Walt Disney Animation Studio! How were masterpieces created? The history of the creation of cartoons filmed at the Disney studio

Mickey Mouse, born 1928

Mickey Mouse became a replacement for another cartoon character- Oswald the rabbit. Disney came up with it while he was still at Universals Pictures, but lost the copyright to it. According to the recollections of colleagues, the artist initially thought of drawing either a kitten or a frog. But he chose a mouse, since there were many rodents living in his studio.

Oswald Rabbit is a distant “relative” of Mickey Mouse

It is noteworthy that Walt Disney initially wanted to name the mouse not Mickey, but Mortemir. However, his wife convinced him that it did not sound like that. However, a character with that name still appeared in the Disney universe. He is the complete opposite of the kind and sympathetic Mickey. Walt Disney himself voiced Mickey. Mickey Mouse first appeared on screens in the cartoon “Steamboat Willie.” This character appears from the very first minutes:

Donald Duck, born 1934

Walt Disney wanted to create a character that would incorporate several negative qualities, missing from Mickey. And besides, children really liked the duck as a toy. And Clarence Nash, American actor dubbing, became the official voice of Dak. He was one of the few who could reproduce that very duck voice.

Donald Duck also “participated” in World War II as the hero of a propaganda cartoon that parodied Nazism. In the cartoon "The Fuhrer's Face" a duck salutes portraits of Hitler. Donald Duck makes his debut in the short film "The Wise Little Hen":

Like Mickey Mouse, Donald has his own soulmate - this is Daisy Duck, who appeared in 1940. Minnie Mouse came out at the same time as Mickey.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, born 1937

One day, Walt Disney as a child saw a cartoon about Snow White without sound and was delighted. In 1934, when the artist had long grown up, he began work on a full-length cartoon based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. In 1937, the premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs took place. This picture was a huge success. Disney liked working with fairy tales, and in 1940 the second full-length film, Pinocchio, was released, based on the work of Carlo Collodi. And Snow White became the first in a series of cartoons about princesses. Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and many other films will be released next.

Excerpt from the cartoon “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”:

Bambi, born 1942

The cartoon "Bambi" is considered the most beloved creation of Walt Disney and best cartoon his studio in general. He was even nominated in several Oscar categories. However, the fawn was not invented by Disney. Bambi is a hero novel of the same name Austrian writer Felix Salten. The film adaptation of the book became incredibly successful. And the book itself sold out in huge numbers, and was well received by critics.

Walt Disney sketches little deer to create the Bambi American cartoon trailer.

This is where that very popular book appears:

Today, animation is familiar to almost everyone. This genre has a huge cultural significance, after all, it is cartoons that become the first educational materials for children; they lay the foundations of culture and education. However, cartoons can also be interesting for adults - some of the works can have a deep and complex plot, which the child is unlikely to understand. We invite you to familiarize yourself with how cartoons are made today. We will tell you about the main genres, as well as one of the most successful projects modern Russian animation.

How the cartoon "Masha and the Bear" was filmed

The creators of the first animation masterpieces, who drew every frame by hand, would be surprised to see the modern technology used to create Masha and the Bear. Everything is different in this animated series. Each character is drawn once, but in detail and from all sides; this work takes about a month. Then, the created model is used in each new series many times. The movements of some characters are calculated by the program, others (for example, Bear) are read from human ones using motion capture technology.

However, that's not all. Making characters and thinking through movements is only a small part of the work on a cartoon. It is necessary to “settle” the characters in the living world, voice their speech, and add special effects. Complete work on one episode of “Masha and the Bear” takes about 4 months, while the studio simultaneously works on 4 issues at once, so as not to force young viewers waiting for new products is too long.

This animated series is shining example high quality computer animation. In this direction, artists work on the image of characters and key movements, and the intermediate frames are calculated by the computer. However, there are other ways of creating cartoons that are used today.

This is a classic direction of animation. Its essence lies in the fact that each frame of the scene is drawn separately and is a copy of the previous one with minimal changes to ensure the dynamics of what is happening. As a rule, characters are depicted on transparent sheets, under which the main background is placed.

Today, hand-drawn animation is by no means losing ground under pressure high technology. Not at all - she managed to put them at her service: instead of transparent films and canvases, layers in graphic editors, shooting frames with a camera has given way to the use of video editing programs. Thanks to this, the genre is still used by leading animation studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. Professionals know many tricks that allow them to create masterpieces in this genre, and we can tell you at home.

Puppet animation

From the point of view of filming, it is practically not inferior to a hand-drawn one, with the exception of one nuance: dolls act as the heroes of the plot. Their movements are filmed frame by frame, which creates the appearance of real movement after editing. The birthplace of the genre is Russia, and the first puppet cartoon was filmed by Vladislav Starevich in 1911.

Plasticine, silhouette, collage and other cartoons that use physical objects can also be classified as the puppet genre. In terms of the detail of what is happening, such animation is inferior to the capabilities of hand-drawn and computer animation, since there is no way to correctly convey dynamics, emotions and many other nuances. Exceptions are possible if the material filmed with puppets is then subjected to additional processing - but in this case we are talking about mixing genres, and not about a purely puppet cartoon.

Is it possible to make a cartoon at home?

Of course you can! Moreover, today it will be much easier thanks to the ubiquity of computers and cameras. Photo technology will be useful for those who decide to engage in puppet animation, and to create hand-drawn cartoons you will need a graphics editor.

Russian allows us to put all the footage together Windows version Movie Maker. You can follow the link to try your hand at animation. After all, now you know how cartoons are made, and you can take your first step in animation yourself!

In the history of animation they always like to say “it all started with a mouse.” But in fact, it all started with the pioneer and visionary Walt Disney. The Walt Disney Animation Studio was created by him. At that time, Americans very much liked to call their companies by their first and last names, and the Disney studio was no exception.

Walt Disney's legacy is large collection cartoons that shocked the whole world: “Snow White”, “Donald Duck”, “Pinocchio”, “Alice”, “Bambi”, “Cinderella” and, of course, “Mickey Mouse”.

Now we will tell you about how these cartoons were created at the Walt Disney Animation Studio.

The process of creating animation or where miracles were created!

1. When the preliminary script was ready, all the directors and animators got together and discussed the storyboard, that is, the storyboard. The storyboard itself represents the story itself in pictures. ()

2. When the story is already ready and the characters' dialogues have been recorded in advance. That is, this is done so that the animators know what the characters are saying in advance, so that it is easier for them to animate and create the correct image of the cartoon characters.

3. When all the dialogues have been recorded, the animators draw sketches (the Americans call them sketches), and only for the characters. Often, animators draw rather sloppily and without color, or even without a background. For one cartoon, as many as 50 thousand individual drawings with characters could be drawn!

The best animators drew only a few drawings or sketches to create the animation, for example, after two or four frames, and left empty frames. Then there was a person who was directly involved in filling out these empty frames (he is also called an inbetweener or the one who fills in the empty field).

4. When the entire cartoon was drawn on paper, the animation drawings went straight to the ink department. Here, animation drawings (that is, character outlines and shapes) were transferred to a transparent film, onto which gouache can be easily applied.

5. And after the ink department finished applying the contours to the film, he sent them to the painting department. The artists would put paint on the transparent film there, but before applying it, they would turn them over to the other side so as not to blur the outlines of the characters and so that they could see where the different parts of the characters were.

6. Before these animation drawings or a series of drawings were sent for photographing, a background had to be added to them, because there is nothing else on the film yet except the characters. Basically, the background was painted with water-based paints and tempera. In some Walt Disney films, the backgrounds were painted on glass and combined with other backgrounds that were painted separately to give a sense of speed and extremeness. Walt Disney Animation Studio used this technique in Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs.

7. When all the elements were combined into one whole, then it was possible to move on to photographing. But the final product itself is not a finished film, it is what was made precisely with the help of a projector that shines onto the frame. The background and character were fixed separately from each other. So the character could walk and not leave this frame, moving only through this environment. And the pictures of the character themselves were changed and inserted under glass one frame at a time and photographed on a camera so that each frame was recorded on film.

8. After all the frames were shot with a camera, the cartoon itself was ready for showing. Of course, you will need to add music and edit moments later. But these are minor things.

9. Walt Disney Animation Studio created and released hundreds of its cartoons this way.

A couple of computers, “smart” programs - and a film masterpiece is ready? No, making modern animated films is much more difficult. CHIP visited the Disney studio and is ready to talk about the fusion of filmmaking and programming.

Snow White, Cinderella, Pocahontas, Bambi and Mickey Mouse - they were all created in the studio, where, together with other equally famous characters from Disney stories, cartoon characters they joyfully greet us from the closets, from the shelves and from the drawings on the walls. Modern technology and the traditional idyllic art of painting - that is the essence of today's Disney.

CHIP visited the studio with long history, located in Burbank, Los Angeles County, California, at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, to learn how animated films are born. Over the past two years, the company, founded in 1923, has been producing its 52nd animated feature, Wreck-It Ralph, in which a disillusioned video game villain seeks public acceptance.

Here, in the “Silicon Valley” of the American film industry, over these two years, through the efforts of 200 animators, programmers and artists, 188 characters and 79 locations were born. More than 10,000 computers processed scene by scene. The action takes place in four video game worlds. It all starts in the eight-bit pixelated game Fix-It Felix Jr., reminiscent of the arcade Donkey Kong. Then main character, Ralph, sneaks into the realistic shooter Hero%u2019s Duty, and then finds himself in the racing simulator Sugar Rush - a mixture of Alice in Wonderland and Japanese anime. The inputs and outputs of these games are located in the fourth world - the Central Gaming Station. Each universe had its own design, movements, colors and effects. “It was like making one movie out of four... very complex film", describes this almost impossible technical and logic problem Renato Dos Anjos, animation team leader.

Between slot machines and jelly banks

In order for the presented worlds to be noticeably different from each other, but at the same time consonant, the production of the cartoon began with a lengthy study. “We were looking for elements that evoked emotion or nostalgia,” says director Rich Moore, already familiar to audiences from the popular animated series “The Simpsons” and “Futurama.” In Barcelona, ​​the team of creators was inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudi. The developers also visited International exhibition confectionery in Cologne, went to a go-kart track and played a variety of video games. Moore is especially proud of the arcade machines throughout the studio that feature the Fix-It Felix game, developed by members of the film crew. These scratched boxes, supposedly from the 1980s, show animators, designers and programmers jockeying for record numbers during breaks.

In 2010, after meticulous planning, production of the film began. The script was already ready, and the actors voicing the characters, including even Oscar-nominated John C. Reilly (Wreck-It Ralph) and Sarah Silverman (Vanellope), began reciting each scene. Most often they did sound work together, in the same room, which is unusual for animated films. This led to some interesting improvised dialogue. In addition, the actors were filmed so that the animators could capture their facial expressions and gestures - a good help for subsequent work. At the same time, layout specialists superimposed computer-generated base character models onto scene locations, set camera positions, and set timing for audio recording.

Click the mouse - and... it's removed!

Finally, it's time to start animating the crude and still ugly scenes. In a darkened mini-studio equipped with a half-dozen computers, director Rich Moore explains to the animation team what the characters in a certain scene are doing, what they are thinking and feeling. Employees watch videos of voice-over artists, and some even stage the stage and record themselves. This gives you an understanding of how the character stands, when he moves his hand or blinks, as well as how he behaves in a particular situation. “Creating animation is not so much a technical task as it is an artistic flair,” explains animation department head Renato Dos Anjos. All 67 animators working on "Wreck-It Ralph" sit down at their computers straight out of prep to model the movements on a base character model and create rough facial animation. These initial models are digital dolls with a skeleton that moves by clicking on the head or joints with a mouse. For implementation, it is necessary to have control structures in the model of each of the characters. Such sequences, defined in the animation program, transform all simple and complex movements of the character's skeleton - from bending the arm to choreographic dance. “If we can't implement a movement, there's always someone smart enough to create a suitable control structure,” says dos Anjos. One of these “saviors” is Jan Berger, Technical Director of Characters. He studied his profession at the Film and Television Institute and has been working for Disney since early 2012. Ian designs controls called "rigs" and customizes them to suit the animators' desires. “For major characters this process can take a couple of months, with secondary characters we do it in a few days or weeks,” says Berger. When creating the moving models in Wreck-It Ralph, the team deviated a bit from Disney tradition, focusing more on video games. This is most noticeable in the world of the game Fix-It Felix. Here the heroes move only by jumping with sharp turns at an angle of 90%B0, as in classic arcade games, where there are no smooth movements housings. Other worlds are also making their demands. “When we animate, we constantly have to move between cartoon, realistic, simplistic, emotional and comedy styles,” explains Zach Parrish, lead animator, on Wreck-It Ralph. At the first stage of work, the so-called “Blocking Pass” appears - rough, non-smooth animation at a speed of only 10 frames/s. Rich Moore studies it and gives his opinion, as well as the acting on film set. Only the scene changed, taking into account his comments, is converted into 24 frames by the animators - in this form the film will be shown on the movie screen. So what are 67 people needed for? With a tired smile on their face, they explain to us: everyone creates only 80 frames a week, which corresponds to three seconds of film. It takes an average of a month to animate a 12-second scene.

Simulation and manual optimization

Animators submit their work to the technical animation department. His team focuses on the way Ralph's hair flutters in the wind as he races around the race track in the world of Sugar Rush, or the placement of the folds in his clothes as he sits down. Here you remember the characteristic Disney physics - not realistic, but cartoonish, which at the same time should look convincing. Jan Berger is also involved in technical animation: “My experience is that the best results are achieved with a combination of hand animation and modeling.” The latter means that the program first indicates the initial position of the object. Then it is activated physical strength, such as gravity or wind, and determines the stiffness of matter, that is, hair or clothing. “Now adjustments must be made until the ideal result is achieved,” Berger explains briefly. Like most of his colleagues, he uses the most popular 3D animation program for these purposes - Autodesk Maya, for which he even developed his own plugin.

As Ralph and the other characters awaken to life, the world still dead. A team of effects specialists led by Cesar Velazquez will work on it. They animate everything that is not related to the characters: fire, water, smoke, destruction, explosions. Even these effects look different in each world of the film. In the shooter Hero%u2019s Duty, for example, Ralph's fight against aliens is depicted as realistically as possible. “To do this, we apply several layers of effects: first smoke, steam and fog, then particles and small debris, and finally light, flashes and sparks,” says Velazquez. It is worth noting that Wreck-It Ralph was the first Disney film to feature a so-called effects designer. At the same time, the creators wanted to give each world a unique style while maintaining the Disney tradition of drawing even in the special effects, without relying entirely on computer graphics. Velasquez and his team had to test some effects in analog mode. The result is a combination of computer-generated and hand-drawn effects. This is especially noticeable in the scene where Ralph falls into the chocolate river. The river, animated on the computer in the classical way, like a liquid, looks realistic. The chocolate drops on Ralph's clothing, however, are done in a typical Disney cartoon style - they were drawn by an effects designer.

The effects animation is handled by Hendrik Panz, who joined the Disney team after completing his studies at the Ludwigsburg Film Academy. Pants is one of the few who works with animation program Houdini, which is better suited for complex effects than software from market leader Autodesk. Such effects also require enormous computer power, so the animation team works on real “monsters.” For example, Panz's workstation, running Linux, is equipped with 48 GB of RAM and an eight-core graphics processor.

Let's add lighting to the basement too

On last stage Adolph Lusinski's lighting team illuminates the scene and characters, creates shadows and reflections, and makes colors pop. All work begins in analogue mode - in a Disney photography studio, where various lighting schemes are tested for the subject. Armed with this knowledge, experts shed light on a specific scene in two stages. First, a real-time renderer (another Disney proprietary design called Figaro) creates shapes of light and shadow based on camera positions. “We're talking with director Rich Moore about how the lighting works,” Lusinski says. “The lighting technicians then work out the details for the final rendering.” For this Disney movie developed a new pixel shader. It calculates the parameters of individual pixels, allowing you to create a specific color, change light values, display shadows, translucency, highlights and reflections. After animating the movements, effects and lighting, the stage is sent to the studio basement. “Here we have about 10,000 computers that just render images,” explains Adolph Lusinski. And since even this power is not enough for such a labor-intensive film, the studio has to rent another computer center in Los Angeles.

And now two years of production are over: the computers have completed rendering, the Disney Christmas movie for a generation of video game lovers has been edited, and at the end of 2012 it opened in cinemas around the world.

Four stages of creating an animated film

Last week the head of The Walt Disney Company Robert Iger, speaking at a meeting of shareholders, said that the company's members animation studios are not working now and do not plan to work in the near future on full-length hand-drawn 2D cartoons. On the one hand, Iger’s statement, in general, cannot even be called news. Disney company and so on Lately It’s not often that he pampers viewers with hand-drawn animation. However, when the corresponding plans are voiced not by someone, but by the head of the company himself, it becomes a little sad.

The Walt Disney Animated Classics series now includes 52 feature films. It began back in the late 1930s with “Snow White” (although the films were not numbered then, since there was no talk of any series yet). Later “Pinocchio”, “Fantasia”, “Dumbo”, “Bambi”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “Cinderella” and many other wonderful films appeared. The latest film released under the Classics label to date is “Wreck-It Ralph.”

Computer graphics came to the Disney studio in the mid-1980s. You can recall, for example, the 1988 film “Oliver and Company,” in the creation of which modern (at that time) technologies were already fully involved. It's still a 2D cartoon, but individual 3D objects - like cars and skyscrapers - were computer-generated rather than hand-drawn.

In the 2000s, computer animation took over the Disney studio entirely. Over the past ten years, the “classic” series has been replenished with nine titles. Only four of these cartoons were made using hand-drawn techniques (and even those - not without the addition of computer graphics). These are the films “Brother Bear” (2003), “Don’t Hit the Hoof” (2004), “The Princess and the Frog” (2009) and “Vinnie Bear and His Friends” (2011).

It’s easy to see that the Disney company has previously paused several years between two hand-drawn cartoons, so you don’t have to be too scared by Iger’s statements. Yes, there are no plans for new hand-drawn films right now, but Iger does not exclude the possibility that they may appear in the future. The audience can wait - in general, they are not used to it.

Among other things, the film "Vinnie Bear" - Disney's last hand-drawn work to date - failed at the box office. The film, which cost $30 million to create, managed to earn only $33 million. This figure is not high in itself, and comparing it with the box office of computer Disney cartoons is somehow awkward. “Wreck-It Ralph,” for example, grossed $435 million (against a budget of $165 million), “Rapunzel: Complicated story"- 590 million (with a budget of 260 million).

At the same time, “Vinnie” was quite liked by critics, as well as by those viewers who did watch the cartoon. This is evidenced by the ratings: 7.2 on IMDb, 90 on Rotten Tomatoes, 74 on Metacritic. That is, everywhere is not below average (and certainly not below the corresponding indicators of some box office hits of recent years).

On the other hand, “Wreck-It Ralph,” “Rapunzel,” and other computer-animated Disney films also received fairly warm critical reviews. In other words, a particular tape production technology does not final result worse or better by default. Modern animators have mastered computers so much that cartoon characters no longer look like plastic dolls. Well, the plots are a separate issue. Whether the scenario is boring or interesting does not depend on the chosen technology.

That is, by and large, there are no serious reasons for frustration. So why then are Iger's words so sad? Maybe because computer graphics yet cannot repeat such a nice, deliberate carelessness of the drawing, characteristic of the cartoon “The Sword in the Stone”?

Or, for example, the transforming hallucinatory elephants from Dumbo. It would seem: thanks modern technologies such transformations have become easier to implement. But the scene with the pink elephants from Dumbo is also impressive because of its man-made nature:

Almost every hand-drawn Disney cartoon has something elusive - some kind of, excuse me, magic that computer animation still lacks. But Disney will continue to improve CGI and produce high-quality cartoons that will arouse the interest of viewers of all ages - and those who miss the “golden period” will apparently have to re-watch the classics.