The animation moves straightly forward these days and we have tonnes of new animated pieces to observe from the worldwide animated studios. Could you imagine that some of the animated films` materials could render for millions of hours, or that to move a character`s hair you need special software? Or the fact that for animating animal characters you need months of observation in Africa? Go ahead and read mind-blowing facts about the popular and very talented animated films.
“Spirited away”
Animation studio: Ghibli
Published in fall 2018, the list of the best non-English films of all time, compiled by the BBC, included only one cartoon: Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”. This is also the first Japanese animated film awarded for the Golden Bear and even Oscar. It is not only the highest-grossing film of the studio “Ghibli” headed by Miyazaki, but also the record holder of the whole film distribution in Japan history. Here are some cool facts about “Spirited away” that will increase your interest in Miyazaki`s work.
Miyazaki draws his characters on his own, carefully creating the appearance of each one, and making a detailed world in which he lives. The director stays undivided with pencil and paper: No 3D, minimal computer involvement – that`s his creative process. Technologies and attractions are not the key parts in his film creation even today. carefully drawn and paradoxically invented large-scale fairy tales, where only the details of the second plane can be viewed endlessly.
The story of “Spirited away” had no end
A story so rich and compelling with multiple storylines couldn`t drown without a script? That’s right, but not when it comes to Miyazaki. Mostly all of his works are being created informally, without a finished script and with the main idea and characters only. “I don’t have the story finished and ready when we start work on a film. I usually don’t have the time,” – that’s what he said in his interview for Midnight Eye. “We never know where the story will go but we just keep working on the film as it develops”.
It could be a “Lord of the Rings” in the anime world
Still, such a creative organic flow, when the story is being written in the process of animating, causes some difficulties as well. Without a script, it’s hard enough to simplify the ideas, even though it is important to deliver the message to a wide audience. That’s what happened with the “Spirited away”. The version intended to be more than 3 hours! Of course, the director needed to make it fit the run time – 125 minutes.
“Frozen”
Animation studio: Disney
The story of 2 sisters that hit the entire world was a massive commercial success and earned nearly $1.3 billion. It now is ranked as the highest-grossing animated film of all time! Wanna know some icy facts?
New is a perfectly forgotten past
Whether it’s obvious or not, but this animated film is based on a fairy tale by the plentiful Hans Christian Andersen “The Snow Queen”. As well as a little Mermaid, and Thumbelina… Let’s just say that Disney did a great job of modernizing old golden stories. Here comes the interesting part: Disney hides the reference to Andersen in “Frozen”. Just say the 4 names of the main characters quickly: Hans Kristoff Anna Sven. 
Hair-work pays off!
Disney animators developed software called “Tonic” for only 1 purpose – to animate Elsa’s hair! Just for you to compare: еn average blond human has 150,000 strands of hair on their heads, but Elsa’s hair had 400,000 individual strands animated with the help of “Tonic”. Here comes the Queen.
2 000 Snowflakes?
Animators also created a snowflake generator – a special program to build an amount of 2, 000 different snowflake shapes that could be used for the animated film.
“Klaus”
Animation studio: SPA Studios
The animation process of Netflix`s “ Klaus” explains why this animated movie became a real banger. Unlike most animated movies today, the characters of Klaus are not CGI (Computer-Generated Imaginary), and can`t even be considered 3D. It’s all just the trick of the light! Even if you are not even close to the animation, but you are at least a cartoon-lover – the facts below will shock you.
All the animation is hand-drawn
All of the characters were drawn by a hand. The animators used live-action reference videos of themselves as a guide. 
The light made 2D look 3D
About 300 people including 40 animators worked on the animated Klaus film for over 2 years. Why did it take so long to create? The idea of the director Sergio Pablos was to create a film about the origin of Santa Klaus and make it nostalgic like 90’s Disney movies, thus 2D would be the best fit for the story. But he wanted it to be advanced as well. The animated company invented a new technology of lightning which they called “KLaS” – Klaus Light and Shadow.
The “KLaS” tools allowed animators to paint with light, using numbers of different types of lightning in various combinations. For example, key light or ambient light. With the 3D light is getting automatically to objects, but with 2D it’s way more complicated. Lightning made characters look more real, as well as helped to tell the story. Here is what the director said due to his 2D choice:
“I never looked at a 3D as an evolution of 2D. For me, it’s just a split, another way to make animation”.
Around 3,160 scenic layers were created
To make the backgrounds pop and look 3D like the characters, the animators used several different techniques, such as multiplanes, where you have layers on top of layers to give the illusion of depth.
“Lion King”
Animation studio: Disney
Creating a nostalgic animated film that references the classics – Lion film cartoon of 1984 and making it hyper-realistic as well is a tough challenge. And it required millions of hours of animating. Let’s open up the facts about this animated hit in 2019.
Yes, that’s exactly the number of animated parts in the “Lion King”. It took 77 million hours of rendering through all of the departments as MPC films estimate! In simple words, if you take a simple computer it would take 8,790 years to render the material and finish the movie. Impressive?
African adventures of the team
Animating animals so they could look real is hard work. Live-action and CGI animation was used for that ambitious live-action remake. But how to make it look real, organic? The animals were a combination of storyboards, sketches, and exhaustive research. John Favreau (the director) and the team took a trip to Africa, where they observed real animals in their natural habitat plus, they could get close to the animals at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida. That helped to build the world, or would I say get closer to repeat the Fauna-world. They also read anatomy books and scientific papers and watched hours of documentaries and other reference footage. 
“The first Simba-scene was a fake” – mother Nature
Remember the iconic cartoon-scene where Rafiki holds a new-born Simba for all the pride lands to see? Well, mandrills can`t stand like that, as we find out from the new “Lion King” work. Thus, in the new film, it seats and holds Simba. Though animators made it as in real life, the difference barely features, cause staying close to the first Lion king cartoon was important to make people feel emotional to the new-old characters.
“Isle of Dogs” by Wes Anderson
Animation studio: Annapurna Pictures
Wes Anderson’s movie could be spotted from a mile away, but will you spot his stop-motion animated movie? Let’s get through the coolest facts about “The Isle of Dogs”- a film set in dystopian Japan overrun by dogs, which was, in reality, shot on massive handcrafted sets in a studio. Through stop-motion is an old-fashioned art form it is not going anywhere.
Andy Gents’ team of 70 people in charge of the Isle of Dogs dolls created about 1,100 dolls and more than 2,000 secondary characters for extras. It took 16 weeks to create one doll. At the very beginning of production, Wes Anderson was offered 60-70 prototypes of the main characters, from which he chose suitable ones. 
Fur or “the hardest part”
“It was the hardest part in this film to manage fur so it moves realistically” – as the head of the puppet department Andy Jet says. When animators work with the human-charactered stop motion films, that is easier since animators usually place facial expressions on the puppets with silicon skin. It’s much tougher when you are dealing with 4 legged characters covered with fur that you can not remove.
So, moving an animal’s fur and body-puppets was the animators’ work here too. Animators in “Isle of Dogs” moved further and used pins of wooden sticks to move the dogs’ eyeballs and lips to give them real emotions and expressions.
Anderson wanted to play
Andy Gents’ team of 70 people in charge of the Isle of Dogs dolls created about 1,100 dolls and more than 2,000 secondary characters for extras. It took 16 weeks to create one doll. At the very beginning of production, Wes Anderson was offered 60-70 prototypes of the main characters, from which he chose suitable ones. There is no need to say that those 5 animated films are worth watching or even re-watching. Especially now, when you could pay attention to details and rare facts about them. Enjoy!
