Perfection is the enemy of done.
Those are the kind of improvements that happen when many items are made. I suspect Disney only made a few, and thus what was more important was creating a working multiplane camera than lowering its weight.
I also suspect that the weight added a lot of stability which prevented shaking between frames.
Wikipedia's page on the multiplane camera is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera
The first incarnation: Lottie Reininger/Carl Koch, 1926. Lottie's "Adventures of Prince Achmed" from the same year is the oldest known surviving animated feature, and can be watched in its entirety on Wikipedia.
Other people fooled around with the idea but there's nothing wiki-notable.
1933: while estranged from Disney (it's a long saga), Walt's former star animator and Mickey co-creator Ub Iwerks built a more advanced one.
1934: the ever-inventive Fleischer studios (inventors of the process of 'rotoscoping', where animators trace over live action) took a very different approach to the problem of creating a sense of depth in animation and built their bugfuck insane Stereoptical Camera, which put miniature sets on a turntable, with a place to put animation cels (which, tangentially, were invented back in 1914 at Bray Studios).
1937: Disney's studio put together a seven-layer multiplane camera for Snow White. Walt's name went on the patent.
(When I was a kid dreaming of being in the animation industry in the seventies, Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic was the canonical history of the entire medium, if you're curious about the minutae of long-vanished studios. It's a lot easier to actually see any old piece of animation that you're curious about than it was back then.)
And there were various predecessors like for example tunnel books: https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/tunnel-books-art-histor...
[0] https://patentyogi.com/celebrity-patents/celebrity-patent-wa...
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/67cf2195-10dc-8011-bc6b-2ee90bdb0a...
There are countless patents that should never have been granted because prior art existed. This isn't a slam-dunk piece of evidence.
Does anyone still mix clashing styles/physics this way in modern animation? My superficial impression is that if a modern character has a gag where, say, its foot elongates to kick an opponent, it has to be part of a foot-elongating species of animal inside, complete with a 10-page backstory, who lives in a fully worked out Elongation Universe that has its own gaming physics engine and subreddit.
The Spiderverse movies have characters with clashing styles and frame rates sharing the screen, but perhaps it fails your second test because they come from different in-story universes. The design, art direction and animation are great, both movies are a visual feast
01-jun-2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605831 1 comments
25-feb-2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633366 1 comments
22-apr-2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550779 21 comments
06-apr-2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16768953 62 comments
These days we only get this stuff in recruiting material or SAAS ads.
Anyone perhaps know what this was from?
There must be tons of stuff locked in the Disney vaults to never surface again.
I really didn’t know of all the cool technology and etc they made.
Maybe a good analogy would be microcomputers and home computers of 80's and 90's compared to a modern phone. Latter is absolutely miles ahead in everything but it's standing on giant stacks of work and on the face of it it's a commodity vs maybe what we had before where more artisan approach was needed throughout to get something great out of it.
What's this genre called?
Big Band?
With everything standing up on end you're constantly fighting gravity and air currents, as well as problems like background art painted using water-based media that makes the paper it's on want to wrinkle. Much easier to just squish it all flat with gravity's help.