Jungle Book Winnie The Pooh Same

Over the weekend, a Twitter video went viral, clocking over 10 million views showing reused animations from early Disney movies like The Jungle Book, Winnie The Pooh, and few others.

Not only did it blow people's mind on social media, it also presented an opportunity to explain early animation techniques and why reusing animations was par for the course.

Twitter

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Before we get into why the animations were reused, let's look at the reused animations that recently resurfaced on social media. It shows a couple of scenes from The Jungle Book animated movie and how these animated scenes were reused in subsequent Disney movies.

The Walt Disney Animation Studios officially released The Jungle Book animated movie in 1967, where Mowgli's exploits from the jungle kingdom saw theatrical release across the US. Ten years later, The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh came out in 1977.

This chronology is important to understand, as you watch the linked video below -- the one that went viral on Twitter over the weekend.

I'm so confused right now. 😳😬🤯 pic.twitter.com/gnAExj9bin
— Fred Schultz (@fred035schultz) February 6, 2021

In the split-screen video, you can see how Christopher Robin's animated character (from The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh movie) stunningly mirrors each and every action that Mowgli performs from The Jungle Book animated movie.

Since Mowgli and his actions were animated a whole 10 years before Disney released Winnie The Pooh, it's evident they reused quite a few animated scenes from The Jungle Book into the later movie.

In fact, it's not just Christopher Robin from Winnie The Pooh, but some other characters like Baloo and the monkeys have their actions depicted and reused in other Disney movies that released later down the years. Obviously, this is shocking for first-time viewers and repeat, older viewers watching these scenes in new light.

So why did Disney do it? Were the animators plain and simply lazy? The answer lies in the cumbersome animation techniques that existed over half a century ago when computers hadn't yet been used for animation.

The video above illustrates the painstaking process of creating the first-ever fully traditional animated feature film (also Disney's first ever) -- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs -- back from 1937.

In the absence of computer-generated imagery, every frame of the animated sequence had to be sketched by hand, needing tens of hundreds of illustrators to accomplish. But by the time Disney came around to making The Jungle Book animated movie in 1967, things had improved a bit.

Enter Walt Disney's multiplane camera! This complex piece of engineering allowed Disney animators to do similar to what you saw happen in the shared Twitter video.

The Multiplane camera was like different layers in a Photoshop image, allowing animators to add or remove anything they wanted, while keeping the base animation the same -- which is what you see in the reused animations from The Jungle Book in the Winnie The Pooh and later Disney movies.

Walt Disney movies back in the 1930s till about 1980s were nothing short of living paintings, moving in three-dimensions. The process obviously was labour-intensive and time-consuming in the absence of modern CGI equipment, which hadn't been invented yet. And that's why animations were re-used -- a few times.