Ever since Walt Disney introduced Mickey Mouse in the world’s first “fully synchronized” sound cartoon, “Steamboat Willie,” back on November 18, 1928, the Studio has earned a reputation for being the leading pioneer in combining great art with state-of-the-art technology. The impressive list of milestones includes:
• 1932: First use of three-strip Technicolor in cartoons with “Flowers and Trees.”
• 1937: Disney invents the multiplane camera and uses it for the first time on the animated short, “The Old Mill.” A special technical Oscar® was presented to the Studio for this invention.
• 1937: First full-length animated feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
• 1940: First use of stereophonic sound in motion pictures, developed as “Fantasound” for “Fantasia.”
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• 1953: First cartoon filmed in CinemaScope with “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom.”
• 1961: “101 Dalmatians” becomes first animated feature to use Xerox lines.
• 1982: First film recorded in digital sound with the re-recording of “Fantasia.”
• 1982: Disney animators Glen Keane and John Lasseter (who went on to revolutionize the medium at Pixar and direct several landmark computer-animated films) experiment with combining 2D and 3D animation with a 90-second test on Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”
• 1985: Disney’s “The Black Cauldron” uses computer animation for several inanimate objects including the cauldron itself.
• 1986: Computer animation takes a big step forward with Disney’s “The Great Mouse Detective” where 54 moving gears, winches, ratchets, beams, and pulleys inside the clock tower of Big Ben were animated using the computer.
• 1992: Disney wins a special technical Academy Award® for the design and development of the CAPS system, a revolutionary computer-assisted animation post-production software system created in conjunction with Pixar.
• 1995: Disney releases “Toy Story,” the landmark computer-animated feature developed and produced in collaboration with Pixar.
With the release of “Chicken Little,” Walt Disney Feature Animation adds its first fully computer-animated feature to this long list of technical achievements. Supplementing the existing software packages available to the animation industry, the technical wizards at Disney came up with new approaches, new proprietary software, and inventive solutions to problems. Steve Goldberg, the film’s visual effects supervisor, observes, “The whole reason I came to Disney back in 1990 was because I always believed that if there was a chance of being able to take the artistic talent that existed here at the Studio and blend it with this new medium of CG, we’d be able to blow the doors off. No one had really done that level of combination before. I just remember thinking, ‘These are the greatest painters in the world, the greatest animators in the world, the best effects artist in the industry…
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