About how many man-hours did it take to animate 101 Dalmatians?
I watched 101 Dalmatians (1961) again recently, and I have to say the animation while very artful seems kind of lesser in quality than say Dumbo (1941) or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Still, it must have been more expensive back then to produce animation in general with the less developed means of mass production of the time, that would later begin to appear in the '70s and on.
To that end I was kind of curious how many man-hours of animation went into 101 Dalmatians?
That way I might compare it to other animation efforts.
Best Answer
I can't find a definitive answer to the man-hours, but I would say that a lot less time was spent producing the animation for 101 Dalmatians (1961) when compared with the previous movie, Sleeping Beauty (1959).
Up until the end of the 1950s, artists would draw the the scenes and characters on paper, and then they would be traced by inkers onto animation cells before colouring and then photography. As you can imagine, inking could take quite some time - especially in complicated scenes.
By about 1959, Ub Iwerks (who had co-created Mickey Mouse, along with other Disney creations) had developed a Xerox camera that could print the animators' artwork directly onto the cels, removing the need for hand inking. However, the process produced a scratchy line effect, rather than replicating the more lavish ink lines from the manual process. This was first used in Sleeping Beauty for the thorny forest scene, where the scratchy lines probably enhanced the feeling of the scene.
101 Dalmatians almost didn't happen, as Sleeping Beauty cost $6 million and only made $5.3 million gross on its first theatrical run, and Disney almost closed the animation department following this. As you can imagine, inking scenes with 101 dalmatians would have been incredibly complex, laborious, and expensive.
So, Iwerks' xerographic process was brought in - and the film was produced for only $3.6 million with an extra 4 minutes runtime over Sleeping Beauty. There were probably other cost-cutting measures, but Chuck Jones estimates that the xerographic process was the biggest contributor to the saving.
The Advent of Xerography: Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians
Pictures about "About how many man-hours did it take to animate 101 Dalmatians?"
How long did 101 Dalmatians take to make?
According to the Walt Disney Animation Studios archives, "101 Dalmatians" was the first Disney film to only use the Xerox process to animate drawings. This would greatly increase the production process for future feature films.How did they animate 101 Dalmatians?
The 17th Disney animated feature film, it was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wolfgang Reitherman from a story written by Bill Peet, and features the voices of Rod Taylor, Cate Bauer, Betty Lou Gerson, Ben Wright, Lisa Davis, and Martha Wentworth....One Hundred and One DalmatiansProduced byWalt Disney15 more rowsWho did the animation for 101 Dalmatians?
101 Dalmatians (franchise)101 DalmatiansFilm(s)One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) 101 Dalmatians (1996) 102 Dalmatians (2000) Cruella (2021)Television seriesOnce Upon a Time (2014-2016)\u2021Animated series101 Dalmatians: The Series (1997\u20131998) 101 Dalmatian Street (2019\u20132020)\u2020Television film(s)Descendants (2015)\u202112 more rowsRedefining the Line: The Making of 101 Dalmatians
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Rabia, Sunarman 2.0, Mikhail Nilov, Mikhail Nilov