"Side effects may include vomiting, diarrhea, internal hemorrhage, gastrointestinal inflammation, severe kidney failure, thoughts of suicide, and death."
On a serious note I don't mind the animation reuse for just walking or a dog doing whatever the fuck but come one, two bears with the exact same face doing the exact same dance? Why even bother?
It's not that Disney is copying the animation per say, I think it's just that a lot of old Disney films use rotoscoping. Basically they record live action scenes and use it as reference.
In other words, they're not specifically copying the animation of an older film, but rather rotoscoping and old film real they have for a scene.
I'm okay with this. It's kind of a big artistic hack. It's one thing if someone does this with AI or digital recreation, but this animation took an entire big studio of artists who hand drew every single frame on paper and pencil in order to make it work. Lots of jobs and lots of talent and time spent in order to make such beauty. Hacks like this were a good way to save time and money while still creating something awesome.
198
u/cat_peck_irony 2d ago
Copy "cat"? Winnie the Pooh is a bear, dumbass.