For a significant part of my childhood, my ambition was to be an animator. This was not proposed to me at some cheap careers talk however, oh no. From the age of about nine, I was inspired by the legend that is Walt Disney. I would spend hours redrawing his characters from my beautiful collection of Disney books, into sketch books, onto scraps of paper, onto Christmas and Birthday cards. I'd delicately trace my fingers round their outline in the books, be enthralled by their vibrant colours, enchanted by their magic, dreaming that one day I would join Disney, and create characters of my own.
However, by around the age of fourteen, my ambitions came to a tragic end. Not because it was an impossible dream but because the magic of hand-drawn illustration was slowly dissolving. My childhood had seen a technological revolution and it didn't spare art. So today, it was no surprise for me to read that Disney finally officially announced it would not be making any 2D hand-drawn animation for the foreseeable future.
For me, the magic is in the talent; the way something made from the stroke of a single pencil could be made to come alive by the person behind them. It captured me and still captures me to this day, with wonder, with innocence but mostly nostalgia. There is nothing inspiring about the real and the ordinary, and that is what modern day animators are trying to create.
Walt Disney for me is an inspiration. He has touched more childhoods than any other animator with iconic figures such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, he has given young girls all over the world the fairytale dream with the likes of Snow White and Cinderella, and he has truly captured the imagination of the world. Such power is unimaginable and will never be replicated; everything he stood for is at risk of becoming extinct.
Everything is about money today. This declaration has come after their last hand-drawn film, The Princess and the Frog, only, I repeat only, made the equivalent of £178m whilst the likes of 3D movie, Bolt, made £310m. This is tragic. How can you put a price on a childhood? I don't doubt that the younger generation prefer the 3D computer animations, but in the words of Walt Disney 'You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway' and he is right; I would still pay £10 to go and see a hand-drawn film at the cinema, where I can see a little part of the creator in it's characters, as opposed to the mind numbingly bland computer animations. The reason today's children don't appreciate simple, traditional illustration is because this is what's been bred into them, their imaginations were not nurtured, but corrupted with bright lights and glowing perfection. Don't get me wrong, I'm not stuck in the Victorian age, and Shrek and Toy Story are undeniably classics in their own right, but there is nothing more warming and refreshing than the individual grooves of wood made by an ink pen, or the slightly scratchy nature of coloured pencils, or even the grainy colours. It's authentic. It's raw. It's an art.
Technology seems logical. Of course it does, as opposed to drawing by hand every turn of the head, every movement of a hand, every blink of an eye, you can simply copy and paste, Photoshop and crop, but this isn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to spend hours creating one single character, memorising every single wrinkle, every single freckle, every single hair on their head.
Anybody can create this:
But it takes true heart and soul to create something like this:
Walt Disney once said 'I only hope that we don't lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse.' Indeed it will end with a mouse also, but one with buttons that is glued to an imaginatively inferior, robotic hand .
This is where the magic ends.
