Screenshot: The Triplets from Bellville / YouTube (Fair use)
In the 20 years since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences first established the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, A hand-drawn film received the award only once– The 2001 masterpiece by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki Spirited Away. From Shrek to Wall-e to Spider-Man: In the Spider-Verse, every other winner but one – the stop-motion animated Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Wer-Rabbit in 2005 – was born of a computer (at 2021 Nominees) The soul will likely follow suit next month. And I think that’s a shame.
That shouldn’t affect the art of computer-generated animation. Many 3D animated films are breathtaking in their beauty and complexity and have only grown as the medium matures (it opens the eyes) Compare scenes from the Toy Story from 1995, the first fully CG-animated feature, and the Toy Story from 2019 4). But there are features of 2-D animation that 3-D will never replicate – quirks and styles and visual shorthand (for example, goofy exaggeration for a gag, such as This half-second shows the little mermaid’s flounder, which she loses when she sees a shark), which cannot be fully transferred to the purely digital area.
As with black and white films, hand-drawn animation has never really gone away – few are released each year – but that’s telling The greatest animated films of the past two decades have shunned the style, at least in the US (Japan still has a greater affinity for the more traditional style) 1990s Disney RenaissanceAs the Lion King became one of the greatest moneymakers of all time – and as it thrives on television – full-length 2-D animation has become more of a curiosity, celebrated by hardcore enthusiasts more than mainstream audiences becomes. Disney’s last hand-drawn work, The Princess and the Frog from 2009, went passably, but the box office pale in comparison to Tangled and Frozen, released just a few years later.
While I love animation in general, the hand drawn style will always be my favorite. Here are 12 films from the medium’s history that might make it yours, too. If you look at these entries, you will at least find that you don’t need a Pixar budget or server warehouse to create a memorable animated feature.