Creating new technology is one of the fundamentals of Disney’s animation department that keeps
them flourishing.
It’s important to embrace technology so you are ahead of the curve and this knowledge
is typically known as movie magic.
Movie magic helps make a scene come to life or character more lifelike to the viewer.
This magic keeps the audience engrossed in the film and let’s them forget they are
watching a movie.
Here is Screen Rant’s list of ten Disney Animation Movie Magic Secrets.
Make sure to stick around to the end to hear how an everyday office product saved Disney’s
animation department.
Sulley’s Fur in Monsters, Inc.
The lovable blue, scarer Sulley was one of Disney’s most ambitious characters created
back in 2001.
His had over 2.3 million individual strands of fur, to be exact 2,320,413 strands of fur.
This made the render times lengthy for the animators at Disney.
They would spend 11 to 12 hours just to export a single frame when Sulley was on screen.
With films requiring 24 frames per second that is a minimum of 11 days per second of
film.
That’s a lot of overtime for the animators.
Toy Soldiers Walk in Toy Story
Bringing toys to life was a magical treat for kids and grownups alike in 1995’s Toy
Story.
The animators knew they had to make the toys appear real and worked hard to create this
enchanted world.
The characters that the animators hard a hardest time formulating a look realistic look for,
were the toy soldiers because of their walk.
They animators could not get the appropriate walk down so they nailed shoes to plywood
and filmed people walking around the studio.
400 Plus Skellington Heads in The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Nightmare Before Christmas is the first stop-motion animated feature to be entirely
converted to 3D by Disney in 2006.
Still in 1993 they had to make Jack Skellington flawless on screen, which involved a painstakingly
long process.
One minute of film took an entire week to capture and they designed over 400 distinctly
different heads for the facial features of Jack Skellington.
That’s more heads than emotions we can think of.
Unique Characters in Wreck-It-Ralph
To bring the arcade world to life, Disney’s animators had a task that Cecil B. DeMille
would be proud of.
Wreck-It-Ralph had the largest cast of unique characters created for this 2012 animated
film.
That is over double the amount of unique characters that are normally animated for a Disney film,
for example Tangled only had 64 unique characters.
Luckily for the animators some of these characters were only from 8-bit games.
Curley Hair in Brave
Claudia Chung, the simulation supervisor for Brave stated that, “Curly hair defies physics
in the way it moves and behaves."
That is why it took them years to develop the film, Brave and Merida’s hair started
out as a series of springs on a computer.
It took the animators almost three years to get her hair perfect and 2 months were spent
on the scene where Merida removes her hood and reveals a full volume of hair.
Sound FX in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
At the time Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released Jimmy MacDonald was the head
of Disney’s sound department.
He was the inventor of numerous contraptions to achieve expressive sounds for characters
like Casey Jr., the circus train engine from Dumbo and Evinrude the dragonfly from The
Rescuers.
Despite the numerous Sound FX he created for Snow White, it was Roy O. Disney that used
his wallet to create the sound of the floor creaking with Dopey's slow footsteps.
Snow in Frozen
Even though other animated films have had snow in them Frozen’s filmmakers knew they
had to take it to a new level.
Disney’s animators of Frozen consulted scientific experts about the precise physical properties
of snowflakes.
The animators and special effects team were even sent to Cheyenne, Wyoming to walk through
snowdrifts to see how snow reacted to movement.
Their work paid off and made it possible for Olaf to be a much loved character.
Xerography in 101 Dalmatians
In 1959 Walt Disney was urged to close down his animation department and focus on TV production
instead.
He disagreed and looked for new technology to save his dire animation department while
making the film 101 Dalmatians.
The technology that saved his beloved department was what is commonly known as Xerox today.
Before Xerox each cell would have to be hand-inked and that took many hours, but with Xerography
all they had to do was make a Xexox copy.
Computer Animation Production System in The Little Mermaid
Today Computer Animation Production Systems or CAPS is widely used in animated film productions.
This process was the beginning of a digital ink and paint program used to digitally color
films in post-production. 1989 CAPS was tested on a scene in The Little Mermaid, it was used
to color the rainbow that was across the sky.
Since it was successful, Disney decided to use this process in 1990 with The Rescuers
Down Under.
The rest is animation history.
Rapunzel's Hair in Tangled
It seems that if you want to reach new heights of technology in a Disney animated film, make
the character’s hair complicated.
The algorithm that manages the way Rapunzel’s hair moves is based on similar algorithms
for cloth.
At the end of the "When Will My Life Begin" montage you can see this algorithm in motion
as she tosses her hair around in a spiral.
The hair almost looks like ribbon being flung around her room and makes for a beautiful
scene.
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