An appreciation thread.

Our last shot was approved out of animation on #Frozen2 yesterday, so I wanted to once again talk about the animation superheroes at @DisneyAnimation. (1/11)

Making movies (and this is especially true of animated movies at Disney) is about trying to coordinate a huge number of people in just the right way to create magic on a timeline under which it should barely be possible to make something coherent. (2/11)

Frozen 2 tested our limits. It was hard in ways that you will likely never see, because a ton of people worked very hard to make it look easy. I don't think I'm overstating it when I say that it represents at least twice as much animation work as some of our other films. (3/11)

The hero cast is huge. They spend much of the movie all on screen at once, holding hands and running and singing and laughing and crying. These are time-consuming, difficult, not-always-rewarding things to animate and all of it needs to tell a story. The animators did it. (4/11)

The designs are very complex and require careful attention. Anna has different rules than Elsa has different rules than Kristoff has different rules than Olaf has different rules than Sven. This is true from how we shape their eyes to the way they stand and how they act. (5/11)

The animators needed to bring these characters that you already know to life in ways that feel both familiar and surprising, which meant every animator needed to hold all of these rules in their head and use them to make choices that felt spontaneous and new. (6/11)

As always, we were very picky about animation. We wanted eyelash overlap and cheek squish and neck tension and for the eyes to be looking in the same direction on characters whose eyes very much did not want to look in the same direction. They did that stuff, too. (7/11)

Virtually every sequence in this film has some big component that required we work closely with other departments in ways we'd never done before. Animators were often building a performance with someone else without being able to see what the other half would look like. (8/11)

All of this while trying to tell the best story we can. This often meant animating a beautiful performance and then being asked to try something different. Sometimes it meant doing that a few times on entire sections of the film. (9/11)

With the ground constantly shifting underneath them (sometimes literally), the animators brought all of the detail and attention and collaboration to every shot, occasionally multiple times, with the hope that maybe the movie would be imperceptibly better for it. (10/11)

So. Thank you to the people who spent so much of their time hitting dumb notes (sorry), building these performances, and doing everything at 100%. You are, as ever, cool geniuses and nice people that I am grateful to get to work with every day.

Good work, ya'll. (11/11)