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.)
The Xerox process is definitely part of this history -- we didn't mention it directly in the article, but it radically changed the Disney pipeline. Part of the case for CAPS was to bring back more hand-inking and colored lines, even though Xerox could (as seen in films like NIMH) do simple colors by that point. The Xeroxed drawings absolutely look great in Dalmatians, though, despite the headaches the whole thing caused for the cleanup artists. Iwao Takamoto once mentioned that project was tough because certain animators weren't great draftsmen, and, without the old pipeline to fall back on, their drawings needed to be revised a lot for consistency before they were ready for the screen! It's fascinating stuff. Thanks for the comment!
There is so much to be said about this movie, and yes, I'm a bit of a fanboi about it! It was another "budget" movie, which always seem to be Disney's best. The Nine Old Men at the height of their skills. Ken Anderson's UPA-inspired backgrounds, for the first and last time in Disney's history. But mostly, who convinced a bunch of animators to make a movie featuring a hundred or so dalmatians, a worst case scenario that no other studio would dare to touch? I'd love to see this film get the Animation Obsessive treatment!
OMG -- looking over my other comments, I talked about Dalmations there, too. I think it's my subconscious way of imploring you to write that article! 😅
Haha! It's understandable -- Dalmatians is gorgeous. Really appreciate the suggestion, as it's one we hadn't really considered before. Will add it to the list and see if there's a way we can tackle such an enormous topic. Thanks again!
Meanwhile, at Warner Brothers Animation, we were working on creating the first classically animated digital 3D stereoscopic film, a Duck Dodgers/Marvin The Martian short for Six Flags amusement parks, entitled Marvin The Martian In The Third Dimension.
We developed the toon shader that was later incorporated into Alias. I handled the 3D stereoscopic background pipeline as well as creating a color management system that provided predictable color for output back to film.
When we screened it at SIGGRAPH in New Orleans, Disney was stunned. That was fun.
Since the short was not released in theaters, it’s been forgotten. But at the time, it was a wower!
Thanks very much for sharing this! We went looking for it, and the toon shading and background and vehicle designs are great. Awesome to learn about the project and its history!
Maybe some promos involving shorties (quick look at experimental method/tech) would be great to air before the main attraction in theater and/or stream...
Very fun read. I didn't realize to what extent CAPS was kept secret. I'd assumed that like with every technological advance, Disney was very public about it from the start. In July I was fortunate to spend a week with former Disney animator Ronnie Williford and his wife in Florida, and we spent most of the time discussing art and animation history. Pretty cool as Ronnie was there to live through it first-hand. We visited with Aaron Blaise and saw his completed, solo-animated short Snow Bear, too, plus a theatrical screening of Brother Bear, and live demo. I'll write more about all this on my own Substack in the days to come.
Glad you liked it! We hadn't realized that ourselves until we started digging into the history -- we definitely figured the company would've used CAPS as a selling point, especially back then (with the hype around computers), but no. Disney's corporate side is famous for carefully manufacturing an image, sometimes in arbitrary ways, and this is another instance.
And those conversations sound awesome -- feel free to ping us when the piece is out!
From my perspective, what’s remarkable about CAPS is how it quietly bridged Disney’s past and future. It kept the hand-drawn spirit alive while opening the door to effects, depth, and colour work that would’ve been nearly impossible with traditional methods. A bit like watching a magician’s best trick without realising new tools were hidden up the sleeve.
It definitely didn't replace the core of Disney's old-school method. Even by the time of Home on the Range, the animators were still drawing on paper. The change was big, but it wasn't nearly as radical as the company's move into CG animation, which really started to put veteran animators out of work. Some people were able to adapt (and the films did take lessons from classic Disney), but the production pipeline was a whole different thing.
It was great reading about this. I had heard of CAPS before and am always fascinated by how animation is made, I need to see behind the curtain to see the inner workings. Thanks for sharing.
It really is a shame that Disney tried to hide all this, because I think their renaissance period was the pinicle of what I imagine "Disney" animation to be. Films like Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Lion King had so much rich colour to them and shots that showed they could push the medium. I really find it disheartening that they don't make animations like this anymore.
Really glad you enjoyed the piece! And yeah, the decision to hide CAPS was unfortunate given the impact on its team. It's kind of par for the course for Disney -- it has a history of keeping secrets and building very artificial public images, dating back to Walt Disney's era.
But it's an interesting, double-edged sword situation: the same corporate bosses who hid CAPS also approved it, helping to spark the whole Disney renaissance in the process. Some of the studio's best work was done with CAPS! It's similar to the relationship that Disney had with Katzenberg during that time -- he was famous for being insufferable, but his decisions also helped to revived the studio at the box office. It's complex stuff. Anyway, thanks for the comment!
As always, Disney only lets you see what they want you to see, but I remember taking the Animation tour at Disney/MGM Studios ( as it was named at the time ) and seeing all those SGI workstations sprinkled around, but no one ever seemed to be doing anything with them.
Animation evolution was really fast considering how it is made right now! It is not only revolutionary for animation or art but revolutionary for society tecnology, I truly miss when Disney made movies not only for money but for the art itself too. Actually... I guess these times won't come back for them unless the ditection of disney change, nowadays they only make nostalgia bait and remakes using live action to not pay enough for the animators, the same who made disney great and powerfull, without it disney would never be what it is now.
The pipeline did change really quickly! It's wild to think about now. Disney has definitely been struggling in the 2020s to make movies that resonate like they used to, but the company's artists have found a way through before, so we'll see what happens!
Probably the protests about Hollywood directors affected them a lot considering the low gain during Covid19. They are making a lot of remake movies to have the stability of fast money and audience. I would reffer nowadays Disney as Fast-Art just like Fast-food. The current Disney director is having a lot of trouble with the financial sistem to pay for more new projects and animated movies, animation is expensive and he does not want to waste his money over things that he is unsure of. Kind of sad bcz Disney was made based on revolutionary ideas, Snow white was tgis kind of revolution in a time with only male protagonists.
Chinese Tales had already gained fame on the Chinese internet long ago, but it recently regained attention when one of its short films was expanded into a feature-length movie and released in theaters. Produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, this film brings together many renowned independent animators from China, such as Xi Chen.
We're very interested by the success of Nobody (浪浪山小妖怪) in theaters! It's amazing to see that it has a score of 8.6 on Douban. We hope to watch it ourselves one day.
Don't you guys think similar is the case with AI. i have this feeling it would become as common as the computers in animation. AI art is not art but it is making it easier to tell stories, like CAPS did for disney. as an artist myself i feel it is not art, but it is making my work easier. it is an ethical dilemma. would like to hear your thoughts.
GenAI is a really sticky topic. We're 100% for human art here and don't use GenAI ourselves, so we might be the wrong people to ask. But we can say that there are surprising differences between the early computer animation era and the AI push, having studied the history of it all.
Computer animation rose slowly over the course of 30-40 years, and a lot of its support came from scrappy enthusiasts and tiny research teams (like the guys who went on to create Pixar). GenAI has appeared very quickly and its biggest supporters are giant companies like Google, which are using a lot of marketing and muscle as they try to force GenAI to take hold.
Another thing is that art/animation done with computers had many breakthrough moments along the way: the Vertigo opening titles, John Whitney films like Permutations from the 1960s, the Oscar nomination for Peter Foldes' short Hunger in the mid-1970s. And then, in the '80s, films like The Adventures of André & Wally B. and Luxo Jr. that brought Disney-style animation to CGI.
Later, of course, you had CAPS and Studio Ghibli's adoption of a computer pipeline in the 1990s -- leading to movies like Princess Mononoke and My Neighbors the Yamadas.
By contrast, we haven't seen many artistic breakthroughs from GenAI tools -- there's no sign of an equivalent to Luxo Jr. or even the Vertigo titles. And we've seen way, way more blowback against its use than there was against early computer animation. People showed quite a bit of interest and curiosity about what computers could do for the medium back then: it definitely wasn't the firestorm that GenAI is today.
So, for a lot of reasons, we're hesitant to compare GenAI too closely to the early computer tools. Companies like Google definitely want to draw that comparison, but it feels a bit like marketing to us, similar to the "Web 3.0" push from a few years ago. For sure, we don't know what the future holds -- GenAI could completely take over. But we'll see!
Similar to A.J. above, I just wanted to drop in to say how much I appreciate your work! (I wish more people would do that on substack instead of silently enjoying.) Appreciating animation and learning more about the craft is something I really enjoy and your writing is one of my favorite resources for that!
Thanks so much! Wonderful to hear that the newsletter is a help. Whenever folks can take something away from an issue we publish, it's a thrill for us.
“While executives see a future where the technology shaves tens of millions of dollars off a movie’s budget, they are grappling with a present filled with legal uncertainty, fan backlash and a wariness toward embracing tools that some in Silicon Valley view as their next-century replacement…
For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key.”
Thanks for the link! It was a worthwhile read. The AI goldrush/controversy in Hollywood definitely crossed our minds while we were doing this piece. Going through the old reports and records, there are similarities between the two eras, for sure. There are fascinating differences, too. A big one is the argument Pixar's people made: the computer was just another pencil for a human artist to use; it didn't do the work. That small point made a big difference in the end -- kind of hard to imagine an AI equivalent to Luxo Jr. in our time! Anyway, thanks again.
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
That means a ton to hear! Thank you -- it's always our hope that the stories will connect with folks who might not be insiders to this stuff.
Same here!
Thank you so much!
Thank you for a great newsletter!
https://open.substack.com/pub/animationobsessive/p/the-beautiful-protest-of-crac?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5dph2w
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.)
The Xerox process is definitely part of this history -- we didn't mention it directly in the article, but it radically changed the Disney pipeline. Part of the case for CAPS was to bring back more hand-inking and colored lines, even though Xerox could (as seen in films like NIMH) do simple colors by that point. The Xeroxed drawings absolutely look great in Dalmatians, though, despite the headaches the whole thing caused for the cleanup artists. Iwao Takamoto once mentioned that project was tough because certain animators weren't great draftsmen, and, without the old pipeline to fall back on, their drawings needed to be revised a lot for consistency before they were ready for the screen! It's fascinating stuff. Thanks for the comment!
There is so much to be said about this movie, and yes, I'm a bit of a fanboi about it! It was another "budget" movie, which always seem to be Disney's best. The Nine Old Men at the height of their skills. Ken Anderson's UPA-inspired backgrounds, for the first and last time in Disney's history. But mostly, who convinced a bunch of animators to make a movie featuring a hundred or so dalmatians, a worst case scenario that no other studio would dare to touch? I'd love to see this film get the Animation Obsessive treatment!
OMG -- looking over my other comments, I talked about Dalmations there, too. I think it's my subconscious way of imploring you to write that article! 😅
Haha! It's understandable -- Dalmatians is gorgeous. Really appreciate the suggestion, as it's one we hadn't really considered before. Will add it to the list and see if there's a way we can tackle such an enormous topic. Thanks again!
Meanwhile, at Warner Brothers Animation, we were working on creating the first classically animated digital 3D stereoscopic film, a Duck Dodgers/Marvin The Martian short for Six Flags amusement parks, entitled Marvin The Martian In The Third Dimension.
We developed the toon shader that was later incorporated into Alias. I handled the 3D stereoscopic background pipeline as well as creating a color management system that provided predictable color for output back to film.
When we screened it at SIGGRAPH in New Orleans, Disney was stunned. That was fun.
Since the short was not released in theaters, it’s been forgotten. But at the time, it was a wower!
Thanks very much for sharing this! We went looking for it, and the toon shading and background and vehicle designs are great. Awesome to learn about the project and its history!
Maybe some promos involving shorties (quick look at experimental method/tech) would be great to air before the main attraction in theater and/or stream...
Very fun read. I didn't realize to what extent CAPS was kept secret. I'd assumed that like with every technological advance, Disney was very public about it from the start. In July I was fortunate to spend a week with former Disney animator Ronnie Williford and his wife in Florida, and we spent most of the time discussing art and animation history. Pretty cool as Ronnie was there to live through it first-hand. We visited with Aaron Blaise and saw his completed, solo-animated short Snow Bear, too, plus a theatrical screening of Brother Bear, and live demo. I'll write more about all this on my own Substack in the days to come.
Glad you liked it! We hadn't realized that ourselves until we started digging into the history -- we definitely figured the company would've used CAPS as a selling point, especially back then (with the hype around computers), but no. Disney's corporate side is famous for carefully manufacturing an image, sometimes in arbitrary ways, and this is another instance.
And those conversations sound awesome -- feel free to ping us when the piece is out!
Hey there! The visit to Ronnie's studio has been wriiten up, polished up, certified, stamped, and shipped out! Hope you enjoy it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zoungyart/p/studio-tour-with-ronnie-williford?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3abtxo
From my perspective, what’s remarkable about CAPS is how it quietly bridged Disney’s past and future. It kept the hand-drawn spirit alive while opening the door to effects, depth, and colour work that would’ve been nearly impossible with traditional methods. A bit like watching a magician’s best trick without realising new tools were hidden up the sleeve.
It definitely didn't replace the core of Disney's old-school method. Even by the time of Home on the Range, the animators were still drawing on paper. The change was big, but it wasn't nearly as radical as the company's move into CG animation, which really started to put veteran animators out of work. Some people were able to adapt (and the films did take lessons from classic Disney), but the production pipeline was a whole different thing.
It was great reading about this. I had heard of CAPS before and am always fascinated by how animation is made, I need to see behind the curtain to see the inner workings. Thanks for sharing.
It really is a shame that Disney tried to hide all this, because I think their renaissance period was the pinicle of what I imagine "Disney" animation to be. Films like Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Lion King had so much rich colour to them and shots that showed they could push the medium. I really find it disheartening that they don't make animations like this anymore.
Really glad you enjoyed the piece! And yeah, the decision to hide CAPS was unfortunate given the impact on its team. It's kind of par for the course for Disney -- it has a history of keeping secrets and building very artificial public images, dating back to Walt Disney's era.
But it's an interesting, double-edged sword situation: the same corporate bosses who hid CAPS also approved it, helping to spark the whole Disney renaissance in the process. Some of the studio's best work was done with CAPS! It's similar to the relationship that Disney had with Katzenberg during that time -- he was famous for being insufferable, but his decisions also helped to revived the studio at the box office. It's complex stuff. Anyway, thanks for the comment!
As always, Disney only lets you see what they want you to see, but I remember taking the Animation tour at Disney/MGM Studios ( as it was named at the time ) and seeing all those SGI workstations sprinkled around, but no one ever seemed to be doing anything with them.
Animation evolution was really fast considering how it is made right now! It is not only revolutionary for animation or art but revolutionary for society tecnology, I truly miss when Disney made movies not only for money but for the art itself too. Actually... I guess these times won't come back for them unless the ditection of disney change, nowadays they only make nostalgia bait and remakes using live action to not pay enough for the animators, the same who made disney great and powerfull, without it disney would never be what it is now.
The pipeline did change really quickly! It's wild to think about now. Disney has definitely been struggling in the 2020s to make movies that resonate like they used to, but the company's artists have found a way through before, so we'll see what happens!
Probably the protests about Hollywood directors affected them a lot considering the low gain during Covid19. They are making a lot of remake movies to have the stability of fast money and audience. I would reffer nowadays Disney as Fast-Art just like Fast-food. The current Disney director is having a lot of trouble with the financial sistem to pay for more new projects and animated movies, animation is expensive and he does not want to waste his money over things that he is unsure of. Kind of sad bcz Disney was made based on revolutionary ideas, Snow white was tgis kind of revolution in a time with only male protagonists.
Merci
Glad you enjoyed!
中国奇谭其实早就在中国互联网出过名，最近再次受到关注是因为其中一部短片被扩成长片，并且上了影院。本片由上海美术制片厂出品，汇集了很多中国的著名独立动画家，比如陈莲华
Chinese Tales had already gained fame on the Chinese internet long ago, but it recently regained attention when one of its short films was expanded into a feature-length movie and released in theaters. Produced by Shanghai Animation Film Studio, this film brings together many renowned independent animators from China, such as Xi Chen.
We're very interested by the success of Nobody (浪浪山小妖怪) in theaters! It's amazing to see that it has a score of 8.6 on Douban. We hope to watch it ourselves one day.
但是长片版本其实并不如短片版本优秀，许多人指责只扩充了时长却没扩充内容显得空洞
Woah I will be checking out re:frame for sure!!
It's great to see the animation newsletter world expand! We met Kambole at Annecy this year and he's great -- rooting for them all with this project.
Don't you guys think similar is the case with AI. i have this feeling it would become as common as the computers in animation. AI art is not art but it is making it easier to tell stories, like CAPS did for disney. as an artist myself i feel it is not art, but it is making my work easier. it is an ethical dilemma. would like to hear your thoughts.
GenAI is a really sticky topic. We're 100% for human art here and don't use GenAI ourselves, so we might be the wrong people to ask. But we can say that there are surprising differences between the early computer animation era and the AI push, having studied the history of it all.
Computer animation rose slowly over the course of 30-40 years, and a lot of its support came from scrappy enthusiasts and tiny research teams (like the guys who went on to create Pixar). GenAI has appeared very quickly and its biggest supporters are giant companies like Google, which are using a lot of marketing and muscle as they try to force GenAI to take hold.
Another thing is that art/animation done with computers had many breakthrough moments along the way: the Vertigo opening titles, John Whitney films like Permutations from the 1960s, the Oscar nomination for Peter Foldes' short Hunger in the mid-1970s. And then, in the '80s, films like The Adventures of André & Wally B. and Luxo Jr. that brought Disney-style animation to CGI.
Later, of course, you had CAPS and Studio Ghibli's adoption of a computer pipeline in the 1990s -- leading to movies like Princess Mononoke and My Neighbors the Yamadas.
By contrast, we haven't seen many artistic breakthroughs from GenAI tools -- there's no sign of an equivalent to Luxo Jr. or even the Vertigo titles. And we've seen way, way more blowback against its use than there was against early computer animation. People showed quite a bit of interest and curiosity about what computers could do for the medium back then: it definitely wasn't the firestorm that GenAI is today.
So, for a lot of reasons, we're hesitant to compare GenAI too closely to the early computer tools. Companies like Google definitely want to draw that comparison, but it feels a bit like marketing to us, similar to the "Web 3.0" push from a few years ago. For sure, we don't know what the future holds -- GenAI could completely take over. But we'll see!
Everything is always more complex than it seems. Thank you for sharing
Happy to tell the story -- thanks for reading!
Similar to A.J. above, I just wanted to drop in to say how much I appreciate your work! (I wish more people would do that on substack instead of silently enjoying.) Appreciating animation and learning more about the craft is something I really enjoy and your writing is one of my favorite resources for that!
Thanks so much! Wonderful to hear that the newsletter is a help. Whenever folks can take something away from an issue we publish, it's a thrill for us.
So intriguing and timely with this article that just came out from the Wall Street Journal:
“Is It Still Disney Magic if It’s AI?”
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/disney-ai-hollywood-movies-5982a925?st=gLJWVd&reflink=article_copyURL_share
“While executives see a future where the technology shaves tens of millions of dollars off a movie’s budget, they are grappling with a present filled with legal uncertainty, fan backlash and a wariness toward embracing tools that some in Silicon Valley view as their next-century replacement…
For Disney, protecting its characters and stories while also embracing new AI technology is key.”
Thanks for the link! It was a worthwhile read. The AI goldrush/controversy in Hollywood definitely crossed our minds while we were doing this piece. Going through the old reports and records, there are similarities between the two eras, for sure. There are fascinating differences, too. A big one is the argument Pixar's people made: the computer was just another pencil for a human artist to use; it didn't do the work. That small point made a big difference in the end -- kind of hard to imagine an AI equivalent to Luxo Jr. in our time! Anyway, thanks again.
Loved this one!
Awesome to hear that -- thank you! It's a story we'd been wanting to explore for months.