A year before Toy Story hit the theatres, ReBoot, the first CG-animated TV series premiered on ABC. © Mainframe Ent.

A handful of years into the 21st century, traditional 2D theatrical animation looks to be an all but extinct species. Today, CGI films rule, filling the feature pipeline as far as the eye can see. It will be quite a while before we find out if Disney’s Frog Princess — the first flat film from the studio since 2004’s Home on the Range and still in the planning stages — is a harbinger of the medium’s return or a doomed, noble gesture.

In the meantime, 2D is safe, sound and thriving in TV series and direct-to-video releases — but even here computer animation is becoming more and more of a player every day. NBC’s primetime Father of the Pride came and went quickly in 2004 and there are only a relative handful of 3D CG series now on the air, it’s still a far cry from 1994 when ReBoot, the first CG-animated network TV series premiered on ABC — a year ahead of Toy Story’s arrival in movie theaters.

ReBoot was created by a four-man team that included Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair, the pair responsible for the primitively animated appliance movers in Dire Straits’ famous Money for Nothing MTV video. On the strength of that single credit and backed by a British company that subsequently fell by the wayside, the show was sold to ABC and Canada’s YTV. Mainframe, a CG production facility named for ReBoot’s mythical computer city, was launched in Vancouver Canada to produce the series.

“We made every mistake possible,” says Dan Didio, at the time an ABC programming exec and, later, ReBoot’s story editor. That’s the only way you’re going to learn, and we wound up thriving for it. We were charting new territory, which made it kind of fun. We didn’t understand the production problems at the time. Mainframe was pushing programs further than ever before. We became pretty much a beta test site for computer software that was applied later on down the line.” The first of its kind, ReBoot had to cope with the all the challenges of being a pioneer. After airing four episodes in the fall of ‘94, the show actually went off the air until January to allow for the longer than anticipated production schedules.

Dire Straits’ blockheaded workmen made a cameo appearance in an early episode where they were unceremoniously clobbered by falling sandbags. “Ian can’t stand being reminded about those characters all the time,” Didio confides. “He wanted to kill them in ReBoot because he hated being held to that standard.”

Mainframe’s Rick Mischel recalls that “ReBoot was quite an achievement at its time, both technically and creative.” It was also more expensive to produce than conventional animation.

Mainframe grew beyond its origins into a powerhouse animation studio producing numerous CG series and direct-to-video features starring well-known characters from Spider-Man to Barbie. Rick Mischel, the studio’s current ceo compares those early days (before he joined the company) to today’s animation scene. “ReBoot was quite an achievement at its time, both technically and creative. The cost differential [between the series and conventional animation] back then was probably 30-40%. It was much more expensive than today because of the cost of technology then. But the whole model was different then, licensing fees were five times higher. With a bigger budget and longer timelines you could afford to do a show like ReBoot. These days thankfully, technology caught up with medium. Between faster rendering time and better software packages you can now produce a CG show in the same time as a 2D one.”

The Disney Channel is most committed to CG of any cable channel, going back to its highly successful 1998 series, Rolie Polie Olie: three of its preschool Playhouse Disney shows are CG with a fourth in the works, as are two series on companion channel Toon Disney.

While CG and 2D production schedules may have fallen more in line, it still costs more to do a show in three dimensions. Meredith Metz, svp of creative affairs at Disney’s TV animation division estimates that a CG show costs 25% more to produce than a comparative 2D show. Nancy Kantor, Disney Channel’s svp of original programming, sees production costs for the two different techniques merging. “I think it’s all coming closer together. CG costs are down, Flash in some ways is going up, because it’s beginning to approach what you can do in 2D. We don’t find the cost differentials to be wildly different.”

“You’re juggling any number of factors, including your financial limitations,” says Disney vp Mike Moon, who oversees both the channel and the TV animation division. “A CG show that introduces new characters, locations every week isn’t one any studio would want to produce. The cost of setting up new characters or environments has to be amortized across an entire series.”

Carefully structuring those elements is one way to keep a CG series’ budget within haling distance of a 2D one. “We might limit the number of models or additional characters at first,” Kantor explains. “Once you’ve built that library, you can add to it later on. In a second season you can quickly get up to where you want.”

The Disney’s Channel’s commitment to 3D CG animation is strongest in its preschool Playhouse Disney block, with three series currently on air — Handy Manny is a production of Nelvana Ltd., Higglytown Heroes is a production of Wild Brain and both are produced in association with Disney Channel while Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is produced in-house. A second in-house effort starring two more of Disney’s (in Meredith Metz’s words) “fabulous five core characters, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger is in the works and due for a fall ‘07 premiere.