The animation industry has rapidly grown over the years, and its quite heartening to see its speed of growth increase only more rapidly with time. From amusing kids, to connecting with and moving even grown ups to emotion, there really have been quite a many number of movies that have set memorable benchmarks in animation history.

Short-listing a long list of movie names, three movies have been selected to be three of the many most memorable animated movies of all time – till date …

1) The Lion King -

The Lion King without a doubt has to be one of the top most memorable animated movies till-date,  being recognized so all around the world. Produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation, released in 1994, the movie is the highest grossing 2D animated film in the U.S.A and is considered by many movie critics and audiences – from all around the world –  to be among the best movies of all time. Not only winning acclaim and many awards as a movie, but it also garnered in 2 Academy Awards for its achievement as a musical as well, with an original score by Hanz Zimmer and songs written by the famous composer – Sir Elton John and lyricist Time Rice.

2)Toys Story -

Directed by John Lasseter – Toy Story was not only Pixar’s first feature film but also one of the first movies to be made entirely with CGI. The movie was bound to be a sure success, with characters voiced by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen and featured music by Randy Newman. Being critically acclaimed for its witty screenplay as well its technical innovative use of animation, has made it one of those movies that is not only overwhelmingly acclaimed by critics, but also considered to be one of the greatest and most revolutionary films in the history of animation.

3) Spirited Away -

Released in 2001 and till date being crowned as the most successful film in Japanese history – ‘Spirited Away’ – is one of the most notable movies of genius animator Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. The movie overtook Titanic as the highest grossing film worldwide and received universal acclaim by critics. In fact, Walt Disney approached Pixar’s director John Lasseter (who is a big fan of Miyazaki) to supervise the English-translated North American version of the movie.

Winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival (tied with Bloody Sunday) and being voted as the 8th greatest cartoon in Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Cartoons poll, Spirited away is definitely one of the most recommended-to-watch animated films and also one of the most memorable.

The story of the movie is about two sisters moving in with their father to live in an old rickety house in the country side, while their mother is grievously ill in the hospital. Whilst living life joyfully to the fullest, in this home away from home type of place, they stumble upon a huge magical creature that they name – ‘Totoro’ – that plays  small but significant parts in their lives as the kids adjust into their new home and life-style. The plot sounds simple right? Though a genius like Miyazaki captures the essence of innocence and childhood, within his amazingly sketched out ordinary characters so well that it will extraordinarily move a regular city guy/girl – caught up in the fast life – to tears, as it makes one deeply wonder of how simplistically pleasant life could be, and how complicatedly exhausting our own advancements and technology have made it.

Miss being a kid, miss your childhoods imaginative world being reality? Then, “My Neighbor Totoro” is definitely yet another one of Miyazaki’s must watch movies -

Disney has then on tried to incorporate animation in live action in various movies using Donald duck. Space Jam was a classic example of a live action animated movie. It incorporated live characters like Michael along with all the Looney toons characters and Michael going down the hole into the Toonland was a sight to see.

Roger Rabbit was one movie that broke all records when it came to animation in live action. None of the movies like Space Jam, Cool world, Looney Toons: back in action could break the record of Roger Rabbit.

Animation in the earlier days was integrated with live action in a variety of ways. Double printing 2 negatives on the same release print. Optical printers or aerial image animation cameras which enable more precise positioning and better incorporation of actors and animated characters.

Animating in live action is not an easy job. It’s not easy to incorporate real people and animated characters together and make it look like its really existing. The recent example of it would be ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where animals like rabbit, caterpillars , butterflies were put into movement and were co-existing with humans and interacting with them. It is done in a bit more complicated manner. For example, when a person shoots a ball and it has to fall somewhere far and we were to animate that we would have to first shoot a man with the ball and his hand in the air about to shoot it and then we would animate the ball and make it fall wherever it has to and then we would start shooting the real life characters from then on. The biggest challenge is to make it look realistic and that is something which is extremely difficult to do.

Who framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) is another path breaking film where advanced special effects were used to make the film more realistic when it came to interaction between the humans and animated characters. All the other movies that had live action incorporated in animation followed who framed roger rabbit but have not been able to achieve similar success stories. But still with the upgraded technology and features and software’s now available along with usage of 2D & 3D animation it makes the movie more realistic.

India is still far fetched when it comes to animation in live action. All the children’s film tries and uses animation to the fullest but we are yet to reach the mark where Hollywood is there today. One of the examples of animation in live action in India would be Taare Zameen par.

The first funda to be incorporated would be to write a script for the movie and then to decide on the characters to be used in the movie. The script would involve the story line to be used extensively to be the characters to life.  Film making fundas always serve as a input for making good animated movies. Even a smallest form of animation i.e. the flip book that was used initially for animation had to be incorporated with a storyline.

Another funda to be used which a part of commercial film is making is the fact of using the storyline to create and enhance the animated characters. The whole movie depends on the characters involved. Eg: Tom and Jerry the popular cartoon characters had the whole story revolving around 2 central characters and this example shows how important it is to have good etched out characters for the movie to be successful.

Rest of the factors have to be singularly customized for an animated movie and cannot be compared with a commercial film. When making an animated film it is important to not mix all the fundas with the making of a commercial film. As a normal and advanced animated movie would require creating, rendering, modeling, texturing and usage of 2D and 3D technology to add essence to the movie.

There is traditional animation, stop motion animation, computer animation, 2D & 3D animation etc.which is not a part of commercial film making but it is a core part of making an animated film. So not all film making fundas will work here but majorly the character sketches and script writing will be an integral process of the movie. The characters will also depend on the fact that the movie is made for. All the Disney movies which were picked up from fairy tales had a ready story in hand but a script has to be made to decide each frame that goes into place for the animation movie.

Every frame has an ideology inscribed into it along with every movement and an animation movie takes up a lot more time than a traditional or a commercial movie involving various cameras and technologies. A normal flip book also requires minimum 10 motion drawings for it to become a 5 second animated movie, so it is widely understood that if a 2 hour animated movie has to be made it will require various tremendous amount of frames for it to culminate into a whole grown movie.

A lot of animation tactics are used in commercial movies too where for example in the recent movie ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where commercial movie was mixed with animation and various characters were brought to life and it gave an entire magical feeling to it. In these cases both the techniques are used wherein funda’s of commercial film making and animation is used in equilibrium.