The interesting world of rotoscope animation

Have you ever wondered why a piece of animation looks so good? How a body moves under the limitations of its weight and musculature? There’s two reasons for that. The first reason is the animation team is not only skilled, but also has a veritable budget. Or perhaps they mixed that skill and budget with a little magical thing called “rotoscoping.”

You might ask, “What’s this rotoscoping you’re talking about?” Well, that’s what I’m here to answer.

Short and sweet

Rotoscoping is an animation technique where animators draw over existing footage. This technique offers much more realistic animation by capturing the subtle details in body and facial movement. The name “rotoscoping” comes from the device used for this technique, the rotoscope projector developed by Max Fleischer. Live action frames would be projected onto a panel and the artist would trace over them. Rotoscoping has also been used by background artists, such as when Ira Turek used actual shots of New York to create the environments of Fritz the Cat.

Special effects artists would use rotoscoping for the matte process and light effects. The most famous examples of rotoscope special effects are the original Star Wars movies, where the technique was used to create the lightsabers.

How it begin

The first rotoscope animations were done exclusively by Max Fleischer’s studio, as he patented the method in 1915. His first rotoscope equipment was made in 1914 and it was used extensively for the Out of the Inkwell series. This was during the black and white age of animation. Fleischer’s patent expired in 1934 and the technique was free for other studios, such as Walt Disney Productions. Disney would use the technique for some of its most famous works, such as Snow White, Fantasia, Bambi, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, and The Jungle Book.

Disney directors weren’t the only people who adopted rotoscope technology. Don Bluth used rotoscoping for his family-friendly flicks, while the adult animation scene was dominated by Ralph Bakshi. Many people cite Bakshi’s rotoscoped movies American Pop, The Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice, as key factors in pushing animation to a more mature audience.

Why was it so popular?

Storytelling… and marketing.

People connect with things like hobbies, beliefs, and definitely appearances. Animation that blurred the line between real life and fiction helped audiences connect more easily with the characters. This, in return, created the potential for deeper storytelling and helped push the notion that animation is more than just drawings on a piece of paper. The combination between realistic and fictional allowed for animators to flex their muscles, if they could handle the workload of course.

Marketing is all about the Ps — Product, Price, Place, Promotion. A visually unique style not only opens doors to storytelling, but makes your product stand out from the competition and gives the marketing team something strong to work with.

Why did rotoscoping decline?

Just like regular animation, the fluidity of rotoscope animation depends on the amount of frames. More frames means better animation, but it also means more work on the animator and higher costs. Making a normal piece of animation can be arduous, but having to precisely copy a piece of pre-existing footage can be a long, tedious process. 

The other major reason is money. As I just stated, its a very time intensive process, and that time costs money. Some productions like Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings were handled like Hollywood level movies, with full costumes and sets. And if you’re going to make a full movie production just to make a animation, why bother in the first place? All that live footage will never be used.

Deadlines approaching and studios needing to make their money back. Studios can speed the process up by hiring more animators but that inflates the budget. Due to the sheer complexity of it, Disney would often recycle its own animations to save time and budget. Creating animation from scratch was ultimately more cost effective, so rotoscoping was slowly steering towards the realm of high budget special effects.

Coupled with the rise of CGI animation, traditional rotoscope has lost much of its edge. Nowadays rotoscoping has mostly been used for short movies and indie projects, such as the works of Morgan King. Very few studios and directors have employed this technique, save for Richard Linklater who used it for his movies Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly and Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood.

A few extra rotoscope facts

• The award winning sci-fi platformer Another World had its animations done using the rotoscope technique. 
• The rotoscope technique has been used in the production of some anime such as Kowabon, The Case of Hana and Alice, Flowers of Evil and some segments of the recently released Uzumaki anime. 
• Rotoscope has also been used for music videos. The most famous example is A-ha’s Take On Me. Other examples include Breaking the Habit by Linkin Park, Freak of the Week by Freak Kitchen and Ye’s Heartless. 
• Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings movie was nearly scrapped completely. The movie’s live action parts were shot in the Spanish countryside. Elements on set that didn’t make sense for the period, like cars and utility poles, would be removed in the drawing process. The Spanish development lab didn’t know the footage would be used to create animation, and upon seeing these inconsistencies, nearly destroyed all the footage.
• Director Richard Linklater commissioned a special type of software to create rotoscope animation. Called Rotoshop, the software would create blends between layers.