How does "recycling animation" work?

March 10, 2017 5:35 PM

Disney is apparently (in)famous for recycling animation, or using the same animation sequences in multiple movies. How does it work?

Here are a couple examples of what I'm talking about.

I don't know much about animation as a process or art and to a layperson, it seems like they'd have to re-draw the sequences with the new characters. So how does recycling work? Is the only way the studio saves money with it by saving animators' time?

posted by thewestinggame to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

From what I understand, those scenes were done through rotoscoping. So the animators were essentially tracing over the reels from existing films, and not putting old cells into new cartoons.
posted by modesty.blaise at 5:47 PM on March 10, 2017

There's more details in this link. Traditional animation requires a fair amount of planning -- animators create exposure sheets that details every animation to 1/24 second, and that feeds into a pipeline of artists who ink, tween, and paint each frame.

So yes, they did redraw the sequences, but since the original sequence had already been planned out and drawn it was just a "clean up" operation (even though the clean up required the characters be totally redrawn)

TVTropes has a page for time-and-budget-saving animation tricks.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:51 PM on March 10, 2017

BTW, that specific Sleeping Beauty sequence was reused for time constraints, not money, so your intuition was correct.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:00 PM on March 10, 2017

This same reuse principle continues today in computer animation

In addition to cloning movement from model to model in the same movie, there is also still the wholesale reuse of full sequences from earlier movies, with whatever changes are needed to update it to the new movie. Michael Bay is particularly notorious for this.
posted by radwolf76 at 12:53 AM on March 11, 2017