Traditional animation

Then once we had that okay, so I was cutting on top of the storyboards, basically that, and then once we were happy with that n- 3D layout of the scene, we would remove the Wiley and any other Looney Tunes character, and then our animators and story artists would then draw what we called sketch-vis on top of the 3D animation to indicate the Looney Tunes, um, characters in their key poses in hand-drawn images as alphas that we would stack on top of the, the, uh, the video, basically.

So the goal of the entire thing was to, that we would end up with a 3D pre-vis version of the movie, where 2D animated drawings of the Looney Tunes characters would be on top of it, that would, where the 3D would represent what would become the live action, and the 2D could be used as a performance reference for the shoot later on.

It was actually, for me, very, very helpful later when we were shooting because most of the time in movies like this, and I, uh, this was Christopher Faria's idea to do it this way because he learned from the shoot of Tom and Jerry where they didn't have that, where when you're on set, you often just simply don't know what the animated characters will do.

This is a usual problem with VFX movies where the, the infamous tennis ball on a stick [laughs] um, appears, and actors have to just kind of like, "I don't know what's going on.

So, um, watching the, I, if I watched the animatic now that we finished before the shoot, I, I would probably look at it as like, "Okay, [laughs] lots of work to be, to be done." At the same time, while you're in it, obviously it all, it, it all feels incremental like you're just, you're just juggling away to try to find the best movie possible, and we were relent- like Dave's relentless and the artists were relentless.

We were, we were always trying to find little things like, um, like the, [laughs] like I'm, I'm one of the voices of the spiders for the Daffy scene.

Those spiders were a pitch idea, um, that came up at some point, like, "Can we, can we add some more 2D elements and, um, kind of create a little bit of, of a fun moment there so it's not just a crane down to a car arriving, but you, it's, it feels more off our world?" And so you have that little mugging sequence which is really cute and funny.

Mm.

very good

no no no it's it's problematic so uh so uh it's basically the setup and i have to say uh people were really disappointed with the trailer And I have to say, marketing people from Pixar lie to you all because for a long time it was told that this will be the first 2D movie from Pixar.

You heard that, right?

I did not, actually.

Oh, okay.

So for a long time, this was advertised as Pixar's first attempt at making 2D movies.

This will be hand-drawn.

No, maybe not hand-drawn, but like, you know, stylized.

And, you know, I got to thinking about it.

You could do a couple of videos on basic 2D animation drawing.

We can put those on the TV station.

And when somebody buys a kit, we can give them a code to get in to watch those videos.

that's kind of what we're doing too, but keep going,

Brian, are you? I mean, I mean, you know, and it's, it doesn't matter whether it's 2d or 3d.

I feel like that if you have a good story or a good character line, I mean, you've got, you know looney tunes they're beloved by everybody you know um and so even whether you're young or you're old you're you've always seen looney tunes you know doing something everybody knows who bugs bunny and the roadrunner and coyote is and of course yosemite sam and all those great characters and of course most of them they started out their voices were done by mel blank and uh you know of course he's gone but every i mean it's it there's something that everybody kind of comes around um you know 2d animation is is something that we're very passionate about helping see more of that Like we've talked about before, we don't think that it's ever really gone away.

It's just everybody's pushed for 3D so much that that's what you see.

But I was also just kind of wondering, if we don't do things like hand animating on black paper, you know, for e- for example, if we don't...

If, if these, if these types of animation are no longer being done, is the knowledge, is the skill set going to disappear? Like, is there anybody still doing, like, 2D hand-drawn animation anywhere? Do people know how? [laughs] I mean, and, and this, again, this is not to knock the animators.

I'm sure some of them do.

But I, I do wonder, like, w- is, there's probably not a whole lot of demand for it from studios, so is the skill set just gonna die? Is-

Hmm.

Zemeckis was committed to honoring Van Allsburg's wishes, so he refused to make a traditional brightly colored 2D cartoon.

Okay.

But when they sat down to budget a live action version, real trains, real snow, real actors, the projected cost came out to an astonishing $1 billion.

I mean, they look hand drawn.

But what from what I'm reading was, was that the 2D animators worked close with some computer animators on it, whatever.

It's amazing.

It's really amazing.