I am exhausted just reading that.

Last night I screened Disney's Pochahontas. I became completely convinced that they filmed the large movements of characters and then rotoscoped. Some of the body movements are just too damned perfect, nuanced and elegant to be pure hand-keyed animation.

Sure enough, at the end, down in the credits and by no means conspicuous is a block of credits for "reference movement cast."

My gut tells me they did the facial animation in the old-school disney cell drawing fashion. I may be wrong. There surely was a lot of hand keyframing going on, because there were plenty of "in-betweeners" and "rough inbetweeners" in the credits.

So...mocap? What about just filming actors moving and using them for reference and 'scoping over them? Seems simpler, way less costly, less 'uncanny valley' and more drawing-like.

::::: Opera :::::