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Paperman is a 2012 black-and-white animated short film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and directed by John Kahrs. The short blends traditional animation and computer animation and is now available online.

For people who missed Wreck-It Ralph at the end of last year, Disney Animation’s Paperman has debuted online, giving everyone a chance to look at the Oscar-nominated animated short that blends hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery in a beautiful, innovative way.

Paperman is different from many recent cartoons, not just because of the limited color palette and retro styling of the characters and the world they live in, but because it doesn’t look like the generic, quasi-photo-realistic CGI that is becoming more and more common. Paperman actually looks as if real people have created it, not machines, and that’s something we haven’t really seen in feature animation for years.

That’s intentional, according to the man behind the short. Director John Kahrs told Cartoon Brew that the origin of Paperman “really came out of working so much with Glen [Keane] on Tangled.” After looking at the work of Keane — a classic Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, among many other projects – Kahrs found himself with a new appreciation for traditional animation and drawing techniques. “I thought, Why do we have to leave these drawings behind? Why can’t we bring them back up to the front of the image again? Is there a way that CG can kinda carry along the hand drawn line in a way that we haven’t done before?”


Paperman‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that Kahrs described as “just like painting on the surface of the CG.”

First the characters and backgrounds were rendered digitally, and then hand-drawn art was layered over those shapes, giving the figures a kind of 3-D quality unseen in old-school animation.

“What you’re seeing is a very stylized CG layer [underneath], but the feel of the image is very flat and lives in between the two,” Kahrs says.  The Meander program, created by Disney software engineer Brian Whited, allows the 2-D hand-drawn artwork to “stick” to the dimensional CG layer underneath. “A cynic would say it’s high-tech rotoscoping,” Kahrs says, referring to an old animation technique of tracing over live-action film stills.

“Really it’s more than that. It’s meant to celebrate the line, and bring it back up to the front of the image again.”The footage in Paperman was then passed back and forth between the 2-D and CG animation teams as they fine-tuned the look of the film — often to ensure it never looked toofine-tuned. “When the line artists would find a more pleasing silhouette, or a better method of expression, we would go back and push the CG into that shape,” says producer Kristina Reed (a former DreamWorks Animation production executive on such films as Madagascar and Over the Hedge.) Other times, she adds, Kahrs would say, “‘It looks too CG right now,’ and want to knock it back.”

Paperman is up for the Best Animated Short Film award at this year’s Academy Awards.

SOURCE  Wired

By kree8tiv

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