Will Disney ever bring back hand drawn animation

CGI dude here.

CGI has a couple of really important financial points to consider.

The first is quality. Obviously if you put low effort into it it'll look plastic but Toy Story was made to look plastic so they didn't need to waste a lot of time fiddling with crude, early CGI to make it "look good" in the same way hand drawn often has to be exact line for line. But the more human your characters need to be the more you need to spend on modeling, texturing, cloth and hair simulations, and render times.

Render times being a big one. An expensive shot can cost a shit ton of time and money just to get done even after it's "done" since you need it on a computer eating a shit ton of space unless you buy or rent out a render farm.

Related to that there's a certain point where CGI becomes cost effective. Since every CG character needs to go through multiple hands before it's ready to animate, or the hands of one really expensive really good guy. But when the characters are modeled, rigged, textured, and ready to animate you can animate pretty simply and then you need to render it and not worry about painting every shot or cleaning up lines.

If you're working feature length with no giant crowd scenes you can do 3d reasonably simply. But if you have a lot more time and money you can do the crowd scenes better than 2d either way. What 2d is good for is mostly when you have a really crazy idea and it's faster to just draw it out than figure out a bunch of complicated cloth and liquid simulations and figure out how that effect is going to be replicated from an idea and some sketches.

Man Aladdin had some hot girls

Gravity Falls was done in drawn animation.

Which would explain the potato heads to budget issues and to keep a good framerate.

I don't know if Star vs is also done like that or is just some really smooth flash.

If is in movies you ask, I don't think that will happen in recent years.

Is cheaper and there's nothing wrong with well made 3D like in "The Incredibles" or anything that doesn't go for a realistic approach.

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Spamming the same thread over and over on a Burmese Python site will not magically cause traditional animation to return to the mainstream.

To do that, you have to go outside and vote for Trump.

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Confession time: I may have spammed the thread once or twice because it was funny.

I did not do it the other three times

I hope Trump buys Disney.

Unless he trust busts that media conglomerate down to its component parts, no fucking way.

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Seriously? Easily the best part of the film.

The whole thing goes to shit because it turns into a generic talking animal film third way through. That's the part that's forgettable as fuck.

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A difference between 3D and 2D animation seem to be that 3D can be atomized into smaller and more technical tasks that are easily separated from each other, are less dependent on specific artists, and are made in more uniform and incremental ways. But it doesn't seem like a departure from how Disney worked before, it's just even more atomization than before. Making and reverting changes in 3D animation is also easy as anything can be changed at any time, and you can literally copy and paste things around and make sweeping global changes like instantly changing the look of every potted plant in the movie (try changing the camera angle in a 2D animated scene; you'd have to re-draw every single frame from scratch). In addition, finding 3D artists is easier because 3D animation is used everywhere now, and 3D animated movies have performed better at the box office.

So, no, I don't think Disney is going back to 2D.

I was curious about the staff in 3D movies vs. 2D ones, so I compared Frozen and Princess and the Pepe.

Frozen's visual effects department: 140 people
Animation department: 190
Art department: 38
Total: 368
Running time: 102 minutes
Budget: $150 million

The Princess and the Pepe's visual effects department: 69
Animation department: 296
Art department: 20
Total: 385
Running time: 97 minutes
Budget: $105 million ($118 million today)

Comparing just those three departments, there's almost no difference in the amount of staff, interestingly enough. Lion King's total for those departments was 439, and the running time was 88 minutes with a budget of $45 million ($72 million today)

For a different comparison, this is The Wind Rises:
Key animation: 35
In-between animation: 70
Paint: 19
Background art: 20
Total: 144 (there's also a small amount of other relevant tasks not grouped under these categories, so maybe the total would be 150-160)
Running time: 126 minutes
Budget: $30 million

And it's not like Frog did anything technically impressive

From what it looks like, in terms of man power, both seem to be even with on another, so 2D is still viable in that sense at least. but the ability to go back and edit without too much trouble seems to be a big factor.

It seems 2d will never die on the small screen it seems

Every time I think of Keith David, all I can think of is he and Roddy Piper beating the shit out of each other in They Live

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS PUT THE DAMN GLASSES ON

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I miss 2D animation so much. It looked so much better than the CG crap.