Ten years ago, Lion King ushered in a new era for animation. Now we stand on the precipice of a new digital frontier. © Disney Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.

Ten years ago, hand-drawn animation was king. The Lion King was wowing audiences all over the world, and making a pretty penny in the process. Other studios, smelling the success of a fresh kill, decided to get in on the game.

As with all things in the circle of life, circumstances change and systems adapt. Here we are, now, on the threshold of a new era in animation history. The rise of the machines has sent traditional animated movies to the fishes in the U.S. What began as a small service technology has blossomed into a full-blown, billion-dollar business. Computer-generated movies are not just carving out their ecological niche, they are bulldozing one. They are the mice-become-wooly-mammoths of our time.

Emeryville and Redwood City, California. Irving, Texas. Lombard, Illinois. White Plains, New York. Honolulu, Hawaii. With CGI films having been pioneered in such far-flung places, the trend continues with feature studios setting roots in Toronto, London, Barcelona, San Rafael, California and Atlanta, Georgia.

As the Hollywood studios make their own transition from pencils to pixels, there is much to look forward to. It is less of a revolution than a renaissance — literally, the rebirth of old ideas in a new context. It is the cyclic renewal story of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Out of destruction comes creation; out of death comes life.

Negotiating Change: The Animation Guild
There is understandably going to be some resistance to change, especially when people get into business to do one thing, and then, halfway through their career, it ostensibly becomes something else.

The Animation Guild membership, according to its rep Steve Hulett, has accepted the new reality that the hand-drawn animation market has shrunk while CGI has grown.

Steve Hulett, who was part of Disney’s story staff during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, is the business representative for The Animation Guild. He observes, “Most traditional animators recognize that CGI is the wave of the immediate future and that 2D (let’s call it ‘hand-drawn’) is not going to hold the kind of sway it did in the early ‘90s.”

To that end, The Animation Guild (Local 839 IATSE) has set up a computer training lab in its building. The Guild has been assiduously pursuing grants with the state of California, and elsewhere, to help its members gain the skills they need to find work.

“Many still wish they were animating with a pencil,” Hulett explains. “Nevertheless, a lot of folks have been transitioning into the brave new world of CGI. DreamWorks has retrained more of its traditional crew than any other studio, but Disney has certainly retrained many of its lead traditional animators.”

Hulett recalls, “The experience of artists who transition to CGI has been all over the map. Initially, there was a lot of unhappiness and mourning for an art form that seemed to be going away. I would walk through Disney in 2002 and the anger and despair were palpable.”

“I guess I feel a little more optimistic than some people,” Hulett continues, “because I think that hand-drawn animation will come back at some point. There will be a studio out there that will produce a traditional animated feature that gets the public excited, and at that point hand-drawn animation will make a resurgence.”

Over the past four years, The Animation Guild has facilitated substantial retraining. The first classes were offered at Abram Friedman Occupational Center, a computer lab affiliated with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Hulett says, “We were heavily involved with training under an H1-B Federal Training Grant and trained 800 of our members in Photoshop, Maya and Shake. The training was extensive, and we offered classes to literally hundreds of traditional artists who were ultimately laid off when the studios went to all-CGI production.”