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Yes, extremely impressive. "Mary Poppins" rightfully received an Oscar for best visual effects. I am continuously amazed at the level of innovation done at the

• beAbU 3y ago
  Re the animation quality: I wonder if Disney didn't create a lot of their later animation by rotoscoping over live-action recordings? The quality of the animation and the realism of the characters' movements in those examples you posted definitely allude to this. Disney was known to recycle some of their animations in older movies [1], so this could be because they have a source live action recording somewhere that they rotoscoped over more than once for different productions. Also note the different backgrounds with different characters that move - excellent example of the multiplane camera in action. In the foreground they have a "recycled" animation, in the background they can then put something else in, and record it all in one go with their special camera. 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd09WdOgOeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd09WdOgOeg
  • lqet 3y ago
    I found this interesting paragraph on Wikipedia: > Very few of the animators at the Disney studio had had artistic training (most had been newspaper cartoonists); among these few was Grim Natwick, who had trained in Europe. The animator's success in designing and animating Betty Boop for Fleischer Studios showed an understanding of human female anatomy and, when Walt Disney hired Natwick, he was given female characters to animate almost exclusively. Attempts to animate Persephone, the female lead of The Goddess of Spring, had proved largely unsuccessful; Natwick's animation of the heroine in Cookie Carnival showed greater promise, and the animator was eventually given the task of animating Snow White herself. Though live action footage of Snow White, the Prince and the Queen was shot as reference for the animators, the artists' animators disapproved of rotoscoping, considering it to hinder the production of effective caricature. Nevertheless, all of the above-mentioned characters were fully rotoscoped and utilized by their respective artists, some more, some less.[98] Despite Graham and Natwick's objections, however, some scenes of Snow White and the Prince were directly traced from the live-action footage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarfs_(1937_film)#Character_animation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_and_the_Seven_Dwarf...
• PaulHoule 3y ago
  Disney’s animation team was decimated in the 1970s, when they made The Black Caludron it took them two years to figure out how to draw decent humanoid animations again.
• hondo77 3y ago
  It's not that they forgot how the multiplane worked. They understood it...in theory. However, they were quirky beasts and it was knowledge of those quirks that was lost. Like getting an old car to run--most people these days don't know about pumping the gas pedal to keep it running.
  • djmips 3y ago
    Pumping to start the car, to prime the carb but never heard of the keep it running part unless you been needing to keep the revs higher until it warms up? But then you don't need to pump, just hold it.
    • hondo77 3y ago
      Keeping a 1966 Ford Galaxy running on a cold day could be challenging. You could warm it up for a while but at some point you'd need to get moving and the pumping to get it moving would start. Then came stop lights--couldn't keep the engine revving while slowing and at the light (well, you could shift into neutral but that was more of a pain than it was worth). Then pump to get it moving again. This was all in the city--if you got to go on the freeway or a country road that morning, things were much easier. It did warm up eventually, of course.
• degauss 3y ago
  Around 1996 I worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation (Hercules, Tarzan, Mulan, Dinosaur era). I was talked with implementing the Disney multi plane 2D scanning camera in a digital environment, Maya, a 3D modeling and animation package. I was given full specs and it was straightforward. One thing was odd, the 2D coordinate system used 5000,5000 as the origin, I forget what units. No one seemed to be able to explain why. A while later the original mechanical multi plane scanning camera was put on display. Looking at it, it made sense. It used a 4 digit mechanical counter for the position of each axis with a range of [0,9999] so 5000 is approximately the center. Warner Brothers Animation used software called Animo and it had the same origin. I ended up working with an Animo developer at my next job and asked him about it. He said Warner Brothers told them to implement it that way with 5000,5000 as the origin because that’s how they do it at Disney and Disney must have a good reason.
  • atlas_hugged 3y ago
    Hahaha that’s awesome. Witnessing the formation of a mini-cargo cult, so-to-speak.