Special effects animation

Besides traditional animated characters, objects and backgrounds, many other techniques are used to create special elements such as smoke, lightning and "magic", and to give the animation in general a distinct visual appearance.

Notable examples can be found in movies such as Fantasia, The Little Mermaid and The Secret of NIMH. Today the special effects are mostly done with computers, but earlier they had to be done by hand. To produce these effects, the animators used different techniques, such as drybrush, airbrush, charcoal, grease pencil, backlit animation or, during shooting, the cameraman used multiple exposures with diffusing screens, filters or gels. For instance, the Nutcracker Suite segment in Fantasia has a fairy sequence where stippled cels are used, creating a soft pastel look.

Live-action hybrids

Similar to the computer animation and traditional animation hybrids described above, occasionally a production will marry both live-action and animated footage. The live-action parts of these productions are usually filmed first, the actors pretending that they are interacting with the animated characters, props, or scenery; animation will then be added into the footage later to make it appear as if it has always been there. Like rotoscoping, this method is rarely used, but when it is, it can be done to terrific effect, immersing the audience in a fantasy world where humans and cartoons co-exist. Early examples include the silent Out of the Inkwell (begun in 1919) cartoons by Max Fleischer and Walt Disney's Alice Comedies (begun in 1923). Live-action and animation were later combined to successful effect in features such as The Three Caballeros (1945), Anchors Aweigh (1945), Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Heavy Traffic (1973), Pete's Dragon (1977), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Pagemaster (1994) and Space Jam (1996). Other significant live-action hybrids include the music video for Paula Abdul's hit song "Opposites Attract" and numerous television commercials, including those for cereals such as Honey Nut Cheerios, Trix, and Rice Krispies.

Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is a method of traditional animation invented by Max Fleischer in 1915, in which animation is "traced" over actual film footage of actors and scenery. Traditionally, the live action will be printed out frame by frame and registered. Another piece of paper is then placed over the live action printouts and the action is traced frame by frame using a lightbox. The end result still looks hand drawn but the motion will be remarkably lifelike. Waking Life is a full-length, rotoscoped animated movie, as is American Pop by Ralph Bakshi. The popular music video for A-ha's song "Take On Me" also featured rotoscoped animation, along with live action. In most cases, rotoscoping is mainly used as a guide to aid the animation of realistically rendered human beings, as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Pocahontas, and Anastasia.

A method that is related to conventional rotoscoping was later invented. If the movie was supposed to contain inanimate objects like a car or a boat, a small live action model of the object(s) was built and painted white, while the edges of the model were painted with thin black lines. In the next stage the object was filmed like it was supposed to move in the animated scene, either by moving the model or filming it while the camera was sweeping over or around it, or using a combination of both. The film frames were then printed on paper, showing a model made up of the painted black lines. After the artists had added details to the object not present in the live action version of the model, it was xeroxed onto cels. (A notable example is Cruella's car in One Hundred and One Dalmatians.) The process of transferring 3D objects to cels was greatly improved when computer graphics advanced enough to allow the creation of three dimensional computer generated objects (wire frame models) that could be manipulated in any way the animators wanted, and then print the outlines on paper before being copied onto cels using Xerography or the APT process. Even if the use of cels has been left by the majority of animators, computer animated objects in traditional animation has come to stay.

Related to rotoscoping are the methods of vectorizing live-action footage, in order to achieve a very graphical look, like in Richard Linklater's film A Scanner Darkly; and motion-capturing actor's movements to use the data in 3D-animation, as in Robert Zemeckis's 2005 film The Polar Express.

Computers and traditional animation

The methods so far describes the techniques of an animation process who originally depended on cels in its final stages, but painted cels are rare today as the computer moves into the animation studio, and the outline drawings are usually scanned into the computer and filled with digital paint instead of being transferred to cels and then colored by hand. The drawings are composited in a computer program on many transparent "layers" much the same way as they are with cels, and made into a sequence of images which may then be transferred onto film or converted to a digital video format.
It is now also possible for animators to draw directly into a computer using a graphics tablet, cintiq or a similar device, where the outline drawings are done in a similar manner as they would be on paper. The development of paperless handdrawn animation is likely to replace the traditional pencil and paper not too far into the future, just as cels and traditional paint was replaced when digital ink and paint was fully introduced in the 90's. For instance represents the Goofy short How To Hook Up Your Home Theater Disney's first project based on the paperless technology available today. Some of the advantages are the possibility and potential of controlling the size of the drawings while working on them, drawing directly on a multiplane background and eliminating the need of photographing line tests and scanning.

Though traditional animation is now commonly done with computers, it is important to differentiate computer-assisted traditional animation from 3D computer animation, such as Toy Story and ReBoot. However, often traditional animation and 3D computer animation will be used together, as in Don Bluth's Titan A.E. and Disney's Tarzan and Treasure Planet. DreamWorks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg coined the term "tradigital animation" to describe films produced by his studio which incorporated elements of traditional and computer animation equally, such as Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.

Interestingly, many modern video games such as Viewtiful Joe, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and others use "cel-shading" animation filters to make their full 3D animation appear as though it were drawn in a traditional cel style. This technique was also used in the animated movie Appleseed, and was integrated with cel animation in the FOX animated series Futurama.

Cel overlay

A cel with inanimate objects made to make the impression of a foreground when laid on top of a ready frame. This creates the illusion of depth, but not as much as a multiplane camera would. A special version of cel overlay is called line overlay, made to complete the background instead of making the foreground, and was invented to deal with the sketchy appearance of xeroxed drawings. The background was first painted as shapes and figures in flat colors, containing rather few details. Next a cel with detailed black lines was laid directly over it, each line drawn to add more information to the underlaying shape or figure, giving the background the complexity it needed. In this way the visual style of the background will match the visual style of the xeroxed parts of the animation. As the xerographic process evolved, line overlay was left behind.

The APT process

Invented by David W. Spencer (aka Dave Spencer) for the movie The Black Cauldron, the APT (Animation Photo Transfer) process was a new breakthrough in how to transfer the animators' art onto cels. Compared to Xerography, it looked visually better. Basically, the process was a modification of a repro-photographic process; the artists' work were photographed on high-contrast "litho" film, and the image on the resulting negative was then transferred to a cel covered with a layer of light sensitive dye by making a "sandwich" of the negative and the cel and expose the negative to light. The layer of dye was sandwiched between the other two elements and exposed to the light through the transparent areas of the negative. Because it was actually divided into thinner layers of dye, each in a different color and sensitive to a specific wavelength of light, it was exposed to the relevant wavelengths one at the time. The light caused it to harden and fuse to the surface of the cel, and chemicals were then used to remove the unexposed portion, leaving the drawings in a variety of colors (photo emulsion). Small and delicate details were still inked by hand if needed. Spencer received a Technical award from the Motion Picture Academy for developing this process.

Xerography

Applied to animation by Ub Iwerks, the electrostatic copying technique called xerography allowed the drawings to be copied directly onto the cels, leaving only the coloring to the inkers. This saved time and money, and it also made it possible to put in more details and to control the size of the xeroxed objects and characters (this replaced the little known, and seldom used, photographic lines technique at Disney, used to reduce the size of animation when needed). At first it resulted in a more sketchy look, but the method was improved later. Instead of using black lines only, cels with lines in different colors were also possible, using colored toner powder.

The xerographic method was first used by Disney in the short film Goliath II, while the first feature using this process was One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). The graphic style of this film was strongly influenced by the process. Some hand inking was still used together with xerography in this and subsequent films when distinct colored lines were needed. Later, colored toners became available, and several distinct line colors could be used, even simultaneously. For instance, in The Rescuers the characters outlines are gray. White and blue toners were used for special effects, such as snow and water.