Disney’s Zootopia Breaks Record as 2016’s Top Feature Animation
In terms of box-office success and supreme animation, 2015 may have been largely dominated by Pixar Animation Studios. Who would forget the Academy Award winner for Best Animated Picture, “Inside Out”? But that was just last year and a new contender has claimed the title for the dominion in feature animation. This year’s top-earning feature animation film is no other than Walt Disney Animation Studio’s Zootopia. Garnering over $1 billion in box office worldwide, Zootopia is now the highest grossing animated film of 2016.
Zootopia owes its success to its talented animators and production team. After losing to their competitors in previous years, directors Byron Howard (“Bolt”) and Rich Moore (“Wreck-It-Ralph”) have teamed up along with Jared Bush for Disney’s best animated film yet.
Since the movie is set in a world where animals populate the civilized society instead of humans, the production team had to painstakingly study the physical features of 64 different animals to create a life-like effect down its smallest detail. Disney engineers even had to create their own software to achieve this look and they called it iGroom. iGroom helped animators create a polished finish for each character. Engineers also had to use Nitro, a real–time display software, for the realistic renders of even the subtle facial expression changes in the movie. To top it all off, Zootopia had an amazing team of environment CG experts to create the superb locations all throughout the movie. Other tools were also used to make Zootopia the best feature animation it is now like the Bonsai, a plant and tree generation tool which helps create visual plants and forests. And then there is Hyperion, a rendering system which has been used exclusively by Walt Disney Animation Studio for their animated movies. This surely is considered as Disney’s most detailed animation ever made and this won’t be the last.
HOMAGE PAID TO THE PIONEERS OF ANIMATION BY GOOGLE DOODLE BY USING THE AGE-OLD TECHNIQUE
Right at the time when the first ever animation film came into existence there has been immense development in the field and it is now almost impossible to imagine the hard work the pioneer animation filmmakers had to go through. Google Doodle makes the attempt to pay the much awaited as well as necessary homage to the woman who was the first animation filmmaker in the world. Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Reiniger (born in Germany in 1899) was the creator of 40+ animated films (her works include the masterpiece of ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed created in 1926) and the oldest surviving personality to have created a feature-length animation film.
Charlotte’s work was a real challenging one as she had to make her creation successful with the help of crude technology of ‘silhouette animation’ (the style in which cut-outs made from cardboards are lit from the back for the creation of black silhouettes). The mentioned silhouettes were then filmed with great expertise (and often extremely painful). The one and half minute doodle makes use of this old method to create something that seems to be super attractive (even when the expertise of modern equipment of the present era taken into consideration). Olivia Huynh, the person behind the creation of the mentioned doodle has been a great admirer of Charlotte and her works and admits that working on this particular project has resulted in the increase of her respect and attraction to the animation legend.
The detailed story presented by Olivia shows how Charlotte Reiniger prepares a flower cut out and walks through the several scenes (which are already populated with several other characters) and then finally plants the flower in the necessary one. The final scene shows how all the characters come together in a scene to thank their creator and present her with their own flowers.
Toy Story 3, an American 3D computer-animated film produced by Pixar Animations
Toy Story 3 is an American 3D computer-animated comedy-drama film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by Lee Unkrich and was released worldwide in the Disney Digital 3-D, RealD, and IMAX 3D formats.
The plot of the film revolves around the various toys of the 17 years old boy Andy. As he prepares to leave for college, he decided to take along only Woody with him and put all other toys in a bag only to be stored properly but Andy’s mother mistakenly takes the bag to the curb for garbage pickup. As a result, the toys felt that Andy wanted to throw them away and escape to move to the donation box. Woody follows them but is unable to convince them of the mistake initially. Later woody convinces the other toys that they weren’t dumped and leads them on an expedition back home.
The film features an ensemble voice cast with Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, Jodi Benson, and John Morris reprising their roles from the previous films, and Ned Beatty, Michael Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg, Blake Clark (replacing Jim Varney), Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schaal, Bonnie Hunt, and Jeff Garlin joining the returning cast.
The film was made with major challenges to make it look organic. Every leaf and blade of grass had to be created as a sense of history need to be created. 27 animators worked on the film using 400 computer models to animate the characters. Each character was either created out of clay or was first modeled off of a computer-drawn diagram. It was only after the animators had a model, articulation and motion controls were coded. Toy Story 3 received several Academy Awards and grossed over $1 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2010.
The Art of Animation 
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