who cares?

This story was on Digg about 2 weeks ago, and was apparently old news...why hasn't Consumerist covered the news that Time Warner has canceled their tiered pricing initiative?

Quiet, you. It's just cool to see.

Yep. I saw this on Big Money half an hour ago and thought it should be on Consumerist.

It's an interesting argument...these are Disney classics, and I doubt most kids actually notice or care, but as an adult, I'm feeling just a tiny bit cheated.

But my defense of this is that the characters themselves are different, even if their motions aren't. Snow White and Maid Marian might dance similarly, but they're not the same character. Even if you want to compare humans to humans...or animals to animals...Baloo from The Jungle Book is not the same character as Little John from Robin Hood, so the preservation of the characters is there even if they reuse the animation. Cinderella doesn't look like Belle, even though they apparently went to the same dance class.

I'd actually feel cheated if it was revealed that the characters looked like each other to the point where Baloo could have easily been Little John or Belle and Cinderella could've swapped princes.

i cut and paste old code all the time.. same var names.. etc.. same thing with graphics templates.. a hue change and viola!

Saw this last week, and was very surprised. I could see maybe studying how the past masters animated certain movements, but to copy the previous work so blatantly...

And it's not even all elaborate dance sequences. Some of the copied scenes were just everyday reaction shots.

I'm betting they probably aren't doing this much anymore, now that their movies are all on DVD and can be endlessly paused and rewound.

@Chris Walters: Please change the title to "Hey! Walt Disney Reuses Animation Sequences: Your Childhood is a Lie"

This isn't that big of a deal. There was a group of animators called the "Nine Old Men", who were mainly the key animators of many Disney animated films. They even admitted to doing this practice, just because it helped with the development process. Plus, they only used their own work. It's not like they were copying from other media.

@opticnrv:
@audemars:
I am pretty happy to see I am not the only one who is unhappy with the way Consumerist has been posting TMZ shit articles.

@pecan 3.14159265: I like to think that they drew the character based on the character in the story. Not "I need a goofy sidekick, can you pull something up for me?"

Also, princess swapping sounds awesome.

@redskull: You mean now that Pixar has taken over the universe?

This is worse than finding out that Santa is fake. My childhood is officially ruined.

Disney copies its own work, and it's news.

Disney takes classic Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and BUTCHERS them, and nobody cares.

Le sigh.

What I find interesting is that this probably can't be done anymore, because Pixar has more or less taken over the animation market. The animation we used to have isn't really being used anymore, and Pixar would have a very hard time reusing their animation in such a blatant manner.

Due to the vast amount of Disney movies I watched as a child, I just thought this was how people danced.

You should see me at weddings.

Ah, 'related' videos, never fails.

I remember watching Robin Hood, the Jungle Book and Aristocats entirely too many times when I was a kid and noticing that the copied animation in the dance sequences.

You can't really blame the animators of that time period though, like it was said, the budgets were slashed pretty heavily and they had to cut corners where they could (this is also the time period where they used xeroxed copies of the pencils instead of actually inking the cells by hand). It's not a terribly uncommon practice in many animation studios to reuse footage, though.

@korybing: Augh, this comment is riddled with poor writing. How I yearn for an edit button (or maybe the patience to proofread before hitting "submit").

You know, that Baloo/Little John hybrid looks really creepy, like he's a jaunty bear zombie. And he dances, so maybe Disney was predicting the rise of "Thriller"?

@opticnrv: Why isn't Consumerist being run the way I want it to be? Why aren't they posting the articles I want to see?

Consumerist should stop posting anything fun or interesting unless it's directly related to consumer issues, otherwise people might enjoy this blog.

@unobservant: Disney takes classic Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and BUTCHERS them, and nobody cares.

Ironic since they used they used stories from the public domain to make billions and now do everything they can to destroy the concept of public domain.

@tastybytes:

Right. But in that case, you are just being efficient. Your code is not put on display; the end result is.

Imagine if authors reused entire paragraphs in books, using find/replace on character names. Or if movies were made entirely out of stock footage?

There are places where reusing assets works, and there are places where it does not.

My heart sank a little when I saw Maid Marion in the exact same moves as Snow white. It starts making you question the characters they drew for robin hood---because they were drawn to the same scale as the seven dwarves just so the animation could be reused. Same feeling with Baloo and little john. Sigh, but the tooth fairy isn't real either, so you grow up and deal with the disappointment ;)

@pecan 3.14159265: Well what Pixar is doing now is what Disney did in the past, in terms of animated classics. Ever since Disney announced that they were getting rid of the old-style animated techniques and move onto 3D, they have been doing poorly with their animated movies. That is why they paid over $7 billion to keep Pixar with Disney.

Honestly, they need to go back to making movies like this, with 3D elements. Like Titan A.E., or Road to El Dorado. (non-Disney related)

I was going to say that the vast majority of this is from the Robin Hood movie, stealing from the earlier Jungle Book and from Snow White. But then I looked up Mr. Toad, and apparently Jungle Book came after that, so Robin Hood steals from Jungle Book, which steals from Mr. Toad.

Disney was a crappier company at the time of most of those... we're talking about one of the other times that they considered shutting down hand-drawn animation.

this news is at least 20 years old. I guess it's new to the younger generation who never saw the originals.

I'm ashamed that I know this, but the dance from Beauty and the Beast is copying the dance from Sleeping Beauty, not Cinderella.

recycling assets is a part of all animation. if you're on a budget and already have something that will save time and money and work then you use it. hell, even pixar does it. In the Incredibles anyone not in the main cast is pretty much teh same model just retextured. Frozone is the exact same model as La Bomb. Oh yeah sorry to ruin it for you but in Super Mario Bros the bushes are just clouds made green.

Oh my god!! The controversy!!! Honestly, I noticed these comparisons when I was FIVE. Really, they did still animate the scenes different characters and very well.

As a programmer, I have to admit that re-usability is a great thing. Good for them.

Now the fact that The Lion King was a complete ripoff of that foreign cartoon flick, booooooo!

@audemars: My childhood cares!

@superberg: So you're saying that Disney's reuse of animation sequences hurt their audience numbers, their sales, and their travel packages to Disney World?

I picked up on Baloo/Little John and others (also the Bear from Bedknobs & Broomsticks too) being similar at a young age and it didn't bother me a bit. Still doesn't, although I never really liked The Jungle Book as an entire movie anyway. And Robin Hood's opening sequence is great.

Watch this with the sound off. It really shows this up well.

On most of the ARISTOCATS/Robin Hood ones, weren't they made around the same vintage?

As for some of the others, well, maybe because I have watched all of these endlessly...(3 kids, vcrs, dvds...I haven entire movies memorized) it seems like they could have been a little more imaginative here..geez! No wonder they were so easy to have burned onto my brain!

BUT on the Sleeping Beauty/ Beauty and the Beast? They are WALTZING!! I would expect it to look similar!

Just my opinion....

@shiftless: I was just going to say: Doesn't every seven-year-old in the world know that Baloo and Little John are really the same? Because I certainly noticed. And that doesn't mean I thought any less of them. (I wore out our VHS copies of Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Dumbo we just left sitting too close to the speakers for too many years.)

@redskull: I don't know about the other sequences, but weren't the original dance sequences rotoscoped from footage Disney filmed of real dancers to begin with? Was Maid Marian copied from Snow White or did the animators rotoscope the same footage that the animators of Snow White used? Same dance, same filmed dance footage, different characters. Rotoscoping is a very legitimate resource when it comes to animation.

@pecan 3.14159265: I noticed as a kid, but I just chalked it up to "that's how Disney does bears." Or cats, or foxes. But mostly bears -- it was pretty obvious that Baloo and Little John were "related," heh.

i reuse my code over and over again.. i only write something once. ya know..

@Corey Eubanks: hahaha

@unobservant: So did The Muppets and Looney Tunes and I don't hold it against them.

@xAnarChisTx: No one should ever make another movie like Titan A.E. It may be the worst animated film ever, unless you count Cool World.

@changed my name: Ah yes. My husband is very good at belting out "I know you, I walked with you once upon a dreeeeeaaaam" in the manliest voice possible thanks to quality time spent with his eldest daughter when she was just a handful of years old.

@pecan 3.14159265: Actually, I imagine it's easier with digital animation. If you've got the 3D models and the motion saved to a file, you can instantly change the size of the model (e.g. length of limbs, size of head) and the camera angle and re-render--it won't look anything at all like the original except to a tiny minority of superfreak viewers.

@logicalnoise: The riverbed scenery used in Bug's Life was re-used in Toy Story 2 for Buzz Lightyear's alien moon space sequence.

@Chris Walters: I'm not meaning one like that, but one with it's style, with better 3D animation.

But come one, give it a little credit. I thought it was a decent movie. =P

@Margaret Powell: Robin Hood was given a very small budget by Disney animation standards and was made on the cheap, which explains many of the cut corners in the film. I feel that many of the "cheats" they used were very clever ways of saving money in a traditionally very expensive filmmaking process. The story is still entertaining, though, and it's a fun watch. It's one of my favorite Disney films.

@changed my name: Dang! I wrote Sleeping Beauty first, then second guessed myself and decided it was Cinderella.

@opticnrv: Did you send in an e-mail about it?

@Chris Walters: True...though I was alluding to Pixar creating pretty original characters, and not necessarily being able to take the exact character and reapply it to a different movie. I'm pretty sure Buzz Lightyear can't be anyone else but Buzz Lightyear without a ton of people noticing.

@logicalnoise: Hah, exactly! I don't see anything wrong with cutting a few corners in animation if you can take something you previously used and repurpose it. Disney wasn't copying from other films, they were using footage they had already made and reusing it. It didn't impact the storytelling or hurt the flow of the film, and it saved them a few bucks (especially for the films with small budgets like Robin Hood). It's how the industry has worked since the beginning.

Next people are gonna get in a tizzy when they find out that walk-cycles are actually reused animation loops and the animators aren't drawing every single step a character takes.