My favorite thing about this post is that it’s at least the third time I’ve seen this topic on BoingBoing. 
You could fill an entire tumblr with recycled BoingBoing posts, I imagine!
…though this is the first time I’ve seen it. (a) That one scene in Robin Hood was lifted from a lot of places, and (b) how much time needs to pass before your “recycling” becomes more of an “homage” (Sleeping Beauty / Beauty and the Beast)?
The earliest clips are from when the technical pioneers and innovators did something to put Disney on the map. Everyone after that, not so much.
The opening of “Frozen” is very similar to the Opening of “Dumbo” (the roustabout song).
This is why I always say Helene Stanley was one of the most influential women in film - She was the body and movement model for Aurora and Cinderella, setting the standards for Disney, and not incidentally a skiddillion little girls.
Hey, there’s nothing shameful about doing a little recycling now and then.
There is only one Disney movie. The rest are eigenstates.
… and it keeps getting funnier… every… single… time… I see it!
In the days before using computers for animation, I wonder just how much is saved by “recycling” the scenes… is it possibly more likely that they re-used the live model footage they used for the animation, thus not having to hire and film live actors to film to base the animation off of?
I guess I don’t know enough about the animation process to understand exactly what was copied since it looks to me like nearly everything is different enough to require completely new art. Is there some stage of 2D animation that involves skeletal mockups? Is that what they would have reused?
footage of live models, I believe. which is likely what they were “recycling”
Only Amber is real, all else are shadows
It all seems to converge on “Jungle Book”(1967) and “Robin Hood”(1973), doesn’t it?
It is worth noting that there are heavy socio-economic powers at play behind the scenes here: in the late 1960’s / early 1970’s, Xerox animation had started to really reshape the animation business by putting the inking departments out of work and forcing studio execs to radically rethink not only what animated features was supposed to look like, but also what the production time frame and workflow was going to be in the future.
Add to that the fact that Walt had passed away in 1966. Disney directors essentially had to re-define everything for themselves at work.
Read great moments in recycled Boing Boing articles.
Recycling between Baloo in the Jungle Book and Little John in Robin Hood actually makes a lot of sense though, they were even voiced by the same actor (Phil Harris).
I remember being somewhat confused by this as a child, since they were obviously both cartoons, but with the obvious similarities in voice, mannerisms, and the fact that they were both BEARS (when there was no reason for Little John to be a bear at all, he could have been a buffalo, a hippo, a panther, etc) made the concept too oddly similar to Harrison Ford being both Indiana Jones and Han Solo.
To me it is the worst one because it is just a palette swap, while the others are just guiding the fluid animated movements from one hand drawing to another hand drawing. It allowed Disney to lower production cost with very little impact to the story.
Same bear actor.
But those were both Doctorow-flavored.
This one is sprinkled with Pesco.
One has a bow-tie, and looks in a completely different direction.
It changes everything. It’s like the influence of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t reuse or paint over cels. They would have been looking at the original animation cleanup drawings, or perhaps projecting the previous movie and using it about like a rotoscope. Disney was best when they used live action for reference, but not tracing. Fleischer was the inventor of the process, and always used it as a tool rather than a template.
Maybe just a coincidence, but most of the movies that re-used the animation (I’d except BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, I guess) sucked. ROBIN HOOD felt like it was re-using a lot more than just animation, for instance. The whole movie felt secondhand, like a re-hash of THE JUNGLE BOOK without any real feeling or imagination anywhere in it.
