>>548
I admit my post might come off as a bit aggresive, but I wasn't really bashing Disney. I like them, their animation is superb and the pinaccle of their philosophy. I do believe it has subtlety, and they have mastered character acting to a point I hardly see in anime. My grip is with the philosophy they have for their craft. I reckon some western animators could go to quite the extremes to defend their "illusion of life" and adhere to every single one of the 12 principles to the letter. This is not healthy for an art form, and (at least in my vision) it gets stale quickly. Especially when your movies don't have a particularly amazing direction -and this is a view I won't change, Disney films are not that well directed-
The video you posted is great, the animation is lively and there is certainly a "rawer" feeling than pure Disney fare. But do you see the same kind of expressionistic energy that is present in a sakuga scene by a guy like Ohira or Utsunomiya, for example? In comparison, I'd say it's still very homogeneous and much closer to classical Disney than anime.
I don't know the specifics about production over at WB, but iirc they would often have two or three (or even more) animators working at the same cut. Ones doing objects, others doing effects, the skilled ones assigned to single characters. Compare with how it works in Japan, where only one person is in charge of everything present on the screen at a given moment. To me this reflects two very distinct ideologies about what art and entertainment should be and how they should be made. I certainly am more in line with the latter.
*Disclaimer: I am aware that I'm comparing animation from the '40s and earlier with something that developed more than thirty years later. Disney had a huge influence on animation worldwide, including anime at its genesis. I will give them that. My grip with them is that they didn't ever diverge from their shtick, and neither did most western commercial animation (except for some significant exceptions), while Japanese commercial animators applied Disney's principles to their vision and ideas, and permeated their work with themselves, instead of trying to blur into the performance.