They are still being being painted by hand. On a graphics tablet, for example.
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Exactly, it's not the medium. It's like saying movies like Up aren't beautiful because of CG.
Yep.
Those older movies are beautiful achievements for sure. But it's disingenuous to say that there isn't a plethora of movies and shows today that rival and surpass those older examples visually. Not to speak of just how much more fluent animation has become.
Many of the people who worked on those older masterpieces are still in animation today, and have only become better at their art.
They used a lot of rotoscoping back in the day. Basically they filmed a scene normally with real people, then traced over every frame to give us those fantastic moments of fluid movement in things like Snow White, Mary Poppins, and Beauty and the Beast (which also used 3D by the way).
Fun fact, some of the more impressive examples from that era (like Mary Poppins) primarily used the sodium vapor process to get perfect mattes directly in-camera, no rotoscoping needed. It's a fascinating and impressive bit of tech: https://www.historicmysteries.com/science/disney-prism/39484/
That is indeed a fun fact! I am somewhat obsessed with sodium vapor lights and the bandwidth of light they produce. I would love to have seen the original camera rig and their special prisms, but apparently they only made three and they've been lost.
High intensity discharge lamps are awesome, can confirm. I miss when streetlamps were still HPS/LPS and mercury vapor, the lighting felt a lot more comforting than the harsh LEDs used nowadays.