When Disney Went Digital
Plus: news.
Welcome! It’s time for a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is our slate for today:
1) How computers changed Disney animation.
2) Newsbits.
With that, we’re off!
1 – Into the computer age
Computers and animation go way back. During the ‘50s, artist John Whitney used one to draw the opening titles for Vertigo. His experiments led him to digital films like Arabesque in the ‘70s. And he was one of many animators toying with the technology.1
A digital animation boom was underway by the ‘80s. Whitney’s son argued in 1988 that “the computer is destined to become a dominant production tool in the coming century.” Better animation made more cheaply and easily, he said, was on the horizon.
Artists proved the potential of this stuff. Each year, a young studio called Pixar was wowing audiences at SIGGRAPH, the main computer graphics conference, with films like Luxo Jr. (1986). Before long, the team’s Tin Toy won an Oscar — the first for a computer-animated short. There was no turning around.2
Even Disney sensed what was happening. In ‘86, it hired Pixar to overhaul the whole Disney process. The company wanted to work higher-tech and cheaper.3 Many of its analog methods — some of them older than Steamboat Willie — would be replaced. It would enter the digital age.
That was the beginning of the “Computer Animation Production System.” Insiders knew it as CAPS, for short. Outsiders mostly didn’t know it — the software was officially kept secret, for years.
Disney first used it for a shot in The Little Mermaid (1989), but people weren’t allowed to talk. “They were afraid if word got out,” said one member of the CAPS team, “the luster of the Disney name would be tarnished.”4
In Walt Disney’s time, cel animation was the rule.
During the heyday of his studio, an army of artists inked and colored characters, props and other moving things onto transparent sheets of plastic — that is, cels. Place a few cels atop a background painting, under a camera, and you create a shot. Replace one set of cels with the next, and you create movement.
That process built classics like Snow White. Cels grew animation by standardizing it into a form of mass production. At times, Walt Disney called his company a “plant” or a “factory,” and he wasn’t exaggerating. It was structured like one.5
Yet cel animation was expensive. The team needed to cut corners after early movies like Pinocchio and Bambi. It cut even more during the ‘60s and ‘70s, and a lot of valuable things were gone by the ‘80s. As Don Bluth and others liked to mention, the rich effects, colored lines and painstaking multiplane camerawork of Pinocchio had largely vanished.6
With CAPS, Disney wanted to get rid of cels and the entire production regime to which they’d led. “We wanted to give the artist back the tools he had decades ago. And we wanted to slow down the escalating cost of production,” said David Wolf of the CAPS team.7 Animators would still draw on paper — but their drawings would be scanned into a computer, then inked, painted and composited digitally.
You see the results throughout all the Disney renaissance films. Take The Lion King. Where Disney’s cel artists once worked by hand from tubs of paint, this team swapped freely between 69 billion colors. A staffer noted that it was possible to have “one [color] palette per scene,” up from maybe nine for an entire movie.
Depth-of-field tricks and special effects (shadows, dust, smoke) are everywhere in Lion King. Plus, there are hundreds of multiplane camera shots — compared to the three or five used in The Little Mermaid. Before, that technique involved stacking cels on different glass sheets below a camera. Computers got the same effect seamlessly.8
Despite the benefits of CAPS, though, its early history at Disney was shaky. The company wasn’t even interested at first.
The project’s roots stretch back to the ‘70s and early ‘80s. In those days, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith (later heads of Pixar) visited Disney every year, trying to sell the company on computer animation ideas. Smith recalled that the “dunderheads” in charge “didn’t have a clue what Ed and I were talking about.”
But key staffers at Disney loved the pitches. One of these pitches was, in essence, CAPS.9
There was movement after Eisner took over Disney in the ‘80s. Negotiations for CAPS lasted a year and a half, during which Pixar was born, spun off from Lucasfilm. Detailed proposals (some public today) were hammered out, and a deal worth millions went through in ‘86. Disney animation was changing — permanently.
Even so, there was a certain stigma attached to digital things. And Disney feared “that the public would perceive computers as diluting the quality of the handcrafted films,” according to one writer.10
The groundbreaking debut of CAPS, at the end of The Little Mermaid, wasn’t advertised. When the software next appeared in The Rescuers Down Under (1990), the first movie made entirely with the new process, the information was hidden.
“[W]e never talked about it, because nobody wanted to have a review of a ‘digital movie,’ ” a Disney exec remembered much later, “we just wanted people to say, ‘It has fantastic flying shots.’ ”
Disney actively suppressed news about CAPS. The team’s conversations with the press were awkward. “The Rescuers Down Under will be using some new computer technology that I can’t really get into right now,” one of the film’s directors, Hendel Butoy, told a journalist in the late ‘80s.
As Animation Magazine reported in 1990:
… one of the real stories behind the film are the technological advances that it incorporates, even though the directors are a bit coy and Disney itself isn’t saying much about the involvement of computers in the animation of The Rescuers Down Under.
All Butoy will say is that “it’s not a computer picture. Technology is getting better and better and new things are tried, but it’s the artists who create the film.” But don’t look to see many Rescuers cels on the gallery circuit.11
CAPS let the artists get wild. The Rescuers sequel is a whole different thing than The Black Cauldron, released just five years earlier. See the color detail, or those flying sequences, which are full of shots built to digitally mimic the old multiplane camera.
Disney’s leadership was eager to put CAPS to work — overeager, in fact. The software “wasn’t tested” and “wasn’t really finished” when Rescuers entered production, according to a member of CAPS’ team. Ed Catmull blamed the exec Peter Schneider, whose take was that “they had just paid all this money for it, so it had better be ready.”12
At the start of Rescuers, CAPS was painfully slow, and there were bugs, and scanned artwork wasn’t quite right. “The technology was still pretty raw, so the colors would vary from computer station to computer station,” remembered artist Lisa Keene. Solving it all and speeding up the program took time. People had to live at the studio. The film barely made it.
“What I remember most of that period was feeling so brokenhearted that we had attempted to make a feature film using the CAPS system,” said producer Thomas Schumacher, “before anyone had even made a short with it.”13
It was reckless. Even Schneider called it “a stupid decision” — although he defended it as necessary. Thrown into the fire, CAPS and its team survived, and the software was now better than ever. A bond formed between Pixar and Disney; there was a real respect for the CAPS project. “Disney never made another cel animated movie in the old way,” noted Alvy Ray Smith.
Despite all that, leadership’s nervousness didn’t seem to go away. A journalist wrote later that Disney “barely gave [Pixar] credit in the film.” The crew still “couldn’t let the press and friends know they had developed a system that may revolutionize theatrical and TV animation.”
Like Dylan Kohler of the CAPS team said:
Everyone involved with the project had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. I didn’t even tell my family about CAPS. We developed this great thing, we got through the hell of getting Rescuers Down Under out, and then we were still under these very strict [nondisclosure agreements] so we couldn’t even celebrate what we had done with other people. Rescuers Down Under came into the theaters, and we couldn’t say to anybody, “This is the first feature in history to be produced entirely in the digital realm, from fade in to fade out.”
For the team, CAPS wasn’t a cheat. A Pixar person once remarked that “computer animation isn’t done by computer any more than clay animation is done by clay.” Another argued that a computer is “as inert and useless as a pencil lying on a desk” without the artist’s hand involved. And it was obviously true.14
CAPS did let Disney do new things. For example, the digital compositing that put 2D animation and a 3D environment together in Beauty and the Beast’s ballroom scene. Or, again, The Lion King — a movie packed with “complex shots that would have been prohibitively expensive, or just plain impossible, in the pre-CAPS era.”15
But it was simply a powerful pencil. One that, in the end, didn’t even reduce costs. “Once we got the tools into the artists’ hands, they thought of new things to do with them. … [T]he films we make today cost about as much to make as they did before CAPS came online,” said a member of Disney’s side of the CAPS team. “But the films we make today look as good or better than the ones we made in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”
None of it ended the weird shame Disney’s leadership seemed to feel about CAPS. Journalists weren’t allowed to see it in action until the mid-1990s. When they arrived to cover it, they found a “tidy wall display” in the studio’s lobby outside, aimed at general visitors, that falsely claimed Beauty and the Beast had been made with cels.
Even as Pixar kept “screeching [at Disney] for recognition,” in Smith’s words, it wasn’t until maybe mid-1991 that CAPS was mentioned publicly by the studios.
Only in 1992, following the huge success of Beauty, did the CAPS team finally win a technical Oscar for its troubles. The world began to learn what the team had achieved — years after the fact. Animation’s future had been in view for a while, secretly.
Reporting on the Oscar win, the trade magazine Computer Graphics World went into detail:
Under development since 1986, CAPS manages the complex, post-production aspects, both logistical and graphical, of creating a large-scale animation. The logistical element — the Disney Animation Logistics System (DALS), written by the Disney team — keeps track of the more than 2 million image files in a typical feature-length film as they’re routed through departments, computer networks, workstations, disks and tapes.
The system’s graphics software, written by the Pixar team, provides animators with several capabilities. Among these are the ability to create seamless images of various resolutions from scans of arbitrarily sized artwork; the ability to composite images and apply special effects such as multiplane camera, depth of field and shadows; and the ability to paint scanned characters at film resolution.
2 – Newsbits
The Pakistani film The Glassworker, which we enjoyed a lot last year, will screen theatrically in Britain and Ireland next month.
A group of journalists in America and Britain (Kambole Campbell, Toussaint Egan and Rollin Bishop) have started an animation newsletter called re:frame. One we’ll be keeping tabs on.
A retrospective on Italian animation is happening in Rome. Among others, it features the brilliant work of Giulio Gianini and Emanuele Luzzati (The Thieving Magpie).
In America, the troubled Warner Bros. Discovery is set to split into Warner Bros. and Discovery — with Cartoon Network on the Discovery end.
The almost impossibly complex, yearslong legal battle over the Russian series Cheburashka continued with a loss by Soyuzmultfilm in New York court.
Also from Russia: the government passed a law that allows the banning of any film (in theaters or online) that engages in “discrediting traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” There’s an official list of these values, including “patriotism” and “service to the Fatherland.”
In China, the film Nobody is a hit — quickly breaking 100 million yuan (around $13.8 million) and getting unusually good scores on Douban. It comes from Shanghai Animation Film Studio and is based on its Yao: Chinese Folktales series.
Netflix was reportedly caught off-guard by the success of the American film KPop Demon Hunters and is “scrambling” to capitalize on it.
At Comic-Con in America, Guillermo del Toro commented on GenAI. “[O]ne of the other things that I find oppressive is people saying, ‘You can do art with an app.’ And, I’m sorry: you can’t. ... You cannot just press a button and get to the middle, because then you will not know the beginning or the end of that idea for yourself,” he said.
Last of all: we looked into a list by Yuri Norstein (Hedgehog in the Fog) of animation he loves — from Bambi to the other Night on Bald Mountain.
Until next time!
For details about Whitney’s early experiments, see the paper “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala” and the book Digital Harmony. His son’s comments about computer animation appear in Animation Magazine (Spring 1988).
Regarding Tin Toy’s Oscar win and Pixar’s visits to SIGGRAPH, see a couple of ‘80s Animation Magazine issues (Fall 1988, Spring 1989) and the 1987 conference proceedings. Meanwhile, the head of Pacific Data Images noted the importance of Tin Toy’s victory in the May/June 1994 issue of Animation Magazine.
The quote comes from the book iCon Steve Jobs — the staffer was Dylan Kohler, also quoted later. The shot that used CAPS is identified in the booklet for The Legacy Collection: The Little Mermaid.
You can see him use these terms in Walt Disney: Conversations and the Star Weekly (November 14, 1964).
For more of Bluth and company’s comments on the cheapening of Disney animation, see our pieces Don Bluth’s Garage Band, The Process of NIMH and Not Living by Animation Alone.
From The Patriot-News (March 29, 1992), an important source.
For these details about CAPS, see Computer Graphics World (July 1994) and Tale as Old as Time, the artbook for Beauty and the Beast. Two of our most important sources today.
See this interview with Alvy Ray Smith, used a few times. The quotes come from his talk From Pixels to Pixar. You can see his original Lucasfilm-era proposal to Disney via his site.
From The Pixar Touch, used a couple of times.
Both articles quoted were published in Animation Magazine (Fall 1988, Fall 1990). You can see more about Disney’s suppression of CAPS in Animato (Winter 1992), used a lot.
Schumacher said this in Waking Sleeping Beauty. As an aside, during Rescuers, Disney’s layout crew wasn’t even sure how to calculate depth in the new CAPS era. It was figured out on the way. See Setting the Scene: The Art & Evolution of Animation Layout.
See Animation Magazine (March/April 1994).
Quoted from writer Christopher Finch in Animation Magazine (May/June 1994). For details about the ballroom scene, see Beauty’s artbook and Computer Graphics World (December 1991).
I have absolutely nothing insightful to say about this, I just wanted you to be aware that someone who knows very little about animation and does not have a particular passion for it, outside of generally appreciating art, is reading your work and finds it fascinating
From my perspective, CAPS is the second effort to make the “factory” more efficient. The first was the introduction in the late 50’s of Ub Iwerks’ xerography process, where the animator’s pencil drawings were xeroxed directly onto cells, eliminating the painstaking hand tracing that the studio had been using since before Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. (Supposedly, there are shots in the finished movie where you can see brief flashes of the animator’s construction lines that didn’t get fully erased, though I myself have never found them!) Dalmatians not only takes some of the studio’s most impressive animation (IMHO) and puts it directly onscreen, but it also features some of the first uses of 3D objects, though in this case they are physical models painted white, outlined in sharpie black, shot and then xeroxed to cells like all the normal drawings. Just two reasons why I consider Dalmatians one of the most impressive Disney films of the 20th century. (Though there’s lots of competition for that honor, I know.)