125,000 hand-painted cels: the audience-belief test that drove Disney's digital switch

ccerrato147 · x · 2026-09-24

A segment of ccerrato147's thread: in the 80s a Disney film was 125,000 hand-painted cels, and every fix cost months. His team went to the archive and listened to Walt — not a word about pencils, every word about whether the audience believed the character. Disney Animation went digital.

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