Disney Animations

So I was researching the techniques of the old Christmas animation classics like Rudolf the Red nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and the Year Without a Santa Claus when I discovered a behind-the-scenes look at Disney's old animated classics.

The video above starts around the 2:00 minute mark but what really impressed me is that it took the animators and designers 4 years to draw, animate, and paint the scenes for Beauty and the Beast. The artists put pictures up on the wall of lions, gorillas, buffalo, and bears in order to inspire different parts of the Beast's image. They then created 3-D clay models in order to truly visualize the Beast in every dimension before drawing him in the 2-D frames. In the next video Don Hahn, the Producer of Beauty and The Beast, goes into detail of the hand-drawn animation process.

In order to make the filming of the hand drawn frames more dimensional, Walt Disney's MultiPlane camera was often used for the classics. But if we think of all the work that went into animating and then filming these Disney movies, the idea of creating a new animation with the computer graphics and animation techniques available is astounding. I often complain about how long it takes for an animation to render or how quickly time seems to go by when animating. But when I take a step back and look at the process of creating my favorite Disney Animated Movie, I realize that I would have started the project my Freshman year in college only to finish it during graduation.

Disney's Beauty and the Beast may have been taken from a long line of French folktales, but the animation process and finished product are something that I can't help but admire.