A Leap of Faith: Jumping Through the Progression of Modern Animation

“If it ain’t broke, break it!” - Danny Dimian, VFX Supervisor for Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse

It was late on the evening of February 24, 2019. The Oscars were in full swing, with winners being announced and celebrations being held. For the animation field, this ni ght was an opportunity for change. For the past 6 years straight, the Disney-Pixar studio had taken home the award for best animated feature. But, this year the public and critics had hope that another film would snatch this record from the reigning winners. You could hear the roar of the crowd as the nominees were enthusiastically announced.  When the envelope was finally opened, the streak had been broken. A studio recently established in 2002 and only on their third nomination in the category had won. The film that pulled off this feat was none other than Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse by Sony Animation Pictures. With its distinct style, unlike any other animated films being made at the time, the win cemented the idea that had been tossed around when the trailer first released in 2017. The field was starting a shift to a newer style, and the rulers of the were starting to be dethroned.

Cinematic animation, or the animation we typically see up on the big screen, has gone through many changes over the past century. In fact, the first ever feature film length animation was made in 1937, less than 100 years ago, and was none other than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney seemed to be at the forefront of the animated film industry as the creators of Snow White, Dumbo, and Bambi. All of these films made up an era of time that is commonly referred to as the Disney Golden Age of the studio which lasted from 1937 to 1942. There are seven different eras in the Disney animation studio, with the others including The Wartime era (1943-1949), The Silver Age (1950-1967), the Bronze Age (1970-1988), the Disney Renaissance (1989-1999), Post Renaissance Era (2000-2009), and the Revival Era (2010-present). Early films in the Golden Age, Wartime Era, and Silver Age were made using what is now considered to be a traditional animation style, also known as cel animation. This system required the animators to draw on plastic sheets which were then laid over each other in order to create motion. To create this moving spectacle animators would have to produce over 400,000 individual cels for an 80 minute feature film. Obviously, this style was quite popular as many Disney fan favorite films hail from this time as Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Sleeping Beauty are just a few of the films from these eras. However, due to the amount of time and storage this style took, Disney begane to look at a way of compressing this workload into a digital workspace to make the process easier for the artists. 

In 1988 a solution to the problem was found via the software entitled the Computer ANimation Production System, or CAPS for short. By using this software, animators were able to upload their sketches to the software and do all of the coloring and fine details on the computer. The first film to use this was none other than The Little Mermaid, released in 1989. This film was the start of the Disney Renaissance, which is regarded by many fans as one of, if not, the best eras of Disney animation. All of this era was animated with this new software, proving CAPS was now the gold standard for successful animation films. But with CAPS introducing the marriage of computers and animation, it was only a matter of time until technology advanced to a point where the entire process could be done digitally, eliminating the need for the hand-drawn cels entirely. This change came quickly when Disney released the Pixar produced film, Toy Story in 1995. This was the first feature film using computer generated animation, CGI (computer generated images) as we know them today. By doing all of the animation on computers, the team was able to create digital models of the characters, allowing for animation to be done via software. Once the animation was made, the lighting, shadows, and textures of the film could be selected. These settings are what set these films apart as it allowed the animators to make their film and the characters in them look realistic. This allowed for the perceptible three-dimensional look of Toy Story. The movie was such a revolutionary work in the field that the 1996 Academy Awards gave the special achievement award to the director of the film, John Lasseter. Immediately after Toy Story was released, other animation studios began to follow suit using the CGI animation style, which subsequently was nicknamed “The Pixar Look” by critics. The hand-drawn style quickly fell out of popularity and practice from this point forward.

From 1995 to the present, the Pixar Look has been the new gold standard for how a successful animated film “should” look. Most major studios such as Disney, Dreamworks, and even Apple adopted the look immediately, making it very hard to even distinguish the work of the different studios. The last studio to adopt the style was Disney who took on the Pixar look in 2005, this was followed by a merger between the Pixar and Disney studios in 2006. It felt as if the world of animation had turned away from its roots. The artistic styling that was the core of traditional animation was lost in this new age Pixar Look where all the films looked like they could exist in the real world. However, this all changed in 2017 when the first teaser trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse was released. For the first time since the early 2000’s, an animated film seemed to have a stylized look as opposed to the all too common realistic Pixar standard. The style took many critics and fans by surprise, but the overall consensus among the public was that this film had the potential to be one of the more important films in the animation industry. 

What set the 2018 film apart was its distinct style which many viewers called “a comic book that had come to life”. And funnily enough, this is the exact aesthetic the filmmakers were going for when creating the film. Yet, it was a very risky venture for the smaller animation studio of Sony Animation Pictures. In order to create the very stylized feel that the viewers get from watching the film, the animators had to reject every conventional tool in their toolbox. The Pixar Look relied on a set of textures that made the final animated film look realistic, more commonly referred to as photorealistic rendering. Spider-verse instead opted to take the approach of non-photorealistic rendering, allowing the animators to combine both the 2-D cel animation style of the past with the present 3-D animation techniques. Adding these two styles together is what allowed the studio to create a film that is a comic book come to life. From frames with quick freeze on an action word like BAM and text boxes on the screen to more stylistic choices using chromatic aberrations to blur the backgrounds and using halftones to indicate shading. All of these attributes are what helped to set the film apart from the others. A breath of fresh air for the industry as the artistic and stylistic side of the medium were on full display for the audience. The film was truly in a league of its own, allowing viewers to flip through the scenes like pages in a comic book. 

The reception of the film and its style was greeted by the film community with amazement. Critics predicted that it would win best animated picture at the 2019 Academy Awards not long after the film’s release in December of 2018. Come February of 2019, and the film did just that, triggering a roar of applause and congratulations from the fans and the industry alike. The film seemed to signal the beginning of a new age of animation, however, other studios seemed more resistant to move on from the reliable CGI Pixar Look. The next film of the Spiderverse style did not come out until 2021 with The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which was released by the same studio, Sony Animation Pictures. More recently Dreamworks has taken up this style with their 2022 film, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Yet, when considering Disney and Pixar’s current proposals, they seem to have no plans to adopt this style in their upcoming films. Additionally, as of right now the only known upcoming film with this style is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, the sequel to Into the Spider-verse. The sequel claims to be an advancement on the original with a total of six different animation styles taking place during the sequel. Time will only tell if this sequel helps to further the advancement of this new style of animation, or if we just have to wait for Disney to take a leap of faith and embrace the Spiderverse effect.