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When Disney Went Digital

When Disney Went Digital

2 comments

·August 4, 2025
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alexjplant

> [...] The Rescuers Down Under (1990), the first movie made entirely with the new process [...]

The first time I re-watched this film as an adult my mind was absolutely blown by the flight over the flower field in the opening sequence [1]. It looked too clean to be hand-drawn but I had some trouble believing that a studio like Disney was using computer animation as early as 1990. I did some research and discovered that it was the first fully CAPS-animated film.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjkdOAjtJ1k

SlowTao

I do like how things like CAPS would have been insanely difficult to do at that time simply due to the hardware limitations, not even going into the horrors of software on that era. And yet a decade or so later you could do similar stuff on the desktop.

For instance by 98/99 Futurama was doing this using SGI systems (I think?). Still hand drawn cels but entirely digitally coloured and composited.