Joseph Gilland

In my last years working for Walt Disney Feature Animation in Florida, I had the honor to work on some of the most beautifully animated films ever made. Perhaps the stories were getting a little stale and the Disney Broadway musical “formula” was running its course, but there was no denying that the quality of the hand-drawn character and effects animation was as good as it gets. As a special effects supervisor, I had the pleasure of receiving scene after scene of absolutely gorgeous character animation. Removing the rubber bands from stacks of drawings and flipping through them, I was holding animation history in my hands. Exquisite scenes animated by the likes of Andreas Deja, Glenn Keanne, Nik Ranieri, Ruben Aquino and Ken Duncan would flow through my hands, to be handed out to the special effects department to have the touch of our effects animation magic added to them. It just seemed like a helluva good job at the time, but it is awfully easy to romanticize that era, and wonder, where the hell is it all going today? I mean, this was real artwork. Moving pictures drawn with soft pencils on high-quality bond paper. These drawings still sit somewhere, archived, labeled and organized (one would hope). It’s real; you can touch it; it still breathes somehow. Only a tragic fire could destroy it in its physical form, and time will ravage it little, as Disney started using acid free particle boards to hold these drawings together as we moved into the 21st century.

Today, the incredible (no pun intended) animation we are seeing on the big screen, exists only as a sequence of zeroes and ones on some kind of digital storage device, a disc, a drive, an electronic memory of some kind. Where is it? What is it? Can it be touched? Felt? Shown in a museum or sold at a Comic-Con? What if someone accidentally hits the “delete” button? That is really how tenuous this information is. It exists only in a virtual electronic place, completely reliant of electricity, hardware and software, and thus it can only be accessed and viewed with the right hardware and software and a reliable energy source. Will we be able to get a look at the inner workings of some of the best animation created with Maya 7, when we are using Maya version 16.5 10 years from now? Will the 3D works of art being created currently, be brought to life only through the DVDs, or the mpeg and .mov files that we collect these days?

My questions may seem naïve to some. Of course there are countless ways of looking at this work and wonderful museum displays can be created from the zeroes and ones at our finger tips, as Pixar’s wonderful gallery shows have proven. But I think it is a question that many of us are quietly asking ourselves, as we try to manage our collections of thousands upon thousands of digital family photos, in files and on websites, on discs and in memory sticks. Who among us doesn’t somewhere have a box or a huge old-fashioned trunk, filled with hard copy family photos or stacks upon stacks of photo albums? Family treasures, real, tangible, cracked and faded maybe, and with negatives usually in questionable condition, but all the same, authentic pieces of memory we can actually hold in our hands.

What about this fine art of animation of ours? Will we ever again see big productions created primarily on paper? Or is it truly becoming a memory, a thing of the past?

OK, OK, I am losing your interest already. It has been brought to my attention again and again, that the “debate” over 2D vs. 3D, or hand-drawn vs. digital, is really getting old. It is no longer an issue and it’s just not interesting anymore. We have hashed it over in every conceivable way, emotions have run high and everyone’s had their say. And everybody knows that the technique is not as important as the quality of storytelling. Don’t they? At least that seems to be the general consensus around the animation studio coffee machine in the past decade or so. But if that’s really so, then why are the majority of the studios in North America relying almost 100% on 3D and digital 2D techniques to make their films? I mean, good old-fashioned animation tables with their discs and florescent lights are really hard to come by in the average studio, and if you do use one, it tends to draw a crowd of the younger employees in the studio, who are amazed to see such an archaic device still in existence, never mind in actual use! In the studio where I am currently working in Vancouver, British Columbia, entire productions, even the “2D” projects, are being produced entirely without paper, even in the design stages, with the fantastic newer Wacom drawing tablets being used at every possible stage.

I started out on the current production of Fox 4Kids Chaotic, using an old-fashioned animation table and disc and really honest to goodness paper to animate some of the more complex effects in the show, and then I would either scan the drawings or in some cases even tape and trace them onto my Cintiq tablet. These effects are then being translated into Flash, as easily re-usable Flash “symbols,” which can easily be copied and pasted into any number of scenes quickly and efficiently. As my proficiency with the tablet increased however, even I began to rely almost 100% on my tablet, even for animating rather difficult special effects, and the animation table is now beginning to gather dust. I miss it though and there is a lot I can’t do, using primarily digital tools. But I am making do, in the interests of time management. The schedule on a modern day television show does not really permit doing several mutations of a given special effects animation before settling on what works best. So the first version is often the only version anyone will ever see.