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Comment by madethemcry | Hacker News Reader

I can only imagine how much work is put into modern 3D animated movies and that it's far from being easy or quick to produce.

On the other side, if I look at the creation process of hand-drawn animation movies and the involved physical man labour, which is so vastly different from labour in front of a computer, that makes it so much more worthy as a memory than any modern animation movie. Or is this simple nostalgia tricking me ?

Regarding that MultiPlane Camera. I never though about the parallax effect in those old movies and just dismissed it with "well they just draw it frame by frame". Watching this was a real eye-opener.

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The feeling and texture of the stop-motion animation or hand drawn animation is not matched by the computer animation. Since we can feel the materials, labor and the natural features of such animations. As a result, we feel more connected.

Computers are the other hand isolated from us by their very nature. Resolution, details and other things are higher and better, but they are not natural. So it feels more distant from us.

Because of the same reasons I use a mechanical watch, because I can feel the materials, labor and naturalness of the device.

edit: Fixed some grammatical errors.

Oh yes you're right. The feeling of texture and natural imperfection is a big part of my feelings.

I love to spot the shortly being animated parts of an animation movie. Those parts always show a slightly different coloring so that you know that something is happening soon.

I bet this is coming from the classic layering shown with Mickey at the beginning in the video.

> Or is this simple nostalgia tricking me ?

It is. Both are labor intensive, and esp. with 3d graphics it rests on the shoulders of giants, with a lot of elementary work in the field being done by Pixar; not just for movies but for games too. Check out Pixar's list of publications; look at the ones at the bottom (time-wise), where they lay some groundwork in realistic lighting, reflections, shadows and such back in the early 80's: http://graphics.pixar.com/library/index.html

It's definitely a lot more labor-intensive, and expensive, to do traditional 2D animation than 3D animation. Cost savings drove the industry switch to 3D as much as anything else.

I mean, think about the time and effort needed to physically paint every cel, just to name one of many labor-intensive processes.

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