Where the Hand-Drawn Cartoons Went

The story

A cartoon is a wonderful trick played on your eyes. Show them a drawing, then another drawing almost the same, then another, fast enough, and the pictures melt into movement. Old animated films used many such drawings for every single second. Sit through one minute of a classic cartoon, and you may have watched more than a thousand drawings go by.

Now feel the size of that. When artists in America set out, in the 1930s, to make one of the first full-length drawn films, the story of Snow White, they needed hundreds of artists working for years. Drawings were traced onto clear sheets, painted by hand on the back, laid over painted backgrounds, and photographed one frame at a time. Every flutter of a bird, every falling leaf, someone drew it. Cartoons were mountains of patient human work, and that is exactly why they felt so alive.

Then, slowly, computers came to the drawing table. At first they only helped, colouring in scenes that once took roomfuls of painters. But in 1995 came a film called Toy Story, the first big film built entirely inside computers, with no drawn frames at all. Instead of drawing a cowboy thousands of times, artists built him once, like a digital puppet, and then moved him. Change the camera, and the computer redraws the scene for you. Whole crowds, rolling oceans, showers of confetti, scenes that once needed armies of artists could now be built, changed and rebuilt inside the machine.

Film studios did their sums, and one by one, the big hand-drawn films faded from cinemas. The puppet way was faster to change, easier to fix, and kinder to the budget, and the sums won.

But here is the part of the story many people miss. Hand-drawn animation did not die, and it never belonged to one country in the first place. In Japan, drawing had been the beating heart of animation all along, through its own long line of studios and shows, and it simply kept beating. Japanese drawn films still fill cinemas around the world. And everywhere, the pencil itself quietly changed shape. Most artists now draw on screens and tablets instead of paper, but the frames are still drawn, one by one, by a human hand learning how a sleeve swings and how a cat lands. Look closely at many of your favourite shows and you will find hand-drawn work hiding in plain sight.

Best of all, the original magic still fits in your pocket. Take a notebook, draw a little ball in the corner of the last page, then on the page before, draw it slightly higher, and again, and again. Flip the pages with your thumb and watch the ball bounce. That flick of your thumb is the entire secret of animation, the same trick behind every cartoon ever made. The tools keep changing. The trick never has.