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
Yep! Moving parts of an animation were drawn on their own on transparent sheets called cels, then put on top of painted backgrounds that were moved sideways to simulate movement. Every transition from one position to another was photographed separately, with the cels containing movement being switched between each photographed frame.
To save time, most animation was photographed at 12 frames per second instead of the usual 24 frames per second normally reserved for live-action movies.
Today, everything can be done by computer, but using much of the same building principles. Best of all, you’re not required to do full 3D animation. There are animation software suites specifically engineered to create traditional 2D style animation very efficiently, even allowing you to throw in a few 3D background effects for added depth during moving scenes.
Best thing is that, today, animation is no longer exclusively the domain of children’s entertainment. There’s now a lot of adult-themed shows and movies available that could never be created in real life because of their potentially huge level of complexity and huge production expenses. Futurama, Disenchantment, Star Trek: Lower Decks, The Venture Brothers, Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty…
You can finally be a grown-up and enjoy cartoons created for a grown-up audience!
You can literally search YouTube and find many examples of animation before computers! Yes they drew hundreds, if not thousands of scenes….each a little bit different. They were artists – and normally a studio would pay them a weekly salary which was a mere pittance (normally just enough to survive) for the art they produced. All the studios payed nearly the same, so the artists could either “grin and bear it” or change professions.
You just described classical animation my friend, how did they do it? Well with a lot of people for the animated parts, the background was usually painted separately so it could be reused for multiple frames, they used a machine called a rotoscope to copy the movements from film as to how was it cost effective I really don’t know AFAIK it really wasn’t so that’s why they had so many repeating scenes
omg . Ty for making me feel old.
I am an animator, computer 3D now. But my first jobs were doing exactly that. drawing every frame on a lightbox. Fortunately, we were at a time in technology where scanners existed and we scanned everything into a computer to compile. As opposed to literally taking a picture of each page with a giant overhead oxberry camera.
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.
You got it.
There was a song on a VHS of Max Fleischer cartoons that went: “First you take pencil then draw a picture, then draw 20 thousand. That’s how they made cartoons, in the days of old.”
That’s paraphrased of course. I haven’t heard that song in 30 years but I remember the cartoons.
You make a “flip book” on celluloid and take pictures of the layers of the flip book to put it on film. Tedious and it takes a big team. You have lead animators, key animators, and ‘tweeners so the work is divided up.
The quick version is that yes, every frame needed to be drawn out and photographed on to the cinefilm.
In reality there were a few shortcuts that could be used, the biggest being using layers.
Rather than drawing out every frame in full, they split a scene into multiple layers, then painted those separately into clear sheets that could stack up to create the final image.
This means that you can use the same background repeatedly as often that will not change frame to frame.
They could then layer on a few foreground details on another layer so those could be moved relative to the background to show sooner motion, or characters could move behind them or otherwise interact with them.
The individual characters could then be drawn separately, and could be split up into multiple pieces depending on how they move – a body may stay static while an arm or other body part moves, so they will place those on different layers and reuse the body frame while using different arm, heads or faces to animate those.
Have you ever noticed in old animation how the background tended to be really nicely painted, but the characters were simply shaded in block colours? Or that you could tell when a character was about to interact with an object like a rock or log in a scene when one suddenly appeared that wasn’t painted as nicely as the background? This is why – putting a little more effort into painting the background that would be reused in a lot of shots was a nice way to make things look nicer, but putting the same effort into something that would only appear for a single frame would have been too time consuming and hard to match exactly frame to frame, so they were drawn in a simpler style.
Animating this way did give some other loopholes too, the most obvious being the ability to reuse animations. If a character is going to repeat the same movement in a different shot (or a different film altogether) why go to the bother of reanimating it when you could just reuse the same set of cells placed on a new background and in a new scene alongside a different supporting character (maybe even partly taken from another place too)?
It also allowed for work to be shared out. Different animators could draw different elements of a scene, with certain staff members drawing the key frames, and then other animators drawing the frames in between those and matching up the movements.
Add all of those together and it does take an incredible amount of effort to make a good quality animation – 24 different images being built up and photographed for every second of film, not to mention audio, storyboarding and all of the other tasks needed to pull everything together into the final product.
Even a shorter animation like one of three Merry Melodies shorts could be in the region of 8500+ frames of animation, while a feature length movie like Snow White could be in the region of 120,000 frames or more.
They rarely did every frame because it was simply not worth it for the small increase you could get from it. Between TVs and the human eye, you don’t really catch 24 frames per second when viewed at that speed.
Traditional animation (and even CGI) is based on 24 frames per second. Which has been the film standard for many years based on the speed of traditional film through a camera. Even updated methods are still “based on” 24 fps as both 48 and 60fps are derivations of 24fps.
Each frame consists of overlaid layers of detail called “plates”. Usually only a few things actually need to move in the animation, so rather than redraw every element for each frame, only the element that’s moving is changed. Like a background may not move at all, so that plate is kept still until the background needs to move.
Animating every frame is called “Animating on 1s”. It’s good for high detail, but unnecessary most of the time. This is for when you want extremely smooth animation and effects.
Animating every other frame is called “Animating on 2s”. It means you hold a single image for two frames. Meaning instead of 24 unique frames per second, you have 12. It’s kind of the default in the west.
“Animating on 3s” means you have 8 unique frames per second. This is a real budget saver, especially if you don’t have a lot of crisp details, smooth motion, or plan to use lots of “smear frames” where you draw the motion between two movements overlaid into one frame. This is used in anime a lot. You may notice a lot of, especially older, anime essentially freezes everything in the scene except for a few elements like mouths or animated emotions like the anime sweat drop.
Even then, work was split between more skilled “keyframers” and the “in-betweeners”. Keyframers draw the important frames with the most action, and the job of the “in-betweeners” was to draw the frames that come between those. Usually because the key frames require more detail and crisper image, the amount of skill required is higher, while the in-betweens will include more volume of work but less exacting skill.
Honestly, it’s not a dead art. Some people have picked up on traditional animations ability to create more graphically interesting elements than available in traditional CG effects.
Michel Gagné is something of the picture boy for this. Seen “Into The Spiderverse”, “The Iron Giant”, “Space Jam” or, played Battleborn? You’ve seen his hand drawn effects animations. He’s really adept at combining hand drawn effects with 3D environments in a unique and stylized way that catches the eye.
There’s some things that traditional drawing is better at than CG, and some that CG is better at. So it never really goes away.
Watch the [Mickey documentary on Disney+](https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/mickey-the-story-of-a-mouse/8DXLYGqqc4CT). That might ELI5. ([Final Product.](https://twitter.com/disneyapromos/status/1594402056755941380?lang=en))
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