DVDizzy.com

I've recently watched the first six chapters of Over The Garden Wall and I love it! It's one of Cartoon Network's best and it shows that cartoons are still important after the 2009 "Dark Ages"...

Thank the Lord for Adventure Time and Regular Show.

“We have such a rich history of hand-drawing [at Disney] and Chris and I also come from a background of storyboarding,” said Hall, explaining how they developed the characters and their facial expressions early on from hand-drawing.

I was trained as a Disney animator on the traditional principles of the Disney artists. When I went and started using computer animation, I never forgot the traditional animation.

[Lasseter] said that Disney-Pixar will continue to be a strong, filmmaker-driven studio that produces "stories from the heart" while also showcasing groundbreaking technology that combines the ideals of both 2D and 3D animated visuals.

I’m bringing my expertise as a traditional animator, and I come alongside and partner with the animation supervisors and head of animation, and I work with the CG animators. [...] A lot of CG animators don’t draw, they aren’t trained draftsmen, and there’s a skill in drawing, a sense of appeal in the poses and expressions that I can help them craft in their scenes.

When asked if Disney has any 2D animated projects planned, Lasseter responded that he "still loves 2D animation".

Lasseter said that they recently produced a Mickey Mouse short and they are searching for a suitable story to use 2D animation.

Q: Do you see a future for more traditional forms of animation?

Kristina Reed: I don’t know about the rest of the world, but very much at Disney Animation, we believe the style of the film is up to the director. And if a director decided tomorrow that he wanted to tell his story with paint and we were gonna animate paint, we’d figure out a way to do it. Directors can decide they want to work in CG, they want to work in 2D, they want to work in some combo style, etc. We get together and we figure it out. We have a technology department that’s committed to whatever that look wants to be. That’s the only thing. It’s what the directors are feeling at the time.

Disney PR bullshit

In this episode of Disney's "Excuses for not doing 2D animation", all of your favorites are here! We have it all!

Why choose to restrict mediums when you can be innovative and combine two to have the best of both worlds?

Throwback shorts aside, it’s clear that the future of animation at Disney (and most of the feature-film industry) is in 3D-computer projects. Though often breathtaking in its capacity to create enormous, detailed scenes, the technology does lose some of the quirks that have been the hallmark of the art, which is why Henn calls it The Great Equalizer.

“There are subtle differences that show up in the hand-drawn world more so than in in the computer world,” Henn says. “We all work the same model sheet, but we all have our own slightly, varying drawing styles, which you don’t have in the CG world. There is no more of [being able to] identify a scene based on how it’s drawn, because you know the style of the artist. In the CG world, everything looks the same.”

Technological progress, though, is a fact of life. Henn is excited to be working on Disney’s next computer animated film, 2016’s Moana, and is very much enjoying his current role as a mentor and artist with the company. Still, as a traditional animator, he’s hoping that the art of 2D doesn’t entirely go by the wayside.

“I would hate to see it disappear completely, and I don’t think it will, because I think there’s enough people that enjoy the art and the drawing of doing 2D,” Henn said. “I think whether we do it or not, 2D animation will always be somewhere.”

The video, which was produced at Paris-based Fortiche Production, has animated segments hand-drawn in TV Paint by Guarnido and a small team of traditional animators with Disney feature credentials.

“2D! Traditional animation!” Guarnido exclaimed while Cartoon Brew watched the work-in-progress with him earlier this month at New York Comic Con. “I love CG animation. I’m totally happy that movies like The Incredibles and Tangled exist, but traditional animation is something different; it’s another art.”

As a companion piece to the video, Guarnido and his team are in the process of completing an art-of book titled Freaky Project. Written by Micael Beausang-O’Griafa with a foreword by Eric Goldberg, it will be made available in time for CTN Expo next month as well as online at BigWowArt.com.

“I don’t know,” Guarnido says. “Maybe in a tiny little way I contributed so people can become interested in hand-drawn animation again. I hope so.”

I'd say some of those aren't just excuses, but flat-out lies, like the very last one about how the director gets to choose.

The first thing we heard about Moana was that it was going to be Paperman-style. For all we know, it was pitched that way.

A combination of the two is even better, since you get the benefits of both mediums.

No, there is no official confirmation, before we start down that line, but I think expecting otherwise is just leading yourself on.