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The Blueprint: Pre-Production
Like any complex project, traditional animation began long before the first cel was painted. The pre-production phase laid the groundwork for everything that followed.Storytelling in Pictures: Storyboarding
The process usually kicked off with a script, which was then translated into a visual sequence through storyboarding. Artists created a series of panels, like a comic book, mapping out the key actions, camera angles, dialogue, and pacing of the animation. Storyboards served as the visual blueprint, allowing the director and crew to understand the flow of the narrative and identify potential problems early on.Defining the Stars: Character Design
Simultaneously, character designers worked to establish the look and feel of the characters. This involved creating detailed model sheets showing each character from various angles, illustrating key poses and expressions. These sheets ensured consistency, making sure that every animator drawing the character maintained the same design integrity throughout the production.Setting the Stage: Layout and Backgrounds
Layout artists determined the composition of each scene, planning the camera movements, perspective, and the relationship between the characters and their environment. They essentially designed the stage upon which the animated action would unfold. Based on these layouts, background artists would later paint the detailed, static scenery that the cels would be placed over.Timing it Out: Animatics
To get a sense of timing and pacing, the storyboards were often filmed sequentially and synchronized with a rough soundtrack, including dialogue recordings and temporary music. This moving storyboard, known as an animatic or Leica reel, provided a crucial timing guide for the animators before the intensive animation process began.Bringing Drawings to Life: The Production Pipeline
With the pre-production complete, the meticulous process of creating the actual animated frames began. This was where the drawings truly started to move.The Art of Movement: Animation
The animation department was the heart of the production. It involved several stages:- Keyframes: Senior animators drew the most important poses in an action sequence, known as keyframes. These defined the start and end points of a movement, capturing the essence of the character’s performance and attitude.
- In-betweening: Assistant animators, often called in-betweeners, then drew the frames that fit between the keyframes. This process created the smooth illusion of motion. The number of in-betweens determined the speed of the action – fewer in-betweens for fast movements, more for slower, smoother actions.
- Roughs and Clean-up: Initial animation drawings were often quick and energetic sketches (roughs). These were then passed to clean-up artists who refined the lines, ensuring consistency with the model sheets and creating a polished final drawing suitable for tracing onto cels. These final drawings were meticulously numbered and timed according to exposure sheets (X-sheets), which detailed exactly how many frames each drawing should be exposed for.
Painting the World: Backgrounds
While the character animation was underway, background artists painted the rich, detailed environments. Unlike the characters, backgrounds were typically painted on illustration board using mediums like gouache, acrylics, or watercolors. They remained static behind the moving character cels.From Paper to Plastic: Ink and Paint
This was a crucial, multi-step process handled by the Ink and Paint department, often a large team primarily composed of women throughout much of animation history.The term ‘cel’ derives from celluloid, the transparent flammable plastic originally used. Later, safety concerns led to the adoption of less flammable materials like cellulose acetate. Painting was meticulously done on the reverse side of the cel to maintain smooth, un-streaked color fields when viewed from the front and to protect the inked lines on the front surface during handling and layering. This technique also ensured the black inked lines remained crisp and clear.
- Tracing (Inking): The cleaned-up animation drawings were carefully traced onto the front of the transparent cels using black or colored ink. This required a steady hand to maintain the integrity of the animator’s lines. Initially done by hand, this process was later sometimes aided by xerography (photocopying) starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, notably by Disney for films like “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” which changed the aesthetic significantly.
- Painting (Opaquing): Once the ink was dry, the cels were flipped over. Painters meticulously filled in the areas outlined by the ink lines on the reverse side, using specially formulated, opaque paints (often gouache-based). Each color had a specific code, ensuring consistency across thousands of cels. Painting on the back kept the colors flat and prevented brush strokes from being visible on camera.
