I don’t know how I feel about this.

When you watch the old Disney cartoons (you know, the original witty, well-drawn, beautiful ones) you can see how painstaking the work was that went into making all the perspectives and angles and movements look as life-like as possible.  Costumes and curtains and fabrics actually draping and moving with the character’s bodies, camera angles moving around with the scenery moving in sync with them, and movements of characters that didn’t look like they were moon-walking along the surface that they were walking on.  I love the old classics like Jungle Book, Cinderella, 101 Dalmations, the Aristocats…the list goes on.  They all had a wonderful and organic look to them that made you appreciate them as fine art in their own right, along with being good stories with memorable characters.

So when I was alerted to this, I was of two minds.

On the one hand: The work that went into these animations was painstaking and took thousands of man-hours to put together, so it doesn’t surprise me that they’d use some animations as templates.  On the other hand, however: It seems that this goes a bit beyond that, with complete and entire sequences being used for more than just one or two different projects.  And this video is just from what this one person did the research to find…there may be more examples throughout the Disney catalog, in fact I’d bet that there are many more.

So, sure, nobody is going to lose a house or their job because of this finding, but I am a bit conflicted in my own mind about this.  My brother told me last December that he only liked the old classics and he hated the new, computer-generated animated features that are being put out.  I know that mostly it’s a case of him being a cranky curmudgeon and “They don’t make ‘em like they used to!!!”, but it illustrates something doesn’t it?  They DO make them like they used to, with assembly lines and bottom lines and pencil lines and worry lines and all that.

Whatever, it made me spend 20 minutes writing about it.   See for yourself.

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