Today I am going to depart from my normal blog style to address a question I was asked recently. I was asked if I thought that 3D animation took away from films or if these new full-length computer animated features lost a very crucial personal touch. My response is absolutely not. While animators who render by hand work very long painstaking hours, computer animators are working just as hard and at least as long. According to John Grant, the author of Masters of Animation, sometimes several artists work on the same character and while the artist who designed the character has an obvious emotional atatchment to that character, the other artists might not. I am not trying to start an argument over which method of animation is better then the other. I think that the magic created with the first full-length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will never be recreated with such a personal touch because in that film actual blush was put on the hand rendered character of Snow White. We would certainly never go to such lengths today because a color pallet in a computer will do a good enough job. However, with Toy Story, the first full-length computer animated film, artists and programmers spent years designing programs and characters as well. The two forms are just different. They achieve the same purpose of entertaining and perhaps teaching youth around the world. Both films were created by passionate teams excited about the new techniques they were using. Both were considered amazing to everyone who saw them. Both are excellent films. I hope that with the increasing amount of computer animated films coming out that hand rendered films are not lost. I will always be a fan of the original film animation. However I do not think that this will happen because both forms have proven to be very lucrative.