Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film footage, frame by frame, to produce more naturalistic movement than drawing from imagination alone typically allows. The device originally used for this — a projector that threw each frame of film onto a glass panel so it could be traced onto paper — was itself called a rotoscope, and gave the technique its name.

Invention

Rotoscoping was invented by the animator Max Fleischer in 1915, and he was granted U.S. Patent 1,242,674, "Method of producing moving-picture cartoons," on 9 October 1917. Fleischer's patent gave his studio a temporary commercial advantage over the technique; once it expired in the early 1930s, other animation studios were free to adopt rotoscoping without licensing it.

Early use

Fleischer first used rotoscoping in his Out of the Inkwell series (1918–1927), in which his brother Dave Fleischer performed the live-action reference footage later traced to animate the character Koko the Clown. The technique's best-known early use outside the Fleischer studio was Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), where it was used extensively to give the human characters — Snow White and the Prince in particular — more convincingly realistic motion than Disney's animators had previously achieved; the added labor contributed significantly to the film's production costs and schedule.

Fleischer Studios itself made what is often regarded as its most effective use of the technique in its Superman theatrical cartoon shorts of the early 1940s, where rotoscoped human and super-powered motion was credited with a level of realism unmatched by purely hand-drawn animation of the period.

Later use

Rotoscoping saw a strong second life in the feature animation of director Ralph Bakshi, who used it across several films — Wizards (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978), American Pop (1981), Fire and Ice (1983), and Cool World (1992) — generally to achieve a more grounded, adult-oriented visual style than conventional cartoon animation of the time.

Digital tools have since replaced the physical rotoscope projector with motion-tracking and onion-skinning software, but the underlying technique — tracing recorded motion rather than animating entirely from imagination — is unchanged. Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006), rotoscoped using Bob Sabiston's proprietary interpolated-rotoscoping software, is often cited as the first full-length feature made with digital rotoscoping throughout.

See also

• Animation
• Animated cartoon
• History of comics