Dick'sToolbox
Animation - the ghoul, the bland and the ugly
I remember the first animated movie that I ever saw all too well. On my fifth birthday I saw ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ on a 16mm projector that my mother had brought home to show in a darkened room at our Christchurch house. I got as far as when Snow White fled into the forest after the Huntsman, unable to kill her as the Queen has instructed, tells her to flee into the forest and never return. As she runs into the gathering gloom the trees are transformed into clutching clawed hands and the peaceful animals become terrifying eyes in the dark.
Unable to cope with yet another terror in my life and ignored by my supposed friends who should have run screaming outside with me, I went and climbed a suitable small tree outside and sulked.  Little did I know that the psychedelic terrors of the ‘Wizard of Oz’ were yet to come and that my supposed friends were to become the sort of people who laugh in ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.
Disney actually avoided most of the real horrors of the Brothers Grimm original such as when the Queen is required to dance in red-hot iron slippers until she dies at Snow White’s wedding. Not customary for the bridal waltz and something which would have distracted the audience from the Best Man’s speech.  But the movie had its scares in an innocent age more than seventy years ago but, to a generation fed on a screen diet of Harry Potter and Zelda, this would be nothing.
It was years later that I inflicted a similar terror inflicted on my young daughter. Another Walt Disney trauma inducing movie called ‘Bambi’ when the early atmosphere of cheer and happiness is shattered by the shooting of Bambi’s mother. Mind you if Bambi’s mother was one of the many feral deer in Warrandyte, I would happily welcome her demise.
I have a recollection that in the Disney book version of Snow White the wicked Queen has three attempts to kill Snow White whilst the film she has only one. The reason was that Disney had run out of money and had to release the film before it was fully realised. Hand drawn animation is not cheap or quick and it only took another thirty-seven animated pictures for Disney to realise this and move to computer generation in 2005 with the award winning ‘Toy Story’. As a comparison that took 27 animators, 294 computers and 110 individuals working 800,000 hours over four years to finish. A year longer than Snow White.
The basic principles of hand-drawn animation are simple. Each character frame is drawn by hand on clear celluloid sheets and placed over a static background image to create a composite image. For a character in Snow White the basic pencil animation drawings look like this:
Motion pictures have traditionally run at twenty-four frames per second. If you are excessively diligent there will be 24 different pictures of each moving character every second - though for the sake of RSI normally two frames are shot thus halving the work. ‘Snow White’ was entirely hand-drawn and is 83 minutes long so there are 119,520 seconds that may have their own
individual images but each image may have several separately animated characters each with their own drawing. Snow White had 250,000 drawings all inked and coloured by ‘pretty girls’ according to the RKO documentary on the film’s making and apparently three million pictures generated if you are to believe the studio. A lot of work.
The multi-plane camera would move each still in front of the camera at a steady speed, making it appear like the images were moving. This method of animation gives Snow White a quality that isn't seen in many modern animated movies. The music and voice actors were pre-recorded well before the animation started, then syncing to the visuals to match up with the sound.
Whilst there are only forty-one visual creatives in the credits there were over seven hundred people working on the images and music.
One of the delights of the Snow White is the use of shadows and this used a mysterious patented device called the Shadowgraph to simulate realistic shadows of characters on irregularly shaped backgrounds. The shadows tie the characters into the scene uniting foreground and background.
To use the Shadowgraph* first the background art would be photographed. It would then be used to construct a miniature stage with three-dimensional cardboard objects, such as tables or rocks, placed in their proper location on the floor plan. Next, the transparent cel with the character that was supposed to cast the shadow would be set up in front of the set and a strong light would be shone through it. The character’s opaque outline would then cast a real shadow upon the set and the props. A camera above the set photographed each cel’s shadow. This operation was repeated for every cel in the sequence. Using these photographs, specialized layout artists would ink the shadows on top cels in their proper place to be included in the scene setup. Throughout that film, not only does the transparency of the shadows vary according to the strength of the ambient lighting, but the shadows are also true to their sources.
This a lot of additional work such as when Snow White ascends the cottage staircase and the candlelight throws shadows onto the stairs and floor in perfect perspective.
Disney wanted the characters to be believable and expressive, so he hired live actors to perform the scenes and recorded their voices and movements. The animators then used a technique called rotoscoping, which involved tracing over the filmed footage to create realistic drawings. This was only used for the most ‘human’ characters such as the Prince, the Queen and Snow White.
Some hand drawn feature length cartoons are still made with the Japanese Studio Ghibli being the best known though they have used some computer assists. Their most famous production is Spirited Away written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki in 2001 that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards.
For me the ultimate test of hand-drawn animation is depicting water. In ‘Snow White’ there is only a stream or two but in ‘Porco Rosso’ another Miyasaki directed  Ghibli production that features seaplanes there is a lot of water, though it is rendered reasonably simply. What it does have is a limpid transparency - and a flying pig as a hero.
It is only when you get to full digital production like ‘Tin Tin’ that super-realism takes over with complex modelling of fluid dynamics which started in an incredibly boring way with ‘Carla’s Island’ in 1981. An island surrounded by waves as complex as bread rolls.  Doesn’t quite compare with sailing ship drama at sea in a raging storm as in  ‘Tin Tin’.
Ultimately feature length cartoons depend not on astounding graphics no matter how impressive they are but on the quality, and imaginative telling of the story as well as the characterisations of characters that are not real. But when the two match each other, magic happens.

*Shadowgraph of a Mouse by John Holbo, November 19, 2017, from ‘Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, no Straight Thing was Ever Made’