Hand-Drawn

I never pretended I didn’t watch the Disney cartoons. Aladdin, The Lion King—there was something there worth looking at, regardless of what you were supposed to care about at twelve. The animation held up. The character design held up. You weren’t just watching pretty colors move around.

By the time I was older, they’d basically stopped making hand-drawn films. Everything went CGI, which is fine, but there’s something different about line work. You can see the human decision-making in it. You can see exactly where someone chose that line weight, that color, that movement.

Five years later, The Princess and the Frog came out. Everyone acted like it was this big event. I probably rolled my eyes about it initially. But watching it, the thing clicked. The animation had weight. You could tell someone actually cared about the craft instead of just moving on to whatever the next technology was.

It’s weird how you forget why something mattered in the first place. You watch that film and it comes back—not the nostalgia angle, not the childhood memory thing, but the actual work. The line weight, the color, how it moves. Someone made every single frame. That’s what stays with you.