I watched a lot of Disney when I was a little kid. I'm surprised I never noticed this.

Wow! My husband, the graphics guy, art dude extraordinaire, never caught this either. Amazing. Rated.

The yodeling reminds me of my Swiss aunt. Cute.

Amazing! This must have taken a lot of watching or a sharp animator's eye!

Here, this might be helpful. The numbers indicate where the movie falls in Disney's self-proclaimed “Masterpieces” series.

1. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)
16. Sleeping Beauty (1959)
17. 101 Dalmatians (1961)
18. The Sword In The Stone (1963)
19. The Jungle Book (1967)
20. The Aristocats (1970)
21. Robin Hood (1973)
26. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
30. Beauty And The Beast (1991)

I think that explains it: everyone was lazy in the 60s. Personally I blame marihuana cigarettes.

Please tell your friend I am in awe of the visual memory and the detail work that must have gone into assembling this. It really was amazing to see the movements exactly reproduced from film to film. I suppose it must be some kind of shortcut they used - maybe blank stick templates waiting to be filled out with body/costume/expression? Funny speculation about marijuana but I wonder if it's more about the computer?

Watching this was like watching Groundhog's Day.

Annette- don't give my friend too much credit, he just sent me the link! It is pretty amazing, though.

Surprising that the animation of the various films is so similar. Although maybe it shouldn't be. Not only does this show that some animation shortcuts may have been taken, but shines a light on how formulaic the Disney films are.

I've never been a big fan of Disney and say with pride, they never receive one cent of tribute from me at any of their theme parks.

Rated for redundancy.

(I didn't read all comments so this may have been posted before.) The reason for most of this overlap is because the Robin Hood film didn't have a big enough budget for them to draw all new animations, so for a lot of the dance and action sequences they used existing material from other films as filler.

Disney copying from older movies is no secret. I've been a fan for ages and own several books on Disney animation. The books often refer to the animaters going to 'the vaults' to watch older animation for both ideas and for outright theft. No surprises here; but these examples totally ROCK!

That's actually quite entertaining and I'd have never thought of Disney just re-making the same thing...hmmph.

WOW>.> Read all the comments and I have no response to this.. I guess I lazy too....

Duuuuuude! I'm going to have to share this.

Looks to me like the animators of "Robin Hood" were the lazy ones. That seems a derivative of all of its forebears. Get it, fore "bears" Haha!

This absolutely floored me. I am speechless. I can't wait to show it to all my Disney friends. Thank you.

This, while obviously true, takes NOTHING away from the great artistry and entertainment of the original films.

Looks like a majority of these were from "Robin Hood," which helps explain why that movie, well, sucked. (Of course, that doesn't provide any excuse for "Home on the Range" . . . )

love this!!!

It is incomprehensible that so many comments about this are negative. Disney's "genius" was in the fact that he "took" classic literature and made it available to the common man through animation. People who thought his stories were original” only naïve and not very well read. Anyone who is disappointed that this “exposes” his redundancy should wonder why they feel that way. Could it be the fact that the impact of this video is proof that he had a “formula” that entertained time after time. Because he was influenced in no way diminishes his creative genius.

How foolish and cynical to try to use this to denigrate the legend that is Disney. Long live The Wonderful World of Disney.

P.S. Spielberg, Lucas & Kubrick would all completely agree.

Philos777--the point of the post and the comments are not directed at the plots or stories of Disney films, but rather at that fact that Disney literally used the same scenes and templates for new films. They were recycling the same scenes over and over again. Seems like a valid criticism to me.

If there's one thing that bothers me about blogging, it's the fact that people will comment on a post they clearly haven't read/viewed.

Well, why not? They've stolen from everybody else, they may as well copy themselves too.

This is what you get when you try to be profound and comforting I guess. This is pretty funny. Shared ^_^

My husband, the former Disney Feature Animation artist has asked me to chime in here on his behalf:

If you look at the timeline, most of the re-used animation shows up in "Robin Hood", which was made right after Walt died. Having lost its micro-managing visionary, the studio was at the start of a tremendous decline, which resulted in its almost being dissolved by 1983.

These films were being made by a dozen guys who were all getting older, had very few younger artists training to take their places, and were given a fraction of the budgets they had when Walt was alive.

Making an animated feature is a massive undertaking, even with the 40,000 Hebrew slaves they used in the '90's, so the fact that the "Nine Old Men" figured out how to work efficiently, using their own animation--the same guys who drew "Robin Hood" drew "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"--and keep things going until the Eisner/Katzenberg reign of terror, is actually a mark of their ingenuity, rather than their laziness.

The reason so much footage was taken from "Jungle Book" is, that it was the last film Walt supervised; he died shortly before its completion. As for the "Sleeping Beauty" animation that was re-used in "Beauty and the Beast", B&B ran out of time and money (you'll notice, no one else in the shot is moving), and they had no alternative but to re-use the waltz from SB.

I'm not normally one to go out on a limb to defend the House of Mouse, but I'll always swing for the fences to defend the artists. Just my $0.02.

90% of these are comparing something to Sword in the Stone - which is rock bottom crap ass Disney at its all-time worst, the thing doesn't even have a plot, just gag gag gag deux ex machina.

I was surprised to see the Beauty scene, however, since I clearly remember them making a huge old deal about the making of that scene - one of Disney's first uses of computer generated backgrounds. You'd think they'd put a trifle more effort into it.

Here's a thought. Has anyone checked to see who the animators were?
I'm sure they tended to repeat themselves all the time, after all it's always easier to do something the second time. While I'm not a huge fan of Disney, they did have some of the best animators is the business, and I'm sure if we put Warner Bros. under the same kind of microscope, we'd end up with the same kind of result.
I know when I designed and built the book shelves for my son's room, the first one took a week to build. Mostly because I was designing it as I went along. The next four took a week all together because I had the template down, and it probably wouldn't have taken that long if I didn't have to wait for the glue to dry between steps.
I say this because animation is both an art form, and a craft, and I'm pretty sure that as craftsmen the weren't above using the existing templates that they had available.

Philos77: I suspect a lot of people dislike Disney for the crass commercialism and the saccharine, false, feel-good themes. For me, the epitome of this was the Tigger Movie. They took a great set of books, Winnie-the-Pooh, stripped out the subtlety and when they ran out of original plots, they made their own, like the Tigger Movie.

In it, Tigger searches for this family, which he doesn't find, the false, feel-good happy ending is the conclusion that his friends are his family.

It particularly irritated me since we were moving to a new country and my kids would probably lose contact with their friends (they did) because a friendship of 4-6 year olds doesn't last without proximity. Although their family lives on another continent, they maintained those bonds.

Friends aren't family. But, Disney made that false, feel-good ending and maybe most people didn't notice. A lot of their movies are the same.

To finish, none of this has anything to do with copying animation, but it does explain general disgust with Disney.

Philos777 -- Actually, the stories originally spent hundreds of years as common folklore, with different versions evolving across countries & languages long before any authors decided to start copying some of them down. So if we were to slam Disney for anything related to that, it would be for aggressively using copyright laws to strangle the same ancient storytelling tradition they profited from.

As for the animation, I'm surprised that nobody noticed it just from watching the movies as kids. I had the impression growing up that the characters were essentially actors, so they'd look & move similarly from one film to the next for the same reasons that a human actor might.

Koselara: As for the animation, I'm surprised that nobody noticed it just from watching the movies as kids. I had the impression growing up that the characters were essentially actors, so they'd look & move similarly from one film to the next for the same reasons that a human actor might.

Good point, well said. The fact that Phil Harris voiced Baloo, Little John, and Thomas O'Malley certainly helped that.

The word is "rotoscoping." To achieve a fluidity of 'human' motion, the studio often filmed human figures in action as base models for the animation. Bet these old films were used as modeling actions over and over. And yes, some of the gags have been reupped.

Disney's animation nosedived to the point that in The Black Cauldron, you can get a mild LSD effect from the inconstant, flickering color timing on the cels. Wow.

(Just for fun, watch the opening of The Black Cauldron, pull it out of the DVD, put in Evil Dead 2. Watch the opening. Hmmmm~)

Now let's talk about the recycled PLOTS.

uh-oh~

Others beat me to it--the answer to why Disney did this is because of the cost/time of rotoscoping. Before computers, this was really the only way to animate human (or at least anthropomorphized animal) movement and make it look realistic. Take a look at the old animated version of "Gulliver's Travels" from 1939 or 1940--it came out very soon after "Snow White." (Also a great classic animated movie, though not Disney.) Gulliver was the product of rotoscope animation. The Lilliputians were not. Big, obvious difference.

Especially for very movement-intensive scenes like dance numbers, it makes sense to reuse old templates. Doesn't make it any less great animation.

At least they're stealing from themselves. The Lion King was stolen from Kimba the White Lion.

http://www.kimbawlion.com/rant2.htm

But thats another blog.