So here is another essay for you to enjoy (or not)
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CGI in The Lion King
Believe it or not, but The Lion King actually uses a lot of CGI in almost every scene. That isn't to say that it is computer generated, and as a traditionally animated film, that's as far from the truth as you can get. What actually happened is that computers were used to aid in the production of almost all scenes. Specifically, The Lion King used the now defunct Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) developed and used by Disney. CAPS was used to aid in the animation of effectively all the Disney Renaissance films, in both obvious ways and not.
Let's start with the obvious. Or the closest that The Lion King has to obvious CGI. Before The Lion King, movies like Aladdin and The Beauty and the Beast used CAPS to enhance the picture and make them revolutionary animated films. But both of them also had scenes that were unjarring in their obvious use of CGI in certain scenes. Aladdin had the 'carpet cam' scene where the animation was presented as though there was a camera on the magic carpet as it flew past the ground. Everything was still drawn by hand, but the ground still looked like a texture in a video game moving past the screen (seeing as the CGI technique is the same). In The Beauty and the Beast, the famous ballroom scene was both praised and criticized for its use of CGI, where the ballroom was rendered onto a cube and the animation overlayed over a panning of the camera (the chandelier was its own 3D CGI object). In video games, this is knows as cubic mapping. The Lion King doesn't have these obviously CGI rendered scenes, but it used CAPS just as much as these two previous movies.
So how was CAPS used in The Lion King? In a variety of ways. The easiest way to describe it is that CAPS took a collection of hand-drawn elements and combined them into one coherent scene. You have the characters, foreground objects, middle-ground objects, the background, and the sky. All of these are created separately, and they are inputed to computers that then overlay the various elements together so that all the parts form a picture that makes up a frame in the movie.
A great example of this is Mufasa's ghost scene. There are several key elements that are drawn independently: Mufasa himself, the shimmer effect, the circling clouds, and the light rays. Once all of these elements are drawn, CAPS adds them one on top of another until the desired effect, that is, Mufasa's ghost in the middle of a tunnel of clouds, is produced.
That isn't to say that this is all that CGI did in the movie. In the stampede scene, computers did almost all of the work. The shear amount of animals involved makes it impossible to draw by hand. So what did Disney do? Create a template for a wildebeest, and let computers multiply that and modify each individual to get the thousands of unique wildebeest that make up the scene.
A special program was created for the stampede as well (a four-year effort) to make it authentic in another way: make all the wildebeest head in the same way, and not clip (collide) into each other in the process. Disney made a sort of “magnet” system, where each animal repels the others, but they all follow a key individual. Plot a pre-defined path in 3D space, and you have a floating stampede. Use CAPS to add the ground, particle (dust), and other elements such as characters, and you have the stampede as scene in the movie.
The Lion King is an incredible example of CGI used effectively to tell a story that otherwise would have been impossible or hard. Not only that, but the CGI took a back stage approach, where it makes the entire movie look better, but unless you know it's there, you never really see the CGI. The Lion King is a true traditional animated movie. But without computers, it would have been a totally different story.
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I would like to add that as much as I tried to describe ho CGI was used, it is best to see for yourself if you want. The Laser Disk behind-the-scenes offers several frames cut down and analyzed as how CAPS was used to create them, as well as a more in-depth look into the stampede software. What I gave you here is only the tip of the iceberg, and I highly advice you all to go and look for yourselves how CGI was used in The Lion King. And a great place to start will be MLK's own theater!
My personal opinion and other commentary to come...[/quote]
Sources: Various online sites, TLK commentary from Laser-Disk. If I missed something, it's because I forgot about it or never discovered it in the first place. If I got something wrong, let me know and I will fix it! This is not done for school or any official business. This is just written by me for you guys, and as you seem to like it (based of my CYFTLT essay) I don't see a reason to stop creating these. Have fun reading!
