Walt Disney and Leonardo Da Vinci

Whatever you think about Walt Disney, he and his team of animators were visual geniuses. For someone that made his money drawing a cartoon mouse, he was deeply invested in injecting physics into his animations. Here’s a list of animation principles developed by the animation team at Disney (rad GIFs as well). The physics made the cartoons more real and the gags more funny. Bending the rules of physics made the cartoons more cartoonish and magical.

Here’s the man himself showing off their cutting edge animation tech in 1957, called a MultiPlane Camera. It’s basically a way to achieve parallax scrolling (which I discuss in a prior post) without computers. It’s a camera and a bunch of moveable planes with various, moveable images laid on different panes. Look how many people it takes to run it! Plus, it adds an element of live performance to the animation which is remarkable.

One thing: I can’t tell whether this machine achieves what Leonard Da Vinci called “Aerial Perspective” or “Atmospheric Perspective.” It was one of those “obvious in retrospect” visual effects. Things at a great distance have more air particulates between the object and the eyes. Thus they look blurrier, their colors grow more muted and cooler. So if you were zooming out, the moon and the village in the background should become blurrier and more muted. The camera might be able to actually pull a plane back away from the camera (or the camera away from the planes) but not enough to achieve this effect. You’d have to re-paint every plane as the camera zoomed out.

Check out the difference in color and resolution of each layer of hills.

Though with computers, I’m sure Pixar has this effect dialed in (62 years later). For me, I’m thinking about how to make effects in Figma to apply, not only to the elements that pop forward (drop shadow, etc.) but that mute and cool the planes behind so that they drop away. Hmm. I think I’m going to go play with that right now.