The Princess and the Frog is out on Friday and will be Disney’s first hand drawn animation since 2004’s Home on the Range. But it doesn’t sound like we’ll have to wait another five years for the next one, because Disney have a trio of similar projects in the works.

Watch this -

So that’s Winnie the Pooh, The Snow Queen and a mystery project from Princess and the Frog directors Ron Clements and John Musker. Here’s some concept art by Harald Sieperman which may or may not be representative of what the Snow Queen will end up looking like.

While Disney has been turning its back on the form of animation that made its name, some excellent hand drawn films have emerged elsewhere. One of my favourite films of last year was the French animation Persepolis based on the graphic novel of the same name. The Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli has put out some great features too, such as Spirited Away and Howls Moving Castle. But it’s good to see Disney is returning to hand drawn as I, and probably most of the people from my generation, grew up on repeated video viewings of films such as The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, The Sword in the Stone etc.

Call me old fashioned but I think there is artfulness in hand drawn animation that is often absent in computer animated movies. Maybe it’s because the tiny mistakes made by the human hand give the films some sort extra quality or maybe it’s because the computer animated films have too many techies involved in their production and too few actual artists, I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong though, computer animated films can be brilliant and in fact because of the consistency of Pixar’s output it is easy to under-estimate just how good most of their films are, but they can never fully replace hand drawn animation, at least I hope not anyway.

Source: SlashFilm