So my basic understanding is they were hand drawn, but how does this even work? Did they hand draw every frame brand new each time? Did they erase then redraw the characters that moved and keep the background the same? But wouldnt that mess up the background if they erased even some tiny parts??
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>So my basic understanding is they were hand drawn,
Exactly.
> but how does this even work? Did they hand draw every frame brand new each time
Yep.
>Did they erase then redraw the characters that moved and keep the background the same?
Ok, so, my understanding is that it was like this:
Everything was drawn on clear sheets of plastic. A background was drawn, then a new sheet was laid over top of it, and characters were drawn in on the new sheet, then another sheet was added for any foreground elements that covered up part of the characters. When all of this was completed, and everything was stacked and drawn, what you have is called an animation cel (short for “celluloid,” the type of plastic originally used).
A still photograph of the cel was then taken on a strip of moving picture film, and this became one frame.
For the next frame, everything was removed down to the background, and the process started over.
Anything that didn’t move between frames was copied by putting the sheet of plastic for the new frame on top of the previous one and tracing those elements, then drawing in any new positions–including facial expressions, mouth movements, etc. Obviously, the old layer wasn’t part of the new cel.
This process was repeated for each and every frame of the film. Each second of film requires a minimum of 24 frames, so for a 2 hour film, you’re looking at a *bare minimum* of 172,800 hand-drawn cels.
Animation firms like Disney would have hundreds of animators on staff. Each and every one of them had to be able to draw the characters exactly the same as everybody else, which is why most cartoon characters are were drawn as simply as possible.
This is also why they would use shortcuts like drawing the entire background for a scene once, and drawing anything that changed on new plastic sheets laid over it, and tracing the elements that didn’t move from one frame to the next.
It’s a laborious process, sometimes taking years to complete from drawing the first cel to the last–but it gives the animators complete and total control over everything that happens in each and every frame of film. It also gives the finished product a distinct appearance that CGI is, to my knowledge, currently unable to reproduce.
Interestingly, things were still done this way as recently as *Lilo and Stitch,* released in 2002 (the last hand-drawn Disney film I can think of OTTOMH).
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