Animated Film Making Process

The reviews were negative because people had very high expectation for this movie (as it marked 100 years of Disney) and they got "just another animated musical". I watched with my wife and we enjoyed it, but we had zero expectations coming in.

Looks like they've updated the page with Wish as the example, whereas the old version used Encanto (first published 2021 according to Wayback)

Thanks! From reading those older comments, the actual process is much more chaotic and iterative, closer to how Hayao Miyazaki creates his movies. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30275329

For most studios, the film is visualized and composed normally, then the "flat" version is used as the left eye of the stereo version. An additional set of render passes is made for the right eye using an offset camera (sometimes, if you're creative with compositing you may not need to do an actual render). This process also allows a stereo version to be created relatively cheaply if the client decides they want to do one halfway through production...

Source: Worked on several stereo animated and live action features and designed stereo compositing versioning process.

It seems from what it says further down, the 2d version is the left eye.

See https://disneyanimation.com/process/?drawer=/process/stereo/

On desktop PC, however, it's a hot mess because they didn't account for people using a scroll wheel on their mouse.

Because it does not give the results the artists desire.

There's a bit of an industry adage here: Every improvement and enhancement in compute performance enables an equal and opposite advancement in software capabilities and complexity, resulting in render times staying the same. While a fairly broad and generalized statement, it is reasonably true for a lot of aspects of our industry.

For fun I asked Kagi "why haven't render times gotten better over the years?". The results were pretty spot on:

"""

Increased Complexity: As software evolves, the complexity of scenes and effects increases. Features like advanced lighting, volumetrics, and motion blur require more computational power, often offsetting any improvements in hardware.

Higher Quality Expectations: The demand for higher resolution and quality (e.g., 4K and beyond) leads to longer render times. Users expect more detailed visuals, which inherently take longer to produce.

Hardware Limitations: While hardware has improved, the efficiency gains may not be enough to keep up with the growing demands of modern rendering techniques. For example, ray tracing can dramatically increase render times, and not all hardware can handle it efficiently.

Software Optimization: Not all software updates prioritize optimization. Some updates may introduce new features that, while enhancing capabilities, also increase render times.

Rendering Techniques: Different rendering engines and techniques (e.g., CPU vs. GPU rendering) have varying performance characteristics. Depending on the setup, some may not see substantial improvements.

Overall, while there are advancements in technology, the balance between quality, complexity, and hardware capabilities often results in stagnant or even increased render times.

"""

Because value creation is bottlenecked by human? The value of technology contained within a product is at most zero, so better tech only ties investment rate of return ever tighter to human factors, contrary to naive assumption that adding more tech should progressively dehumanize processes for exponentially more rewarding returns.

I should think the bar has been lowered for film-making of all kinds due to technology. YouTube has hosted an increasing number of "fan films". I guess I'm just a little surprised to have not come across more "garage films" that are less derivative.