Something I really enjoyed about this article is that really helps explain a counterintuitive result in hand drawn 2D animation. It's a well known phenomenon in hand drawn 2D animation that naively tracing over live action footage usually results in unconvincing and poor quality animation. The article demonstrates how sampling and even small amounts of noise can make a movement seem unconvincing or jittery- and seeing that, it suddenly helps make sense how something like simple tracing at 12 fps would produce bad results, without substantial error correction (which is where traditional wisdom like arcs, simplification etc comes in).
2D animation traced over live action is called rotoscoping. Many of Disney's animated movies from the Walt Disney era used rotoscoping, so I don't think it's fair to say it results in poor quality.
The comment was about naive tracing. When Disney used rotoscoping they had animators draw conforming to a character model on top of the live action pose.
The experienced animator and inbetweeners knew how to produce smooth line motion, and the live action was used for lifelike pose, movement, etc. It wasn’t really tracing.
There’s examples of this in the Disney animation books, the finished animation looks very different from the live actors, but with the same movement.
On the other side of the same coin, when animating VFX for live action, animation which looks "too clean" is also a failure mode. You want to make your poses a little less good for camera, introduce a little bit of grime and imperfection, etc.
Animation is a great art and it takes a lot of skill to make things look the way they ought to for whatever it is you are trying to achieve.
Most animators don't like the "digital makeup" comparison (because it's often used in a way which feels marginalizing to their work on mocap-heavy shows), but if you interpret it in the sense that makeup makes people look the way they are "supposed to" I think it's a good model for understanding why rotoscope and motion capture don't yet succeed without them.
Rotoscoping has its place. It can save a lot of time/money for scenes with complex motion and can produce good results, but overreliance on it does tend to produce worse animation since it can end up being constrained to just what was captured on film. Without it, animators are more free to exaggerate certain motions, or manipulate the framerate, or animate things that could never be captured on camera in the first place. That kind of freedom is part of what makes animation such a cool medium. Animation would definitely be much worse off if rotoscoping was all we had.
I mean, rotoscoping is still animation, but it's just one technique/tool of the trade. I thought it was used well in Undone, and I enjoyed The Case of Hana & Alice
Rotoscoping was utilized for some difficult shots. Mostly live action was used for reference, not directly traced, Fleischer style. I've never seen rotoscoping that looked so masterful as Snow White and similar golden age films.
