The Saturday Slow-Down: Character Close-Up

The last time we took a Saturday Slow-Down...

...we were approaching the ends of the Disney Animation Building and the Animation Academy.  Today, we're going to wrap up our tour of the building and spend some time checking out the awesome spectacle of the Character Close-Up room.

What makes the Character Close-Up work so well is the Zoetrope.  Awesome to watch, awesomely difficult for us to pronounce.

The closest that we can come to describing it is that it is old, classic animation technique brought into the new century; if that's even correct.  We've probably all seen animators display "moving" characters using the flip technique; drawing characters on the corner of pieces of paper in different stages of movement and then "flipping" the corners of the paper to bring about the illusion of the drawings "moving".

The Zoetrope is the same principle in theory.  This might help explain it a little better:

So, that's how it works.  You can see in the top picture all the little Toy Story characters in different "motions".  Then the box begins spinning around at blazing speeds, begins a fast seizure-inducing strobe effect, and it looks like all the Toy Story character begin hopping, see-sawing, ball-rolling, lassoing and riding like the wind on Bullseye all over the place.  It's really neat to watch, not so easy to photograph (all you get is a white light like in Poltergeist which we should all stay away from at all costs).

Whee!

If you've ever been interested in animation at all, or how it works, then this is the room for you.  Even for people like us who have no real ties to drawing (and as shown in our Animation Academy article a few weeks back, we're not terribly good at it), it's a pretty cool place just to stand and watch, and the kids love it!  There's always someone hanging around watching it all go off.  Definitely worth seeing.

We usually spend about 10 minutes or so watching the Zoetrope do its thing, and if you're still with us at this point, you've almost hit the two hour mark in the building so far; all fun, mostly interactive, shaded and air-conditioned, and some of the best animation in the world.  How great was that?

We hope you've enjoyed our little soiree in the Animation Building.  As we said way back in the beginning, it's one of our favorite places to hang out in The Park.  They are currently reworking the clips and music shown in the lobby (so right now if you go in you're going to be treated to multi-colored panels and not much else, save a message saying they're being worked on), but that aside it's still one of our favorite places to be.  We hope that by showing you a little bit of each, if you have the chance, you'll give it a look and it will become one of your favorite places, too.

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