Twenty-Four Hundred Man-Years For What?

Nowhere is there more magic, wonder, and illusion than in a Disney animated film. From start to finish, the making of an animated film is an amazing process. Six hundred people work for four years to create a million drawings that will be projected at twenty-four frames per second, and if everyone does their job, you will laugh, be moved to tears and be transported to a different world.

Don Hahn

So it took something like six hundred people something like four years to create the Disneyfication of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”




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Winsor McCay animated the film “Gertie the Dinosaur” all by himself. He had one assistant to trace backgrounds, but McCay spent a great many months doing thousands of animation drawings himself.




Ub Iwerks animated the cartoon “The Skeleton Dance” (and many others!) all by himself. He had assistants to handle ‘clean-ups,’ but Iwerks did thousands of animation drawings himself.




Ray Harryhausen created the stop-motion animation for “It Came From Beneath The Sea” all by himself. He sometimes had assistants help create his models, but Harryhausen did all the animation filming by himself.


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So it took something like six hundred people something like four years to create the Disneyfication of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”


Modern animated films created by platoons of wildly talented artists are certainly longer and much more visually dynamic than animation created by one person, or one person working with an assistant or two.

But by any criteria, are modern animated films better than the single-person creations?

Many people still watch, say, “It Came From Beneath The Sea” and still enjoy the movie, still have fun watching it. Does anybody ever put on a DVD of, say, the Disneyfication of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and even watch the movie, let alone enjoy watching it?


Twenty-four hundred man years for what?