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BUENA VISTA, Calif. — If you’re like me, you grew up on a steady diet of classic Disney animated features. And again, if you’re like me, you practically have all those classics memorized.
Since I am well-versed in classic Disney animation, I can’t say this is the first time that I’ve noticed Disney often recycled scenes. Meaning animators would take the bare bones of scenes — especially with big movement — and just animate new characters over it, producing many almost identical scenes with different characters.
I mean, who can blame Disney for trying to cut time and costs back in the day where everything was 100 percent animated by hand?
But it is the first time I’ve seen a video that shows the scenes one after the other. It’s not only a delightful walk down memory lane, but a good lesson in animation history.
It also turns out that how animators captured big movement scenes is interesting. They used a method called rotoscoping, which allowed animators to trace action frame-by-frame from a live-action film. There’s fuller description with illustrations and examples on the Lomography website.
The video compares the big dance scenes from “Sleeping Beauty” and “Beauty and the Beast,” as well as dancing scenes from “Robin Hood” compared to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” “The Jungle Book” and “The AristoCats.”
To see a split-screen side by side of Baloo the bear and Little John (the bear) identically animated, visit the Huffington Post.
