Drawing an entire new movie by hand is a long, hard, tedious process, but the animators at Disney have a hidden trick up their sleeves: they recycle footage from older animated films into new ones.
In a new video showing how Disney’s team of animators remixed old animations for newer films, the team at Movie Munchies have mashed up some of Disney’s most classic movies. Did you know Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast have the exact same dance scenes? Or that animators drew over scenes from Snow White to create footage for Robin Hood, all with the same characters and movements.
Watch the video below to have your childhood ruined:
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
7 responses to “Video shows how Disney animators recycled footage from older films”
How long has this story been going around for? I think it was on Digg first. Neither breaking nor Apple centric.
They just put an old story under tracing paper and write a ‘new’ one over it.
Movie Munchie’s video was uploaded on May 13th 2015. So today. However, there have been a few comparison videos on youtube for years. This one is pretty good though
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Now let’s look at the billions of other frames that were NOT recycled.
These were musical numbers. They probably spent 3 months working on 1 minute of film.
Why reinvent the wheel? I’d recycle too!
this is not fair. they use 25 % recycled footage for “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” in every single episode, and it does not get put on the home screen of cultofmac.
i’ve often wondered if they lifted Miguel and Alicia from the he-man Christmas special from any other series, like fat alert, or if they created those characters for the christmas special.
a lot of background characters from she-ra also show up lifted from he-man, like the blonde with the red headgear.
The He-Man show was so overtly copied it was almost annoying but it didn’t mean the show wasn’t fun to watch. So if I can give He-Man a pass Disney is definitely in the clear as far as I’m concerned.
Besides, other than Beauty & the Beast most every other film was completely original. And like others have said, hand-drawn animation is insanely tough so why not recycle some animation and draw over top of it to save some time?! Sounds perfectly logical to me and actually gave Disney films a ‘lived in’ feel.
I say bring back hand-drawn animation. As much as I love CG films I think they have it way too easy. Anyone can make a CG model and move it around in different ways and have it look the same but drawing a character by hand and making sure it’s immediately recognizable from any and all angles is magnitudes more difficult.