Well, Here We Are.

The face of a man sat waiting to annihilate:

A plotter acted as sort of a 3D printer but for 2D images. There was a ball point pen that could move up and down, and the paper underneath could be moved in and out. Using CAD based programs you could plot points in 2D space and the plotter would draw the lines between them and even do geometric shapes!

When it came time to do The Great Mouse Detective, the animators at Disney wanted to do more dynamic shots for the climatic battle inside Big Ben. Drawing all those gears and cogs would be a nightmare for the animators, so they experimented with using 3D animation.

But this was still the early 80’s. There was no digital ink and paint program, no way to merge the 2D animated characters with the 3D animated backgrounds digitally. So how did they get the 3D animated backgrounds out of the computer?

By drawing each frame on the plotter.

Every frame was printed out on the plotter, and then xeroxed onto animation cels, and then hand painted like traditional 2D animation cels are.

But why the plotter? If they were gonna have to export every frame anyway, why not use a printer? Well… because printers back then just weren’t very good. A plotter uses points and physically draws the line between them, much like how vector graphics work. It yielded a much smoother and higher fidelity line than if they just printed them out.

This was still a massive undertaking, but it was probably the best solution to getting the dynamic camera moves they wanted out on paper. 2D animation was drawn over top and then both layers of animation cels were filmed frame by frame.

And that’s how you got dynamic shots like this in the mid 80’s! 3D animated backgrounds, printed with a plotter, xeroxed onto animation cels, hand painted, and then re-photographed with the 2D animation on top!

Yeah, about that. Seven years prior, this was all drawn by hand:

The key differences between the two are camera movement and shifting perspective. In Cagliostro the backgrounds remain static 2D, meaning the animators aren’t trying to redraw every frame with a moving shifting perspective. They aren’t doing the sweeping dynamic camera moves Disney wanted for Great Mouse Detective. That reduces a lot of the work load on Cagliostro because they only need to animate the gears on 3-4 frame loops per scene.

Disney wanted more dynamic movement, where the camera could sweep in and around the scene. That places a HUGE amount of work on the animators to ensure that everything is being drawn in perspective while it’s moving. I can’t even begin to think about how much work and effort would’ve had to go into this sequence if it was done entirely by hand. It would’ve been a nightmare!

Please don’t get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE Castle of Cagliostro. It’s an amazing movie, especially knowing its history and the crunch they were under to get it made in such a short time. But it’s not exactly a 1:1 skill check comparison. Cagliostro used the fact the camera wasn’t moving much to reduce the work load and relied heavily on looping animation.

But if you’re looking for a 1:1 comparison skill check I’ve got you covered!

See, the purpose of this post was to talk about how the computer was making it easier on animators by not making them have to draw every frame in perfect perspective. If you wanted a comparable skill check then I would instead suggest comparing the clock tower sequence in Great Mouse Detective to the airplanes in Porco Rosso.

Every single shot of the planes in that film was done by hand. Miyazaki famously refused to use CGI for the longest time on any of his films. If Porco Rosso had been animated by anyone else, those planes would’ve been CGI planes. So every shot, every dogfight, every moment of these planes flying around and turning slowly in perspective was done meticulously by hand, and it looks absolutely AMAZING! That’s a technical marvel in and of itself!

Oh and if you want more examples of animators being absolutely INSANE and doing everything by hand, I strongly recommend the works of Richard Williams. Not only was he instrumental in making Who Framed Roger Rabbit look so convincing, he’s also the insane artist who animated things like this:

You wanna talk insane skills? How about animating every single card in a deck of cards as they fly about the screen? The guy was a technical perfectionist!

Readers. Paul Hollywoods cookbook.

I don’t know if it was laziness or mistranslation but when converting the units to our stupid empirical measuring system someone done Fucked Up.

It doesn’t help that Mr. Paulywood is already very spare with his instruction and method. It called for an absolutely absurd amount of yeast, first off. About three times as much yeast as a reasonable person would need to make bread rise but perhaps Mr. Hollywood is compensating.

Next it wanted an egregious amount of salt. Both of us paused over the measurement, hesitating to get on board with such a high salt content. But he’s Mr Bread so we went with it, opting not to tweak the recipe until we’d tried it his way at least once.

It. Was. Awful.

Truly the most repulsive bread either of us had ever had. The loaf was dubbed Paul’s Salty Mess and lives in infamy to this day.

It took two more bakes for my beloved to actually find a proportion of ingredients that was actually agreeable to consume. This involved researching the difference between UK and US yeast which I think we can all agree the editor should have done, as well as finding the the metric recipe on Paul's website to compare. Even the non-fucked up one was still egregiously salty.

Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”