Animation is a grueling and slow process and the better it is the longer it takes. Disney animation studios have been cranking out films for almost a hundred years, and while things are now in mostly 3D, they used to have to hand draw every frame of their cartoons.
It’s not too surprising that they would often reuse old animation, but it seems to be a surprise every time someone discovers that they did it again.
Right now, Gen Z is discovering this fact on TikTok, where a side-by-side comparison of The Jungle Book and Winnie the Pooh show that little Mowgli and Christopher Robbin took a very similar path through their respective forests.
It seems to have started with TikTok user @buzzzi_ but it’s not made it to Twitter. The TikTok is set to the track “Paris” by Else, which Insider says is often used to denote something sinister is happening:
https://twitter.com/fred035schultz/status/1358178430722965513
Well, that music definitely makes it creepy!
The only weird thing about it is how often the phenomenon surfaces over the years as people rediscover it. Insider reports that it came up in 2009 when written about by The Daily Mail, then again via Insider in 2015.
When it went viral then, GeekDad interviewed former Disney animator Floyd Norman, who said that the late director Wolfgang “Woolie” Reitherman “liked to play it safe and use stuff he knew would work.”
Norman said, “It was done probably to save time, save money. Although I don’t think it saved much time and I don’t think it saved much money because it was more of a hassle to go dig this old footage out of the archive. It would’ve been easier to just sit down and animate a new scene than to go back and try to retrofit all this old stuff to something new.”
So, it didn’t save money, it saved thought. Cool, wish I could do that. Unfortunately, the youths aren’t taking it well:
@colleenlepp #duet with @buzzzi_ how? Why? What? #disney #disneytiktok #wdw #disneysecrets #disneymovies #childhoodmovies #disneyclassics #disneyanimation #fyp
Discovering that Disney reuses animation is just one step in growing up we all have to go through.