Animation is a filmmaking technique by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are either tradtional animations or computer animations made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, has continued to exist alongside these other forms.
Pixar Animation Studios, known simply as Pixar, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Since 2006, Pixar has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, a segment of the Walt Disney Company.
Beauty and the Beast is a 1991 American animated musical romantic fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is based on the 1756 fairy tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, in turn an abridged version of the 1740 story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. The film also incorporates ideas from the 1946 French film directed by Jean Cocteau. The film was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, and produced by Don Hahn, from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton.
The Walt Disney Studios, located in Burbank, California, United States, serves as the corporate headquarters for The Walt Disney Company media conglomerate. The 51-acre studio lot also contains several sound stages, a backlot, and other filmmaking production facilities for Walt Disney Studios's motion picture production. The complex also houses the offices for the company's many divisions, with the exception of Pixar Animation Studios, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Studios, which remains on its namesake lot in nearby Century City as tenants of Fox Corporation.
The Rescuers Down Under is a 1990 American animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is the sequel to Disney's 1977 animated feature film The Rescuers, which was based on the novels by Margery Sharp. In The Rescuers Down Under, Bernard and Bianca travel to the Australian Outback to save a young boy named Cody from a villainous poacher who wants to capture an endangered golden eagle for money. Directed by Hendel Butoy and Mike Gabriel from a screenplay by Jim Cox, Karey Kirkpatrick, Byron Simpson, and Joe Ranft, the film features the voices of Bob Newhart, Eva Gabor, John Candy, and George C. Scott.
The Little Mermaid is a 1989 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation in association with Silver Screen Partners IV and released by Walt Disney Pictures. It is loosely based on the 1837 Danish fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen. The film was written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements and produced by Musker and Howard Ashman, who also wrote the film's songs with Alan Menken, who also composed the film's score. Featuring the voices of René Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Paddi Edwards, Buddy Hackett, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Ben Wright, and Samuel E. Wright, The Little Mermaid tells the story of a teenage mermaid princess named Ariel, who dreams of becoming human and falls in love with a human prince named Eric, which leads her to make a magic deal with the sea witch, Ursula, to become human and be with him.
The history of animation, the method for creating moving pictures from still images, has an early history and a modern history that began with the advent of celluloid film in 1888. Between 1895 and 1920, during the rise of the cinematic industry, several different animation techniques were developed or re-invented, including stop-motion with objects, puppets, clay or cutouts, and drawn or painted animation. Hand-drawn animation, which mostly consisted of a succession of still images painted on cels, was the dominant technique throughout most of the 20th century and became known as traditional animation.
Traditional animation is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in film, until the end of the 20th century, when there was a shift to computer animation in the industry, specifically 3D computer animation.
The Works is a shelved animated feature film, partially produced from 1979 to 1986. If it had been finished as intended, it would have been the first film that was entirely 3D computer-animated. It included contributions from individuals who would go on to work at digital animation pioneers Pixar and DreamWorks Animation.
A cel, short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. Actual celluloid was used during the first half of the 20th century. Since it was flammable and dimensionally unstable, celluloid was largely replaced by cellulose acetate. With the advent of computer-assisted animation production, the use of cels has been all but obsolete in major productions. The Walt Disney Animation Studios stopped using cels in 1990, when Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) replaced this element in their animation process. In the next decade and a half, other animation studios phased cels out as well.
John Alan Lasseter is an American film director, producer, and animator. He has served as the Head of Animation at Skydance Animation since 2019. Previously, he acted as the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios, as well as the Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.
Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, it is the longest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 62 feature films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Wish (2023), and hundreds of short films.
The multiplane camera is a motion-picture camera that was used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This creates a sense of parallax or depth.
Disney Digital 3-D is a brand name used by The Walt Disney Company to describe three-dimensional films made and released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures mostly under the Walt Disney Pictures label and shown exclusively using digital projection.
Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. By modeling structures using combinatorial geometry mathematics and applying Monte Carlo radiation ray tracing techniques, the mathematicians could estimate exposures at various distances and relative locations in and around fictional structures. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGi/SynthaVision was formed at MAGi by Robert Goldstein.
Digital puppetry is the manipulation and performance of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtual environment that are rendered in real-time by computers. It is most commonly used in filmmaking and television production but has also been used in interactive theme park attractions and live theatre.
The Disney Renaissance was a period from 1989 to 1999 during which Walt Disney Feature Animation returned to producing critically and commercially successful animated films. The ten feature films associated with this period are The Little Mermaid (1989), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), and Tarzan (1999).
Waking Sleeping Beauty is a 2009 American documentary film directed by Disney film producer Don Hahn and produced by Hahn and former Disney executive Peter Schneider. The film documents the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation from 1984 to 1994, covering the rise of a period referred to as the Disney Renaissance.
The history of computer animation began as early as the 1940s and 1950s, when people began to experiment with computer graphics – most notably by John Whitney. It was only by the early 1960s when digital computers had become widely established, that new avenues for innovative computer graphics blossomed. Initially, uses were mainly for scientific, engineering and other research purposes, but artistic experimentation began to make its appearance by the mid-1960s – most notably by Dr. Thomas Calvert. By the mid-1970s, many such efforts were beginning to enter into public media. Much computer graphics at this time involved 2-D imagery, though increasingly as computer power improved, efforts to achieve 3-D realism became the emphasis. By the late 1980s, photo-realistic 3-D was beginning to appear in film movies, and by mid-1990s had developed to the point where 3-D animation could be used for entire feature film production.
A Computer Animated Hand is the title of a 1972 American computer-animated short film produced by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Produced during Catmull's tenure at the University of Utah, the short was created for a graduate course project. After creating a model of his left hand, 350 triangles and polygons were drawn in ink on its surface. The model was digitized from the data and laboriously animated in a three-dimensional animation program that Catmull wrote.
