Disney’s innovations in animation

As Disney and its stock price struggles with streaming, Reuters looks at how Disney overcame previous challenges in its 100-year history. One of the first challenges was making animation that was believable:

He obsessed over quality and poured money into producing cartoons that would resonate with his audience. He wrote that observing the real world was key and animation must have, “a foundation of fact, in order that it may more richly possess sincerity.”

The studio formalized 12 principles of animation which transformed static sketches into lively characters on a screen. Veteran animators taught the principles to each of the new artists who joined the studio to ensure consistency.

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Digital face aging with neural network

Disney Research demonstrates their use of neural networks to seamlessly age and de-age someone’s face across a continuous range. Sure what is real anymore anyway.

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Disney-Fox market share

Disney is set to buy 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion. I honestly don’t have the mental capacity or imagination to comprehend such a large sum, much less figure out how such a deal works. At least Youyou Zhou, reporting for Quartz, provides breakdowns of market share for the two companies, which makes things a bit more understandable. If the deal goes through, Disney is going to be (an even bigger) behemoth.

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Catching a real ball in virtual reality

Man wears virtual reality headset. Another man throws a ball to headset-wearing man. Headset-wearing man catches actual ball displayed in virtual reality. There’s something magical about the quick data processing going on here.

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Disney business strategy chart, 1957

Disney strategy chart from 1957

This is Walt Disney's corporate strategy from 1957. The theatrical films serve as a foundation, and everything else — TV, music, Disneyland, etc — feed off of and back into the Disney universe. I like how each little Mickey Mouse runs in the direction of the arrow he is on and holds something unique to the place he's running to.

See also: the Disney org chart.

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