COMPUTER ANIMATION: What Would Walt Disney Think of Today's Digital Wonders?

"Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals." - Walt Disney

Walt Disney, the acknowledged father of animation truly loved innovation and technological progress. Indeed, the very nature of his EPCOT or Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow was combining emerging ideas with technology, implementing them in an experimental setting, thereby creating a showcase for possible new ways of doing things in cites and communities across the globe.

Of course in regards to animation, Disney’s approach was cutting edge and groundbreaking. Animation fans and especially Disney fans know that it all started with a mouse – Mickey Mouse. For Disney, capturing the innocence and simplicity of a spirit like Mickey’s lay in the most famous silent era performer – Charlie Chaplin.

On Mickey’s inspiration, Disney said, “We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin- a little fellow trying to do the best he could."

But as a classically oriented visual artist, Disney was mostly at home with pencil and paper. So how would Walt Disney feel about the emergence and dominance of computer generated films? Films whose creative core lie in computer chips and pixels. Nowadays, Disney only makes digital feature films and from their recent acquisition of PIXAR, they’ve committed to a purely digital future from now on.

TRON: The Future Looks Digital