Basically the animators had access to the original drawings and traced the new characters on top frame-by-frame using a light table.
It’s a variation on the use of “rotoscoping.” Still a lot of work, but less work than trying to parse out the nuances of character motion from scratch.
Big duh moment…thanks, I’m on my 3rd cup of coffee and still couldn’t wrap my brain around it.
I recall visiting one of their archives, and they have a huge collection of backgrounds that they’ve reused over and over as well.
In many (most?) of these cases it was also live-action reference that was traced and re-used. Disney did a LOT of that.
The japanese cartoonist Ozamu Tezuka, Joe Barbera and William Hanna also did some of these production “hacks”.
Of course their works were stunning compared to Clutch Cargo.
Thank you so much for making me remember Clutch Cargo.
12 years of therapy, down the drain.
“They all said it wasn’t possible to make an entire episode of an animated TV series with a budget of just five drawings, but we sure showed them!” —Cambria Productions
Pixar had some fun with that style of animation with The Adventures of Mr. Incredible & Pals, included as a bonus feature with the DVD of the movie.
Apart from the repetitiveness of the topic I think that this discussion is an interesting one to have.
My take would be that in both CGI and hand cell animation the ethos has always been to reference ‘character’ motion from real life or other animated source material… watch any PIXAR ‘making of’ and you’ll see an example of this. I’d imagine in a time consuming process in a studio production environment (economically driven) that they would find it more expedient and money saving to replicate motion of a scene if it has been done before… Why reinvent the wheel?
I’m thinking if this is the case then there’s a whole new can of worms to be opened re intellectual property rights!!
Bah! This kind of thing is a stain on the animation industry. Its not like Gertie re-used motion! Each frame was unique!
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