Animation from Pencils to Pixels

Foreword

Mickey Mouse is only a little more than one year older than me, so I guess I have grown up and (hopefully) matured alongside the art of animation—Disney animation, that is—virtually from its very beginnings. Whether that makes me an expert on the subject is another question, but certainly I have been a long-time observer of the evolution of both the art and the business of animation for a good deal of its history.

In the last twenty years, the so-called “digital revolution” has brought sweeping changes to animation, or at least that is the perceived wisdom as we hear it from the outside world. You will hear that “everything has changed,” that “pencils are no longer required,” and most demeaning of all, “2D is dead!!”

Before we all go ...