Disney officially gives up hand-drawn animation

The struggle between hand-drawn animation and computer animation has been a long and difficult battle. Many people still prefer the look and feel of hand-drawn animation, and this classic style is what made Disney great in the first place. But the economies of computer animation, coupled with the time constraints of producing a major motion picture, have meant that hand-drawn animation is increasingly losing out to computer animation.

At a shareholders meeting this week Disney chief executive Bob Iger announced that none of the studio's current or scheduled future projects will use hand-drawn or 2D animation. Everything for the foreseeable future will be done in 3D digital format. Iger isn't ruling out a possible return to hand-drawn animation at some point in the future, but it seems likely that this would be a novelty project at best.

Capping off this announcement, Disney "gutted their hand-drawn animation department," as well as laying off nine veteran animators who had been some of the studio's biggest talents.

The last Disney movie to employ hand-drawn animation was The Princess and the Frog, a retelling of the classic Grimm fairy tale which Disney transposed into 1920s New Orleans. Unfortunately it didn't do as well as other contemporary CGI Disney and Pixar films, with disappointing ticket sales. Maybe if it had done better at the box office, Disney would be more open to continuing its tradition with hand-drawn animation.

Then again, maybe not. When John Lasseter took over Pixar, he bemoaned the fact that Disney had used 2D hand-drawn animation as "the excuse for poor storytelling." As long as you're looking for a whipping boy, you'll find one, and blaming hand-drawn animation is probably as good an excuse as any for the corporate balance sheet wizards who only notice that hand-drawn animation costs more than CGI to produce.

Image courtesy Flickr/wickedboy_007