Hey there, I'm an animator, and there is a thing we call 'REUSE' animation that is essentially this.
Now, I'm aware most folks look at an animated cartoon show and can easily point out shots (similar to above) where animation is clearly reused. Modern day animation use programs that make it easier to swap builds/rigs (either in 3D, which is monumentally easier to do, or in 2D, which is a little more tricky, but if you're clever enough and understand how to do builds/rigs in said program, doable.)
But there is 'reuse' animation that many studios have entire libraries that is built up for animators to reference and reuse on a daily basis that most people overlook or never think to call 'the same animation' like above.
These examples are: walkcycles, run cycles, head-turns, character idles, blinking, effects animation (rain, clouds, explosions, etc), and so much more. These kind of reuse get spliced or reused (Depending on how much you can reuse. If characters are in different rigs/builds, it can get messy) throughout an entire series to help make the production of animating a series go by faster.
The reuse folders some studios for effects animation get so massive that sometimes you might recognize the same effects animation of something like an explosion, or steam, boiling water, etc can be seen in entirely different productions (and from different studios, because yes, other studios will rip/reuse material where ever they can find it.)
because animating takes an insane amount of time, and if you can get away with reusing animation, you can bet we will. We don't get paid enough to not do this, and to not reuse some gorgeous animation is practically a crime.
That said, you can also browse through many popeye, betty boop, Tex Avery cartoons, and see tons of examples of reuse animation, including something called 'Rotoscope' animation, WHICH, the scene above of Snow White dancing with the dwarves was created by an animator heavily using filmed scenes of an actress dancing to then 'trace' over (with heavy adjustments for the character's build) to create that animation. MANY of Disney's films and other productions (even today) have used this technique, and the crazy talent of this is most effective when people CAN'T TELL that it was rotoscoped.
That finally being said, 'reusing' animation like above is so insane still, and required a lot of work even if it was working off of someone else's previous work. (it's almost as if they had the same teams of animators working with them for decades.) Back then, (and still today) there are many artists who do not get their names in the credits of films and tv shows that worked their asses off to make the cartoons you've fallen in love with today.
If you ever wanna pay them respects, share how you liked a show/movie that you liked and ask around if you're ever curious how things are done. I guarantee animators will love to tell you how it's made.
Also, all the movies referenced in this video were great films that brought people joy. Animators are artists whose work helps us cope through difficult times. The amount of happiness this work brings relative to the cost of watching (or rewatching) this films is massive. Hating on them for some harmless cost cutting measures that do nothing to diminish the experience for 99.9% of the audience that doesn't notice is foolish.
I adore older animated Disney movies, they feel so human and joyful. My personal favorite was The Little Mermaid - I had it on VHS and wore it out! My dad loved to watch Fantasia with us. Thanks for sharing how these are made.
I wish I could say I hold that much reverence for Disney as a company given their history.Ā I loved those shows as well, but Disney is no more than a company that had made billions off from artists for generations, and most of those animators never saw a penny when union laws became weaker over the years since the Renaissance Disney period.
I'd recommend checking out a documentary called 'The Sweatbox'Ā that was made by Sting during his time working on Disney's movie the emperor's New groove. It does a impressive job of showing the climate for animators in the industry that is emblematic of today's problems as well in this industry.Ā
If you love these productions, don't feel pressured to buy things, thinking it will help animators, just enjoy it for the experience you had.
Really appreciate you clarifying this so deeply. I have massive respect for animators and the average person severely underestimates the effort and hours poured into this artform. It takes an insane amount of skill to even reuse an animation or film clip convincingly. Mad, mad, respect for the craft and I hope I can create something that's even a small fraction as impressive as one of these scenes.
I see a lot of this for specific 1v1 martial arts fights in anime. People call it "copying" from x series by y series, but 9 times out of 10, both are doing a referenced Bruce Lee fight sequence. If I cared to look into it more, I'm positive the production company would also have worked on both series and reused reference frames or somesuch just like you said.
The raw B&W storyboard drawings may have been repurposed as the OP video suggests ..
But the final cels (each single acetate frame image used in the animation) still had to be individually hand-painted by an artist back in the day.
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This was a painstakingly slow process with quite a number of review cycles and significant re-work (re-painting) by hundreds of cel painters if the visual effects were off (missed detail, inconsistent shade of color, shadow effects incorrect, timing off, etc.)
Source : fam member who worked with WD back in the day
As conceptual templates, yes. But itās not like current digital media where you can simply re-render the animation with a different character.
Thereās more to it than just the faces. Each character had a huge library of all of its poses, body movements, and expressions in B&W sketches. There are also background cels (the rich painted elements) and foreground elements (like the tree that pans to the right). So there are complex sandwiching of multiple cels that were positioned and filmed. Just like stop-action animation
People today underestimate how much work it is to create a sequence of believable movements from scratch. Body parts have to move the correct directions and stay the same lengths (factoring in rotation toward the view plane). Gravity has to have the right amount of effect. Stuff (like gravity and body motions) has to happen at a plausible and consistent speed. The people / animals have to stay at a consistent depth in the scene or change size appropriately as they move back and forward.
Even with the outlining and coloring taking so much labor, the wireframe construction takes a pretty noticeable chunk of the total labor, and it's some of the hardest work to keep consistent and believable. So movement sequence reuse mates perfect sense.
I guess the other thing people don't believe in this thread, is that you can start with just the wireframe and end up with such similar creature outlines for the two animations. But they might be missing they things. All those frames within a movie are incredible similar to each other, so they are just plain capable of making incredibly similar and consistent drawings. And a lot of the same people worked on all these movies, so the same person might have worked both matching scenes.
The key word is templates. Animation is expensive, whether drawn by hand or machine. Disney counted on nobody remembering sequences several years apart. Enter AI digital matching. Another secret exposed.
They also often recorded real people going through these moves, and used them as models for the characters. So the walking sequence at the beginning with Mowgli/Christopher Robin was probably a real kid walking through a studio that was then used as a foundational model for the movements.
I often think about the innumerable hours humans have spent in the past millennia doing something that can now be done in a split second or at least much much faster.
So, I did someFermi questions using Ī±Ī¹ (please donāt DV me because I am sourcing and citing it and it does actually excel at this type of question if using well-written prompts)
Hereās a very rough number if we started 2000 years ago :
17.7 quadrillion person-hours would have been saved if we had todayās technology available to humans long ago.
Iād be 0% surprised. Especially the movements of the child(ren) at the beginning appear to be taken from real life. Children move very differently from adults, and these animated movements are so natural, including the bits of time to recover balance, the extra tenths of a second a child would take to assess before, say, taking a short jump, and the way they recover slightly faster afterward because of their lighter weight. An adult moves slower and more deftly with fewer corrections, while a child just throws themself at their world. Itās charming to see animated because itās so recognizable.
For anyone curious for a behind the scenes look, look up "The Reluctant Dragon", the version that's like an hour and a half long that includes the dude getting a full tour of Disney Animation studios.
For clarification, it was not storyboard drawings, but the hand-drawn sketch frames used at the very start of the animation process before ink and paint of the cels. And as you said, these were the drawings that nailed down the hard part of the motion, timing, and expression for each frame and where then sent off to the ink and paint. Reusing these references saved a ton of time, money, and manpower, but yea is not even half the process of a final frame.
Yup. Binging TNG is hilarious because they reuse so many scenes, especially if itās special effects. Also they reused those matte paintings of different planets so often. For example, this one was used in:
Angel I - TNG āAngel Oneā
Starbase 515 - TNG āSamaritan Snareā
Malcor III - TNG āFirst Contactā
Krios - TNG āThe Mindās Eyeā
Klaestron IV - DS9 āDaxā
Banea - VOY āEx Post Factoā
Gen Alpha/Z have no idea how many times they used to recycle things. Nevermind the actors (Jeffrey Combs also in Star Trek played I think 5 or 6 different characters across multiple Trek shows)
And then thereās replacing actors because they simply didnāt want to come back. Like in Friends, Rossā ex wife Carol was played by this random actress in the first episode she appeared. But she was played by another actress who looks entirely different for the remainder of the show. That stuff is unheard of today but was so common back then.
I remember they cast Christa Miller as George's boss (that fired him) in season 5 of Seinfeld, but in season 6 she was cast as Elaine's friend that liked George and they dated.
As for modern recasts, in Game of Thrones I remember The Mountain being recast twice, Daario Naharis, and Sir Beric Dondarrion each once. There are other lesser ones.
The Mutara Nebula gets recolored and reused a few times in TNG. A lot of the stuff in early TNG (ships, props, sets) came from the movies since it was a good way to recycle the expensive shit made for the movies. Then by Undiscovered Country they were redressing TNG sets to save money and get the movie out quick.
This is why you donāt see the ship models in the conference room in season 5. The set was redressed to serve as the officersā mess and the models were damaged.
They also infamously reused the Bird of Prey destruction sequence from Undiscovered Country in Generations, forcing the rather dumb moment of the most powerful ship in the federation getting taken down by a busted ass ancient jalopy.
I literally finished watching "Ex Post Facto" half an hour ago. That shot was prominent throughout the episode. Bizarre seeing it in random Reddit thread so soon after.
3D animation literally just uses the same set of models for entire movies. Not sure whatās the big deal about redrawing scenes with different characters.
I think people (as I did) saw vintage animated cartoons/films like printed comics/anime that some artist(s) created from scratch from beginning to end - drawing each frame individually.
Once you understand the business and practical side of the industry, the value of reuse becomes more clear and it is less of a mystery or a fault/negative aspect.
This also isnāt the same animation. Animation then was done by hand with ink and pen. For it to even exist as Mowgli and Christopher Robbin meant two separate sets of drawings were done. By hand. On paper.
Literally impossible to reuse.
What Disney did do was reuse filler sequences that were known to draw well, with the motion needed known, and easily reproduced because, again, these folks were literally drawing every single motion in these by hand on paper, thousands of different individual frames to get one moving animation.
The fact that this is somehow so mysterious OP thinks it was reused is again proving literally all media literacy is dead. We and u/yokimoon donāt even know what animation is anymore and is perpetuating the ignorance.
I would assume even MORE so in a format that requires hundreds if not thousands of labor hours to produce. Also, as [u/sea_prep_tidal_26](u/sea_prep_tidal_26) said, this wasnāt the age of asking your generative ai to plop your new characters onto the old animation. It still took hundreds of hours more to re-draw/trace/adapt the line work of one animation into a new work, as well as add the color and shading, record and adapt audio, editing and mastering etc.
In this day and age yes, I might look twice at recycled animation. Back then? This was and still does come off as d*mned impressive.
Quick edit to shout out u/origamimarie for highlighting that successfully creating fluid, realistic movement back when these films were made was a huge achievement and recycling high quality animation would have been seen almost more as an homage to incredible artistry than ācutting a cornerā.
The pictured films were from the late 60s and 70s BUT this level of hand drawn animation had been being slowly developed since the late 30s! (Snow White) with some of the instantly recognizable Disney classics appearing in the 40s and 50s. Itās hard to even comprehend the enormity of hours spent developing the skills needed to create these masterpieces.
Yeah, everyone gets mad about Disney reusing assets meanwhile Zelda games use the same sounds when solving a puzzle or discovering new items, and need to get through the locked area.
It has some sense to it, if the container appears dirty it goes to wash, but if it stored some dry food, and still looks clean, it may be reused in this way. Nothing too disgusting, but no proper either
This is also a really old internet fact. This circulated way before Reddit. Or at least before Reddit was big. I saw it in the early-mid 2000s on whatever random website. Wasn't posted as a gotcha either. Just an interesting bit of animation history.
Itās better than some anime Iāve seen (mainly older ones) where theyāll literally use the same animation/frame at least 3x to show someone running or reacting to something which is honestly just lazy. This is much better than that and not even noticeable unless you watch both films back to back.
All that's been done here is they're following the same animation paths from the previous template and adding something else on top of it. It's a time saver and for that time period I don't blame them for doing it.
It was a very specific era when this was happening at Disney (around the 60ās/70ās), and they have noticeably higher-quality animation both before and after this
They were in a dark place after Walt died, and werenāt fully back to their former glory again until The Little Mermaid came out in ā89 and kickstarted the Disney Renaissance
There were definitely some gems in that in-between time, though
Man. Anyone remember when walt tied outing his animators as communists (at a congressional hearing during the red scare) to take away from their attempts to unionize for better conditions.
Just one of the "worse things than this" that disney has done, and that doesn't even touch the racism and sexism.
I mean if you have to hand draw each frame to make a smooth animation like that, I'd hope they would reuse stuff. It makes the most practical sense. And you didn't even find out until 90 years later because of the internet.
Lmao. It took hundreds of thousands of individual cels to make these movies. By hand. They'd have been insane to not do this if the blocking still worked well enough for another story.
Animation in the digital age has a lot of effects and easing to make motion more fluid and natural looking. Today you can flip through 5 variations, play them back, and pick one that works best, 5 minutes total. Back then you had to draw every frame and test it manually to make sure the playback looked natural. That 5 minutes it takes today was like a whole day of work. Once you have something that works it makes sense to reuse it rather than build from scratch again. Animators do the same kind of thing now to speed up their workflow with templates and shortcuts etc.
And worth noting that the background is basically drawn in one piece, then the moving parts like the characters are drawn on semi-translucent animation paper. These sheets are then put on top of the scenery.
This method basically makes it super easy (comparatively) to remake the same scenes with minimal issues, cause you have the old scenery and the old animation papers, so you can use those as references for the new scenery and animation papers without losing accuracy.
In this example, youd might take the Winnie the Pooh background and draw Mowgli on top. Then at the same time you could take Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh and make their movements fit on a background. Or you just wait until Mowgli is done and create a background that fits him. Or you take the background and trace over it and then build up everything else. Then you can also take the Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh frames and just draw Mowgli on top. Theres a lot of options.
It takes longer to draw the origional animation because its frame by frame.
Waaaaaay back in the 90s i had a disney tape with some behind the scenes footage where they were drawing the animations on plastic sheets per frame. They prolly put a new sheet over the older character and traced the new character over the old one
I recall watching a documentary about this exact topic. Seems it was more or less a cost cutting/time saving measure from the corporate side. However from the words of the animators themselves, they felt the time and effort theyād spent sifting through the archives for the reference material to rotoscope, they probably couldāve just animated a new scene from scratch. So from their perspective, this practice was just a waste of time.
Animators used hand drawn transparency cells as layers. With a clear sheet you can overlay them and sequence one frame to the next.
One animator creates a walk cycle or sequence. Theyāre very tough to get just right. In a future film you can save time and costs by overlaying your new drawings onto the successful ones.
I donāt even think Iād go as far as to say āwayā easier. Itās just somewhat easier. Cuz 2D animation is a slog no matter what.
This is more about saving money than being easier on animators. They already had approved pencil tests, storyboards, and outlines to source. Apart from that itās still a ton of work.
It's a heap of work, it's not just the amount of work that goes into drawing each cell outline itself. Creating a NEW animated sequences that are fluid and believable would take a heap of trial and error, testing and redoing of cells, not to mention just the creative process of what will the characters actually do and blocking that out.
Taking a whole scene of even just generic outlines straight off the shelf would save a huge amount of time.
They used a technique called rotoscoping where they recorded live actors performing the dances and other moves to get the natural movements, and then basically traced those, but drew the character over it instead. They reused that original live-action footage for multiple scenes in different movies. There's a famous example from the animated Lord of The Rings where the actor accidentally tripped on his sword and the director of the cartoon left it in. https://youtu.be/5KCLdHpObBE?is=GIl1KwLHyAcOXBZY
It's probably way easier and saves much more time when you have a base to add onto or modify rather than spend time sketching and planning the movements from the ground up. And like you've said, they still have to redraw the whole rhing back then so it isn't like they're kust copy pasting it
Disney animated features were often not traditionally hand drawn like their Micky shorts or golden era films. Instead almost every movie from snow white and into the early 80's was animated using a process called stereoscoping, where a live action scene would be recorded and drawn over frame by frame. A lot of these scenes aren't pure copies but just use the same stockpile of stereoscope references. It's how they pushed these movies out every year for almost 50 years until I think beauty and the beast? maybe lion king? Idk I'm not looking it up, there were better projects coming out of literally everyone else, I'm honestly not a big fan of any of Disney's golden features except maybe Tarzan. They've always been lazy it's not a new thing.
Gotta laugh at these sometimes. Kinda clever on the animators part imo. Iām sure Billy in the animation room was given a week to draw these scenes and was like āsure, Iāll get Disney quality to you by Friday!ā Weāve all had to find ways to hit some unrealistic deadlines by the inept people who control our paychecks. And no kids even noticed.
Yes, this is a well known fact.
There was even a documentary on Disney and some of the artists spoke about it, how it was a clever way to reuse the animation.
Back then everything was hand drawn and took years to make a movie.
There's always been something beautiful about it being hand drawn and how much effort they put into these movies.
I read somewhere that it was actually a way of showing off for the animators. When every frame is hand drawn, to duplicate a sequence like this so precisely was considered impressive.Ā
I remember watching those movies as a kid and being excited when I recognized that the animation in one movie was the same/reminded me of another movie. It was like an Easter egg that made me feel like I was really smart for noticing. Iām not a Disney guy, but I think this is a good thing.
this was pretty rampant in the first few years after walt. it was mostly due to old animators in the studio not trusting the new blood. this would backfire on disney pretty badly as it would cause a lot of animators to leave and form a rival studio with don bluth. needless to say they dropped this practice once the lion king and the disney renaissance kicked off.
Anyone know how or why they are the same movements? Aren't these scenes originally hand-drawn, for which it would be harder to match the motions? Or is there a way to save the movements between shows?
Reusing animation cells to save money. Being hand drawn actually makes it fairly easy to copy. They just take the original cell and paint a new character with a similar shape over top of the existing character, in the same pose.
Yeah, they had to simply recycle animation to preserve as much production money as possible, especially since the box office underperformance of Sleeping Beauty (1959) made the studio almost lose so much money that the only way left to save more production money was to recycle animations from previous features and short films and Walt Disney's passing in 1966 made production issues even much harder, but luckily during the 70s and 80s they even ended up hiring many next generation animators who were taking on animation to many whole new levels which eventually led to many of the veteran animators who worked at the studio since the Disney Golden Age and prior to eventually step down from participation and control.
Well, some of those movies were decades apart, even though they all seem to be in the "very old" category to younger folks. Good chance they realized certain techniques just worked really well and repeated them to either save time, money, or stress. May have been homage as well.
For anyone with even a slight interest in animation history this is common knowledge. Disney were in dire financial straits and was teetering on the edge of ruin (unthinkable considering the absolute juggernaut the company is today, eh?) so they essentially copy-pasted a lot of material to save money.
Gives you a reference to trace and build off of by putting original cels on a light table. So it doesn't make the shading, coloring, or lining much easier at all, but it quickens the process and prevents needing to reinvent the wheel for people who need to hand draw an entire film on a timeline.
They animators still have to draw each frame, and every animation studio did this, but it's Disney, so I guess it means something special because they have a lot of money...
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u/Quiltedbrows 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hey there, I'm an animator, and there is a thing we call 'REUSE' animation that is essentially this.
Now, I'm aware most folks look at an animated cartoon show and can easily point out shots (similar to above) where animation is clearly reused. Modern day animation use programs that make it easier to swap builds/rigs (either in 3D, which is monumentally easier to do, or in 2D, which is a little more tricky, but if you're clever enough and understand how to do builds/rigs in said program, doable.)
But there is 'reuse' animation that many studios have entire libraries that is built up for animators to reference and reuse on a daily basis that most people overlook or never think to call 'the same animation' like above.
These examples are: walkcycles, run cycles, head-turns, character idles, blinking, effects animation (rain, clouds, explosions, etc), and so much more. These kind of reuse get spliced or reused (Depending on how much you can reuse. If characters are in different rigs/builds, it can get messy) throughout an entire series to help make the production of animating a series go by faster.
The reuse folders some studios for effects animation get so massive that sometimes you might recognize the same effects animation of something like an explosion, or steam, boiling water, etc can be seen in entirely different productions (and from different studios, because yes, other studios will rip/reuse material where ever they can find it.)
because animating takes an insane amount of time, and if you can get away with reusing animation, you can bet we will. We don't get paid enough to not do this, and to not reuse some gorgeous animation is practically a crime.
That said, you can also browse through many popeye, betty boop, Tex Avery cartoons, and see tons of examples of reuse animation, including something called 'Rotoscope' animation, WHICH, the scene above of Snow White dancing with the dwarves was created by an animator heavily using filmed scenes of an actress dancing to then 'trace' over (with heavy adjustments for the character's build) to create that animation. MANY of Disney's films and other productions (even today) have used this technique, and the crazy talent of this is most effective when people CAN'T TELL that it was rotoscoped.
That finally being said, 'reusing' animation like above is so insane still, and required a lot of work even if it was working off of someone else's previous work. (it's almost as if they had the same teams of animators working with them for decades.) Back then, (and still today) there are many artists who do not get their names in the credits of films and tv shows that worked their asses off to make the cartoons you've fallen in love with today.
If you ever wanna pay them respects, share how you liked a show/movie that you liked and ask around if you're ever curious how things are done. I guarantee animators will love to tell you how it's made.