The Real Truth About Disney’s “Recycled Animation” via GeekDad
“Disney Legend Floyd Norman actually worked on many of the films in question; he started at Disney as an in-betweener on Sleeping Beauty. So I asked him, ‘what’s the deal with all those recycled scenes?’
‘That was Woolie Reitherman. It’s actually harder and takes longer to redraw an existing sequence,’ Norman told me, 'it’s a lot faster and easier to just do new animation, and it’s a lot more fun for the animators. But Woolie liked to play it safe and use stuff he knew would work. That’s all it was.’
Gary Trousdale: ’The scene from Beauty and the Beast that we re-used was done for time, but not money. (well…time IS money, but that’s another story). We were just days from our final deadline to deliver, and we had an entire dance sequence (the last scene of the movie, not the ballroom) to do. Everyone was booked and busy, and we knew damn well that Woolie had established this precedent, so we took the Sleeping Beauty dance, re-sized and re-positioned it, and gave the note ‘Note to Clean-up: clean up Aurora as Belle, clean up Prince Charming as Beast.
