Disney Discovery

Disney has become a big household name to many families worldwide. They're behind many of the animated classics we know from our childhoods as well as ESPN and the Star Wars franchise. Their name has become so large that even many other animators, companies, and other artists take inspiration from Disney...

...or just straight-up rip off from Disney.

 

But did you know that Disney... ripped off themselves?

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05…

Well, OK... it's not really ripping off themselves. It's more like taking some of their old clips and then rehashing them by replacing characters, tracing, and etc.

Apparently animators in Disney HQ used a "technique... called rotoscoping." (Visser) Rotoscoping is a form of animating where scenes, live action or pre-animated, are traced over. With all fairness, rotoscoping/tracing can take a lot of time, and Disney didn't have the computer technology to just do palette swaps and etc. in... say, Photoshop. So I guess there is some effort in recycling those scenes?

Understandably, Disney did have a dark period in its history. It can be argued that Disney had to resort to this process due to low budgets during that time. However, with Disney being the big name industry it is today, it comes off more shocking than it probably did in the 60's or 70's. With the budget Disney has today, we wouldn't expect it to reuse some old clips and animation.

Rehashing forms of media is not restricted to rotoscoping and animation. It has also been prevalent in other art forms. A good example of this is Nickelback, a band that has been renowned for reusing musical samples from their own tracks and not providing much originality or differentiation from their music. It's not just Nickelback, though. Joga, a eurodance group from Italy (which may ring a bell for DDR fans) have sampled one of their own songs as well. One of their songs, Bye Bye Baby Balloon, takes some of its audio from Dam Dariram, another Joga song.

Listen to this if you don't believe me:



The point is... artists drawing off from their older works is not a rare occasion. While many call it out to be unoriginal, (and it may be so) it's still practiced often with other artists. That's not saying it's bad, as some artists manage to produce different emotions, reactions, or context and content while still rehashing their old work. It just goes to show that sometimes artists have to rely on their older works to help ground their art form and production... even Disney.

~Tony

Nick Visser. "Apparently Disney Used To Recycle Animation Scenes, And It's Blowing Our Minds." The Huffington Post. 2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. Web. 11/7/2015. www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05…

Russ Fairley. "The Horrors of Rotoscoping." VideoMaker. 2014 VideoMaker Inc. Web. 11/7/2015. www.videomaker.com/article/171…

n.a. "Video Brinquendo." Wikipedia. 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Web/Images. 11/7/2015. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%ADd…

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