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Disney’s Double Takes
Disney’s Double Takes
This video reveals that many classic animated films use recycled animation.
By Bernhard Warner and Matthew Yeomans
Posted Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 11:03am
Take Out/TakeAway: The Times of London called Wetr0x's painstaking edit work "a YouTube hit." It brings to attention yet again an old technique in animated films, that of "video referencing,” a way for studios to cut down on production time and costs by duplicating certain scenes. Fairly harmless stuff, right? Well, YouTube viewers aren't happy. As one viewer groans, "No wonder Robin Hood is considered the cheapest of all of Disney's animated features."
Social Media Effect: YouTube has fast become an active forum for consumers to cheer the best work of their favorite brands. It's also a hostile place where the masses unmask "fakery." Remember Mac fans dissecting the Microsoft "laptop hunters" ad? In less than two weeks, this video, produced by a teenager in Sweden, is putting Disney on the defensive for a production technique it employed decades ago. That kind of cyber-sleuthing is causing a fresh headache for a brand like Disney that's already seen its beloved characters widely parodied on YouTube and across the Web.
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YouTube BrandWatch is The Big Money's exploration into how the world's best-known businesses, so adept at managing their images offline, are being perceived online, where control is harder to come by. Every week, The Big Money features a corporate-themed video that's had significant viewership on YouTube: some approved, some unapproved, some mashed-up combinations of the two. And we'll ask our readers to vote on how the video affects the brands. We think the responses will surprise you, and provide a window onto what is fast becoming the most important playground for corporate games. (Note: This feature has no official relationship to YouTube or its owner, Google.)
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Disney’s Double Takes
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Comments
Just How Repetitive?
All the examples shown are Robin Hood ripping off an older classic. They're edited in different orders as if to imply that all sorts of movies are stealing from each other, but even a glancing inspection and some knowlege of the timeline of these movies will tell you that this is only one instance of cheap corner cutting and not a systemic problem.
Don't stop with the animation...
Disney doesnt just recycle animation, it has also mastered a repetitious formula (albeit very successful) for it's Disney Channel "Original" Movies. The same usual protagonist/antagonist set-up, over arching theme (a sporting event, musical) and touching moment somewhere. Musical features have songs roll out every 6-9 minutes with a finale score with a guest "star" from another movie.
Critically, these shows are unoriginal to the average adult but they score well with the kids and bring in the big bucks. Can't fault them for that.
Stick with a winner!
How is this a failure? Disney's templates obviously succeeded over and over again--these are some of my favorite movies! Just imagine how difficult and time consuming animation was in those days. So many very successful shows, movies, commericals, and products are the same as something that came before it--just dressed up differently. There's nothing wrong with that if you own the rights.
Animators recycle? What a shock.
This should not be news to anyone who knows anything about the history of animation. Betty Boop shorts are nothing but cycles of animation repeated over and over. They, like Japanese animation, were often shot at under the recommended 24 fps rate (i.e., two or three shots of each frame, rather than one). Warner Bros. shorts, "The Simpsons"... the list of traditional animation sources that use techniques like this goes on and on.
In my book, re-using poses and angles is far less of a "cheat" (if that's what we consider this) than re-using whole animation clips, cutting the frame rate, or excessive use of cycles. I think that part of this may stem from the complexity of the movements that are in the animation shown in this clip, for one thing. Notice how much of the clip is made up of dancing. Dancing is a complicated thing to animate, and likely something that was rotoscoped (also an animation "cheat"). As the characters themselves, such as Snow White and Maid Marian, are too dissimilar to have been "traced" from one another, a likely explanation is that film footage was shot of live actors in the "Snow White" dance sequence, and then re-used as a reference point in "Robin Hood." It's also worth noting that most, if not all of the films shown were from the late 60s to early 70s period, already recognized as a period of artistic decline at Disney (and a period of cost-cutting techniques, such as Xeroxing cells).
Oh, and as for the similarity between Baloo of "Jungle Book" and Little John of "Robin Hood," it does bear mentioning that the two characters were voiced by the same actor, Phil Harris, which goes a long way towards explaining why the characters also look so similar.
Traditional animation is a horribly expensive art form when compared to live action or digital animation. Possibly the only thing more tedious and expensive would be claymation/stop motion animation (which also likely re-uses shots, movements etc. - Puppetoons, anyone?). If relying on prior films for reference is what is necessary to prompt studios to even consider even producing traditional animated films, then a little borrowing here and there is totally within the realm of respectability.
Disney video
Sorry, but the fact that Disney has re-used animation references (particularly in their cost-cutting heyday of the 1970s, when few would honestly consider their films "classic") is hardly a secret or a new revelation. The same information is available on Wikipedia, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_(1973_film)
Disney "recyclables"
It's actually interesting to see the duplicated scenes, but I don't think it's a deal breaker for Disney movies. It could be argued that the movements were reminiscent of a style that was distinct to Disney animation. The plots and dialogue were still unique. Plus considering it was all hand-drawn back then, (no computers to speed up the process, kids) I can understand using a template for more general scenes, like dance sequences.