Disney Reused Animation Scenes in Movies

Posted by Debbie Lang | June 17, 2015

A scene from Disney's first full-length cel animated feature film, 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (left), was reused in the 1973 Disney film Robin Hood (right).

Over the years, Disney has amassed thousands of hours of animation. Prior to Toy Story, which ushered in the era of computer animation, Disney animators had to draw each animation cel (short for celluloid) by hand. To make life easier and more importantly, to satisfy the appetites of audiences who were hungry for more animated Disney movies, animators would often draw different characters over old animation cels, essentially creating recycled animation scenes. The process is called rotoscoping, and it was more commonly used to turn scenes of live action into animation by drawing over each frame (today, computers assist with the task).

A YouTube user has put together a video (posted below), which provides several examples of Disney's reused animation scenes. The video isn't proof of any wrongdoing by Disney. Similar well-known and accepted recycling tricks have taken place across the entertainment industry. For example, video games have often used templates and portions of old levels to create new ones, and let's not get started on the music industry, which is filled with songs that have sampled older tracks.