Kudos to BoingBoing for this link. It’s an account of the last days of the 2d animation department at Disney. In many many respects this is a sad thing to hear. I grew up watching cartoons way before 3d was popular. I like 3d animation but to me it’s just another medium for animation artists to use. It saddens me to think Disney fell to the hype of 3d and toasted their 2d department. Are there any studios left that still respect doing 2d art in the U.S.? I know in Japan many of the anime studios have moved to using computers to help the production process but many of them look the same 2d as ever.
Update: I should update my comments on the 2d death. It seems that Disney stopped
their traditional 2D department and forced them to move over to computers. Disney also wanted to thin the numbers that made the transition. Amusingly, their efforts to try to whittle down the numbers so they could have a smaller staff backfired as many of the animators jumped right on to the new toolsets in the boot camp that was offered (gee… now that’s a surprise. Give a carpenter a power hammer and guess what?)
