15 Interesting Facts about Animation

• Fact #1. Did you know that the lamp from a Pixar opening has a name? It is called Luxo Junior, named after the animated cartoon short of 1986, which Pixar produced under the same title.

• Fact #2. Amination is literally translated from French as “soul.” So, the process of animation is actually the “ensoulment” of characters!

• Fact #3. Walt Disney initially came to Louis Mayer, the head of Metro Goldwin Mayer, with his idea of a cartoon about Mickey Mouse. However, L. Mayer responded that the movies are mostly attended by women, and women are scared of mice. Hence, he refused to purchase the cartoon’s idea and felt deeply sorry about that afterward.

• Fact #4. Walt Disney received not only an Oscar award for the cartoon “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” but one large figurine and seven smaller ones.

• Fact #5. “Toy Story” is the first feature-length film fully modeled and created with the help of 3D technology.

• Fact #6. Thanks to the absence of the fifth finger on the hands of cartoon characters, animation studios managed to save several millions of dollars, since this decision cut the time for the frame-by-frame rendering of characters. Along with that, four fingers did not cause any visual discomfort among viewers.

• Fact #7. “Lion King” was initially created as a secondary animated film, while the main stage was made by the Disney studio on “Pocahontas.” Scriptwriters of “Lion King” did not believe in the project and were reluctant to start working on it, since they thought “the story is not that good” and “I don’t even know who will watch that.”

• Fact #8. In 1997, over 700 Japanese children required medical aid after watching the animated film based on the Pocket Monsters game for Nintendo. They had cramps, and experts attributed the effect to the 5-second light twinkle in the eyes of Pikachu after the explosion scene.

• Fact #9. Throughout the second part of the “Pocahontas” animated film, its main character has her hair gathered up into a bin – the reason for this was a lack of artists’ time to conduct rendering of flying, flowing hair.

• Fact #10. “Tangled” is to date the most expensive animated film in the world, costing the studio $274 million. The film’s production took 6 years since there were technical problems with one (longest) character – Rapunzel’s long hair. It took 9 years to create a program for ideal hair modeling for the film.

• Fact #11. Can you guess what makes animation so fascinating and soul-touching? Yes, this is the real-life behind some of the stories. Lady and The Tramp is just the cartoon inspired by springer-spaniel Lady, owned by Walt Disney writers. Although Walt Disney didn’t approve the first storyboard of Lady and The Tramp, he got back to this idea two years later and created another soul-touching masterpiece loved by kids and adults worldwide. 

• Fact #12. The creators of How to Train Your Dragon studied at the summer school of physics to better understand and convey the dynamics of the flight.

• Fact #13. Do you also sometimes find it challenging to understand what Bugs Bunny says? The creators decided he should speak the mix of Bronx and Brooklyn dialects to add more personality to this character.

• Fact #14. Who do you think is the wealthiest animator ever? No, Walt Disney is ranked 5th, while the wealthiest animators are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park.

• Fact #15. The first-ever animated 3D clip appeared in 1972, and it was a scanned and animated hand of a video creator.

40 Year Old 3D Computer Graphics (Pixar, 1972) from Robby Ingebretsen on Vimeo.

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