The animation directors were amazing and the animators on staff were incredible artists in their own right (Walt Kelly and Carl Barks both started in Disney Animation). Preston Blair started there too before moving on to working with Tex Avery at MGM.
These people made pencil drawings come to life and act.
Today, everything is done with computers. A few seem to have weight and mass, and a few even seem to project emotions, but it doesn’t do much to compete with the animated films of old. Such fluid motion and elabortate work.
At least Frank and Ollie lived to see the day that they got publicly recognized (with a documentary about them and public interest in animation art in the 1990s which took them on the road to galleries across America).
ALMOST everything is done by computer. Disney is making shorts now in the classic format, “Enchanted” had 14 minutes of 2D animation by the great James Baxter and team, and “Princess and the Frog” that is coming out Christmas of 2009 will be classically animated. Eric Goldberg is leading that animation effort.
I should also add that Dreamworks’ “Kung Fu Panda” has a couple of minutes of classical animation in a dream sequence, also generated by the one and only James Baxter.
Their animation seemed to be a real world which we could view and enjoy. They gave us a gift more precious than we imagined.
See “Iron Giant.” The two old guys on the train are not only based on Frank and Ollie, they provided the voices.