Disney’s most recent family-friendly film, Enchanted, has only been out for a few days and has already raked in more than $50 million at the box office, completely silencing critics who predicted that this feature’s traditional animation would, “…horribly alienate modern audiences who can’t stand anything less than computer animation in a feature film. They’ll be clawing at their eyeballs and fleeing the theater within the first five minutes.”
Fans of traditional animation are, to say the least, overjoyed at the film’s reception. Says Peter Celinker of the California Center for Intense Manual Labor Arts, “Although the first ten minutes of the film were obviously created using traditional animation techniques, most viewers should be unaware that the entire film is, in fact, hand animated. This proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that traditional animation can hold its own with ‘computer’ or ‘lazy’ animation when it comes to realism.” Celinker admitted that hand-drawing this kind of detail was time consuming, even when digital methods are used to color cells. “It’s true that the whole process is labor intensive. Enchanted began principle animation in 1998 and was barely completed before the film’s release date, and production costs were somewhere in the low billions, but once you see the final product on the screen, you know it was all worth it!”