[Dardan Elbasani]

<h3 class=”item-title”><span data-field-selector=”title”>2-D or Not 2-D?: How the Iris Closed on Hand-Drawn Feature Animation</span></h3>
The article I read has got to do with the death of 2D animation and the rapid rise of 3D that took the world by storm and forever changed, not only the animation industry, but also live-action film. 3D animation certainly wasn’t a stranger to hand-drawn animation, especially in the late 80s/early 90s. The Ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast, the Stampede in The Lion King, the Flying Carpet in Aladdin (so on and so forth), are a few of the most memorable parts and scenes in animation history – and, ironically, none of them could have been possible without the very thing that killed its kind less than a decade later, namely CGI.

Basically, hand-drawn animation died out so quickly it shocked both 2D AND 3D animators. Tom Sito, one of the main animators at Disney during its so-called Renaissance (at a moment where the most prominent animators were paid up to a million per film), said: “Being someone who was raised in the traditions of classic animation, I don’t think we ever saw it ending. We thought we were part of a legacy that went back generations.” Well, he couldn’t have been more wrong. By the end of the 90’s, Disney’s features had been infected with a plague yet unknown (though most likely being their inability to tell stories as great as the ones that came before Pocahontas) that stopped their up and coming films from being financially successful. Then Toy Story came, showed everyone that 3D animation CAN be a thing (much like Snow White did for 3D animation back in 1937) and the rest is now history. The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s last hand-drawn feature film, barely made its money back, and Disney hasn’t looked back since, firing its entire 2D animation department staff.

(begin of rant)

What is most upsetting is the fact that 3D animation is also hurting and even killing 2D studios that are arguably better than Disney (and also Pixar, after their last great film known as Ratatouille of course). One of those studios is Studio Ghibli, which has been in hiatus since 2014. This has got to do mainly with an odd stigma put on both types of animation – that 3D animation can be viewed by the entire family, while 2D animation is… well, for kids. While this doesn’t make much sense at first, considering how photorealistic CGI has become, it’s no surprise that people have begun to treat it as live-action. I mean, look at the new Lion King “live-action” movie. Not. a. single. frame. was shot with an actual camera.

(end of rant)

Here’s the link for the whole article: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1016&context=gj_etds

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