While I am amazed that the piece of crap movie that it was made that much, in the current Hollywood climate, that's actually pretty good, isn't it?

Yep. Movies seem to struggle to get to the 100 million mark nowadays. I'm pretty certain they were trying to hit 'Lion King' numbers. That seems like an uphill trek...

You and me both, sister! Thanks for posting this info.:snap:

I wouldn't get too excited about the hand-drawn animation in Enchanted being a sign of a revival at Disney. They aren't doing th animation in that movie, and neither is Pixar. James Baxter Animation is doing the sequence.

Sure, there is hope that it will be so successful that Disney has to return to hand-drawn animation full time but there are a lot of hurdles. One, it would be very expensive to recreate what used to exist and it would be a couple years before any product could be created. Two, there is no reason that CG animation can't be used to produce what looks like hand-drawn animation (see the short Lorenzo for an example of something you'd swear is hand-drawn being completely CG).

While I would regret it if the look of hand-drawn animation dies, despite any momentary resurgence, I think the process is for the history museum except for very localized specialty projects.

Wouldn't use of a computer to produce the look of something hand-drawn be prohibitively more expensive than just, well, drawing it?

Not if you don't have to hand draw every single cell, but rather produce charcter deisgns that LOOK hand drawn, but are actually animated by softwared.

Yeah, that's what I thought someone would say. But the highly-paid animators do only "key" drawings, and the vast majority of actual drawings are done by grunt-work "in-betweeners."


Eh. whatever.

Yes, but there are still a time and flexibility factors involved. You'd have the same setup of the lead artists doing the key frames, while fresh-out-of-Cal Arts flunkies serve the role of the 'tweeners. But while certainly those flunkies are probably more well paid than traditional in-betweeners, they can produce results in a fraction of the time. And equally as importantly, produce alternate results in equally small fractions.