Did people literally just draw thousands of pictures that looked almost identical and then they stitched them together, like a flip book? How did they do it, and how was it even remotely cost-effective and worth the effort?
In: 40
Pretty much like a flipbook. They’d draw everything on “cells,” (basically just pieces of paper) that usually had holes punched in the corners or some other markers to line them up, and then each cell would be photographed to frames of film.
Even for big budget animations though there were usually ways to minimize the effort.
* Painting the backgrounds extremely detailed, and then using a more simplified style for the characters and pasting them over the re-used background was a common one.
* They usually also “animate on 2s,” which basically means each drawn frame lasts for 2 frames on screen, reducing the amount of total drawings required.
* Things like [Disney’s multiplane camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera) that allowed them to film parallax without much added effort.
* Lower budget animations like Anime and Scooby-Doo would only animate small parts of the body such as the mouth or arms. That’s why everyone in Scooby-Doo wears collars on their shirts and wrists, it’s so they could just animate the head and hands and keep the body the same.
In the end though, it *was* just a ridiculous amount of work. Not too unreasonable when you have 20 or more people working on it at the same time though.
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