it’s because disney’s animated shorts show new technology/innovation that will be used to the next feature film. it has always been that way. i remember before up came out, there was a disney short “partly cloudy” (which was shown in “the incredibles” i believe) where the technology used on the clouds was the ones used in UP.

It`s not just 2D, but a 2D 3D blend. the 3D elements wouldnt blend as well if it were all 2D, and let`s see the short before judging more.

The reason this is so amazing is because it speeds up the artists’ workflow an incredible amount and as they say, time is money. In a typical 2D animation, you have 24 frames per second. Usually in cartoons they drop it down to 12 and just double every frame. That means for every minute of footage you have 720 frames all drawn by hand. Now imagine that it takes a talented disney ink artist (not drawing the whole scene just inking it) 20 minutes to ink a single frame (they’d have to be super human but humour me) that would translate to 240 hours of work just for one minute of footage. Now lets say this Disney artist is paid $40/hr (they probably make more) that translates to $9,600 to pay them to draw 1 minute of footage.

Now take a look at this new system. The end result is something that is almost indistinguishable from traditional 2D animation. In fact I’d bet that if they didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t have known. Now instead of taking 240 hours to ink 1 minute of footage you’re down to 40 hours because you only have to ink the first and the last frames (20 mins per frame x 120 frames) and then the computer processes the in between frames. That translates to $1,600 that disney has to pay this inker instead of $9,600. Now you know why they don’t do it all by hand. Its not talent, its money and time.