Disney Dumps Hand-Drawn Animation

Posted on September 23, 2005

It appears that hand-drawn animation may soon become a thing of the past at Disney. Faced by stiff competition from Pixar, which uses computer-generated animation, Disney is about to throw in the towel on hand drawing.

Mr. Keane, a 31-year veteran who created the beast from "Beauty and the Beast" and Ariel from "The Little Mermaid," was a Disney traditionalist. But after a series of experiments to see if he could create a computer-animated ballerina, his opposition softened. So he invited the 50 animators to discuss the pros and cons of both art forms, calling his seminar "The Best of Both Worlds."
For an hour, Mr. Keane painstakingly ticked through the pluses and minuses of each technique while the other animators listened quietly. After a few tentative questions, the crowd burst into chatter, as animators shouted over one another, some arguing that computers should not replace people while others expressed fears that they would be forced to draw by hand.
In a recent interview, Mr. Keane recalled that Kevin Geiger, a computer animation supervisor, then stood up and demanded of him, "If you can do all this cool stuff that you're talking about - that you want to see in animation - but you have to give up the pencil to do it, are you in?" Mr. Keane hesitated before answering: "I'm in."
Three weeks later, the company's animators were told that Disney would concentrate on making computer-animated movies, abandoning a 70-year-old hand-drawn tradition in favor of a style popularized by more successful, newer rivals like Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation. The results were nothing short of a cultural revolution at the studio, which is famous for the hand-drawn classics championed by its founder Walt Disney - from "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to "Peter Pan."

It's the end of an era. Soon they'll replace all the screenwriters with artificial intelligence-enhanced computers programmed with all the plots ever written. They're already considering replacing actors with computer-generated characters. What's next? Replacing all the (human) audiences with robots? At least they could be programmed to a) show up in droves on the opening weekend and b) give the film great word of mouth buzz.