ERROR: The Time Machine is based on an H.G. Wells book, not a George Orwell book.
Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
After th…
ERROR: The Time Machine is based on an H.G. Wells book, not a George Orwell book.
Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.
After the initial box office failure of Sleeping Beauty, Walt was forced to scale back on how he was gonna make his animated films. He was facing competition from the newly emerging medium of Saturday morning cartoons, as well as numerous animated commercials on TV. He couldn't make his movies in fancy widescreen or large format 70mm anymore, so he went back to spherical filming. Yet as he focused more on Disneyland and the live action stuff, Walt found different ways to save money on creating animated films.
One of those ways was a process called Xerox, invented by the Xerox corporation for the use of taking pictures of anything on a sheet of paper and then transferring that image onto another sheet of paper, any that could fit in the paper tray. Initially designed for business and office work, the Xerox 914 was for its day, a revolutionary machine. Walt Disney figured that if Xerox could make perfect copies of printed and written documents onto other sheets of paper, he could do the same thing with animation drawings and then transfer them to standard acetate cels so he could take the ink out of the ink and paint process. This would be how Disney films would end up being made for a while.
The first film to utilize this process was One Hundred and One Dalmatians, based on the book by Dodie Smith. It was rather difficult to animate all those individual spots on all the puppies, but they pulled it off. Yet to save even more money, for the sequence involving the Twilight Howl, they recycled character models and designs from Lady and the Tramp and incorporated them as background characters. Also noteworthy is that rather than going through any licensing issues to show a clip from someone else's show playing on TV, they were like, you know..
