Eric

We grew up watching hand drawn Disney and now it's gone. We don't talk about this enough. Every frame of this video was painted by hand, by a human being. Every single one... To put that into perspective: to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney employed around 750 artists for three years, and they produced nearly two million individual paintings. More than 700 of the backgrounds were painted in watercolour. Over 150 people worked in a single department whose only job was to ink and paint the transparent sheets, called cels, that the characters were drawn on. It all ended within our lifetime. According to the Smithsonian, The Little Mermaid, released in 1989, was the last Disney feature made with the hand-painted cel method. The very next film, one year later, went digital. And something was lost in that transition. In every frame of the old films, a human hand physically touched the surface. A person sat at a desk, held a brush, and made a decision. Two million small decisions, made by hundreds of people, most of whose names we will never know. But the deepest difference is that the old animators knew they were making a cartoon. They did not try to copy the world. They stretched it, exaggerated it, bent it out of shape, because they understood something we seem to have forgotten: a drawing that imitates life exactly feels dead. Walt Disney even had a name for this: he called it the plausible impossible. Today, everything chases realism. And somehow, the more real it looks, the less alive it feels... I started my newsletter because the past is full of beauty, and fewer and fewer people take the time to show it to us anymore. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.