“I’ve been doing it all backwards,” animator Aaron Blaise says, chuckling.

It’s a joke, but also kind of true: He began his career at Disney, working on classics like Aladdin and The Lion King before serving as the director of 2003’s Brother Bear – one of the last hand-drawn films the company ever produced before switching over to computer-generated animation. Preferring pencil and paper to screens and software, Blaise left Disney not long after, becoming an instructor specializing in animal drawing. Garnering over a million subscribers on YouTube, he eventually decided to make another film – also about bears. He would produce it entirely by himself, in his home office, and he’d do it just like they used to back at Disney: without machines doing the job for him.

More than three years and 11,000 individual drawings later, "Snow Bear" – about a lonely polar bear in search of friends on the arctic expanse – is now available on YouTube. It’s a love letter to the craft, on par with Richard Williams’ Prologue or Glen Keane’s The Duet, as well as a tear-jerking swan song of an artist at the end of their career and the top of their game. It’s also incredibly nostalgic. Not just for those who grew up watching 2D animated films, but for the people that made them as well. Both technically and thematically, "Snow Bear" can’t help but make you reflect on how a timeless and beloved art form – the bedrock of Disney as a brand and company – all but disappeared in the wake of technological innovation.

Truly, it’s hard to overstate just how disrupting the emergence of CG was to traditionally-trained animators like Blaise. Many had dreamed of working at Disney ever since they were old enough to hold a crayon, and thought they’d stay with the studio until the day they retired. While some adapted to the new norm, others stayed behind, searching for hand-drawn work in TV or as freelancers, or leaving the industry altogether. Though many of them, like Blaise, loved watching CG films, they just didn’t enjoy working on them. For animators like Blaise, their heart was in 2D, not 3D – and 2D, sadly, was on the out.

While blockbuster CG-animated films like Toy Story 5 dominate the big screen today, let's take a look back at how hand-drawn animation succumbed to this new form.

Above: Former Disney animator Aaron Blaise is still drawing by hand. His short film "Snow Bear" is available on YouTube now.

End of an Era

The history of CG goes back further than you’d think. At Disney, the technology was being deployed in a noticeable way in its animated films as early as 1986, for the many rotating gears inside Big Ben during the climax of The Great Mouse Detective. Throughout the Disney Renaissance, CG helped render scenes too complex or cumbersome to draw by hand, from the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King to the moving camera of the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast. Then in 1995 came Toy Story, the first feature-length film to be animated entirely using computers – no drawing involved.

Everyone in the industry who saw Woody and Buzz butt heads knew that a new era was about to begin, though what exactly that era would look like remained – for the time – unclear. “Disney had a distribution deal with Pixar, so us 2D guys actually got to see an early test screening,” Blaise tells IGN over Zoom, seated near the very desk where he drew "Snow Bear." “I still remember walking out of the room and someone going, ‘Well, that’s it. We’re done.’”

They weren’t alone. According to Tom Sito, an animator and animation historian who worked on The Prince of Egypt, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and many Disney Renaissance films, practical effects artists had felt the same way after seeing the groundbreaking CG in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan back in 1982. “There go our jobs,” they’d said, Sito tells IGN. “Some stuck their promotional posters in the garbage as soon as they left the theater.”

Above: The Project Genesis animation from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Not everyone was in low spirits, though. A self-described “eternal optimist,” Blaise belonged to a camp of animators who believed that “there was enough room for both of us” – that, moving forward, Disney was going to produce both 2D and 3D animated films, working together side by side like The Lion King’s Timon and Pumbaa.

‘I Feel Like a F#@king Puppeteer’

To their credit, for a while it seemed like this would indeed be the case. While Disney’s animation studio in California switched over to CG during the 2000s, their other location in Orlando – near the Disney World Parks – continued work on 2D projects like Lilo & Stitch, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Brother Bear. But the more these films struggled to keep up with the critical and commercial success of Toy Story, Ice Age, and Shrek, the clearer it became that this division of labor would not last. “In hindsight,” Aaron admits, “the pessimists saw the writing on the wall a lot earlier than I did.”

Above: "Technological Threat," an Oscar-nominated short about 2D animators being replaced by computers, lost – poetically – to Pixar’s "Tin Toy."

Disney went through several rounds of layoffs during this time, each of them heartbreaking to those involved. “Around 1999, we were called onto the sound stage where they had filmed Mary Poppins,” an animator who spoke to IGN under condition of anonymity (and described themselves as “low on the totem pole”) recalls. “Hundreds of us were going to be let go in chunks. I was fortunate to be among the first to leave, because friends who stayed told me things got really ugly. It’s human nature, I suppose – desperation brings out the worst in people.”

Those who weren’t let go set to work learning CG. Though some adapted quicker than others, the transition was far from easy. For one, animators had to familiarize themselves with a variety of intimidating and constantly evolving programs, including Softimage and – later – Maya. Beyond that, CG animation is just fundamentally different from its 2D counterpart. In 2D, each pose is drawn from scratch, then filmed together with other drawings to create an illusion of movement. 3D, by contrast, is more like the virtual equivalent of Claymation: You set up your model in one pose, then move on to the next.

Different though it was, some welcomed the change. Sandro Cleuzo, a Brazilian animator who worked on Space Jam, The Iron Giant, and – more recently – Netflix’s Nimona, had a friend who was among the first to make the switch. “His hand-drawn work is amazing,” he tells IGN, “and yet he told me, ‘Sandro, I love CG because I no longer have to draw!’ I was so surprised by that. I always say 2D animation is a combination of drawing and acting. I love both, but some people just want to focus on the acting. And with CG, they could do that.”

'I was doing everything on paper, with watercolors, but the executives couldn’t see how my vision would translate to 3D. That’s when I realized I had to bite the bullet.'“

Others, meanwhile, despised computer animation for this very reason. “I remember when Pres Romanillos, a great animator who died of cancer way too young, moved to DreamWorks to work in CG,” Sito says. “I asked him, ‘What’s it like?’ And he goes, ‘I feel like fucking puppeteer.’”

Cleuzo felt similarly about CG: “I did the training, and was a quick learner. Colleagues who went on to work at Pixar and DreamWorks looked over at my desk and went, ‘How are you doing that!?’ I didn’t find it difficult – just boring. I didn’t like the idea of animating with a mouse.”

Blaise also struggled with CG. “I was doing development for a computer-animated film,” he recalls. “And I was doing everything on paper, with watercolors, but the executives couldn’t see how my vision would translate to 3D. That’s when I realized I had to bite the bullet.” Like Cleuzo, though, he never finished his training: CG just wasn’t as rewarding. “Hand-drawn is more spontaneous. With CG, there are so many steps you have to go through before you actually start animating. But in 2D, I can have an idea, draw it, and – boom – it exists. It’s magic.”

While Blaise doesn’t regret sticking with 2D, others say they do. “They were teaching us to work with Maya,” the anonymous animator says, “but I never went further than learning how to bounce a ball. I don’t know why. But now pretty much all of the jobs are in CG, and I realize it doesn’t matter what tool you’re using. 2D or 3D, it’s about the performance – about bringing characters to life. I guess I was just stubborn.”

Eventually, Cleuzo also lost his job at Disney. He was asked to learn CG so he could work on Chicken Little, the company’s first CG feature, but declined. If he wouldn’t adapt, two options remained: draw storyboards for other CG films, or move to Florida to work on My Peoples, a film which – in that short-lived spirit of coexistence – would include both 2D and CG animation. Cleuzo chose the latter, but sadly the film never made it to cinemas: Several months into development, the project was cancelled, and the Florida studio – the would-be home of Disney’s 2D animation moving forward – closed its doors.

‘We Thought Nothing Could Stop Us’

“It’s hard to understand if you weren’t there, what it meant to people,” the anonymous animator continues. “It was our identity. I had wanted to work at Disney since I was eight. I applied three times and finally got hired to work on Pocahontas, and thought I was going to be there until I was old. People were depressed. I heard rumors there was a suicide. I don’t know if that’s true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. You take away someone’s identity, they have nothing left. They feel like life’s not worth living.”

Above: "A Computer Animated Hand," one of the first bits of CG footage.

The industry changed quickly. “Back in 1994, when The Lion King came out, we were at the top of our game,” Blaise reminisces. “We thought nothing could stop us, that we’d never go away. And yet, several years later, we were gone.” In retrospect, though, he isn’t all that surprised at how things turned out. “CG was this cool, shiny new thing, while our 2D stuff was becoming… I wouldn’t say formulaic, but there was definitely a formula, and the Broadway musical thing was just getting old.”

“You could almost set your watch to them,” Sito adds. “First 10 minutes – the ‘I want this’ song. Twenty minutes in, the funny side-character song – ‘Friend Like Me’ and the like. Then the villain song, the love duet, the fight song, and then the credits. When they did Toy Story, they really had to fight. ‘No music,’ they insisted. The suits couldn’t believe it. ‘What do you mean, no music!?’”

Just about every person IGN spoke to for this article agrees: Pixar didn’t beat Disney at the box office because audiences preferred 3D over 2D, but because Toy Story was a damn good film – so good, Sito emphasizes, that you actually “forgot you were looking at a computer-generated image.” Pixar’s subsequent successes – on par with the Disney Renaissance – weren’t due to the fact that CG is somehow inherently superior to hand-drawn, but because the company gave its employees the creative freedom to deliver the very best films they possibly could.

Ironically, CG now appears to be facing many of the same challenges that 2D was all those years ago. “Everybody’s getting tired of the ‘Pixar look,’” Sito notes, “the dough-faced kids with the little bean mouths. I can’t tell one from the other, and don’t ask me what happened in Wish or Elio because I don’t remember, though I can still recite all the lyrics from The Little Mermaid. Once again, there’s all this sameness because executives don’t want to mess with the recipe. ‘Let’s do Toy Story 5!’ No. Toy Story ended with Toy Story 3. When they gave the toys to that little girl – that’s it. It’s over.”

“You’re going to be the victim of your own success every time,” Blaise concludes. “That’s just how the world works. Today, Disney has found a lot of success with their live-action remakes, and they’ll keep making them until they’re no longer successful. If you have a machine, you’re going to keep using it until it breaks.”

CG was, of course, hardly the first technology to upend the entertainment industry. In the 1920s, sound killed silent filmmaking. During the 1950s, color replaced black and white. Nothing lasts, and there are no happily ever afters. “During the Golden Age of Hollywood,” Sito says, “there was work everywhere. If Warner wasn’t hiring, Paramount was. Then, in the sixties, all the backlots were bulldozed and turned into shopping malls. A lot of them also felt like their world had died, and nobody had told them why.”

Ironically, CG now appears to be facing many of the same challenges that 2D was all those years ago. “

Every innovation has its cost. Sito points to the team of assistant animators who tracked all of the spots on the dogs in 101 Dalmatians, making sure they followed along with the movement of the bodies. “With CG, you press a button. It’s called texture-mapping.”

CG not only made certain jobs obsolete, but it also phased out a unique, decades-old work environment that many employees saw as their second home and personal happy place. “Walt Disney wanted his artists to stay sharp, so he brought in teachers and effectively created a school within the company,” the anonymous animator says. “Somehow, even in this hyper-corporate environment, that culture of continuous learning persisted. I got to take painting classes, even though I didn’t work as a painter. To me, that was the most amazing part of working there.”

On the flipside, CG also opened doors. For decades, whether or not you were able to find work as an animator depended on whether or not you could draw. Thanks to CG, this skill – though still very valuable – isn’t the end-all-be-all it once was. “I studied to be an architect,” Dariush Derakhshani, a CG animator and animation teacher in California, tells IGN. “I like to draft, plan, blueprint, build. CG opened the field to different people, including those whose talents lie more on the engineering side.”

Above: A sequence from Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler, an example of what 2D animation can achieve.

Something Human

Now, the specter of another technology hangs over the animation industry: AI. Many animators fear for the future, and liken the anxiety they experience today to what they went through when CG arrived on the scene.

Whether or not AI will have a similarly seismic impact remains to be seen. But as then, there are optimists and pessimists. Some genuinely believe DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg when he predicts that machine learning will slash 9 in 10 animation jobs, while others – including Derakhshani – think this is just puffery to boost stock prices. For all we know, he muses, AI could actually expand and “democratize” animation as CG did before, opening up the field to people who make up for in imagination what they lack in drawing or computing skills.

“Maybe AI will become a tool just like any other,” Blaise wonders. “Personally, though, I’m not interested in punching in some prompts and having it spit out a shot. That’s not why I got into animation. The journey is the destination, and I don’t want any kind of machine taking that away from me.”

If anything, he suspects that AI might just pave the way for hand-drawn animation’s comeback. “Five or 10 years from now, it’s possible that AI will be able to make a decently watchable film,” he says. “But when that happens, people more than ever are going to crave art made by other people. I’m already seeing that with "Snow Bear," actually. I’ve gotten so many comments saying how nice it is to see something so human. Animation made by computers is homogenized, pasteurized, perfect. Hand-drawn animation is full of little imperfections, and that’s what makes it perfect.”

Top illustration by Amanda Flagg