I came back to see if The Black Hole was on your list. That would be an interesting one too, The Black Hole was actually one of the last movies to use the hybrid hand drawn animation/live action approach. It’s hard to tell though because it’s only used for the special effects like the black hole itself.

[–] carbonari_sandwich@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not familiar with it, but it looks really interesting. I might have to go seek this one out.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It’s one of my favorites but definitely not like other Disney movies at the time or anything that came before or since really. I freely admit that I have nostalgia goggles for it and that it’s definitely one of those love it or hate it kind of movies.

One of the more interesting things for me in addition to the animation is it was planned to be their Star Wars. There was a huge merchandising push behind it that had board games, and action figures, and a novelization, etc. and there were planned sequels. Of course it went nowhere because the movie was very much a love it or hate it kind of movie.

AFAIK, they’ve actually tried to remake it two or three times in the last 30 years or so and every time it’s run into development hell because people have wildly different interpretations of what the main theme or point of the movie is just for starters.

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There were quite a few movies that used this technique after that, including some produced by Disney (most notably Who Framed Rodger Rabbit). It was pretty common, at least for effects shots, will into the 90s and early 2000s.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes and no, I was specifically talking about the practical effect of combining animation with live action. Every movie that came after had some form of computer assistance whether in camera control or in using CG for the actual combination even if the animation was still hand drawn or in some other way. The Black Hole used some computer help but at that time there were only a couple entities, like the newly formed ILM, that could do things the new way and they were all tied up with other projects like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Alien. So a bunch of the shots in The Black Hole were done using the same double exposure techniques used in Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks among others.

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It sounds like you are trying to describe the sodium vapor process, which would be a more accurate way of saying this. Hand drawn animation was used a lot, this specific process was not, and the differentiation is not "using computers" or "CG". It was a Disney developed process that was not used by anyone else, so obviously it would only appear in Disney films or collaborations.

Its a pretty elegent way of doing this and it looks better than even a lot of modern computer equivalents because it essentially places the animated sequences on the same plane as the live action. It also required a lot of bespoke equipment and knowledge that no one was able to effectively copy.

Its why the animated sequences in the films that used it look better than a lot of the stuff that came after.