Is rotoscoping lazy animation? Is it cheating? Finding another artist’s work or footage and tracing it..

Recently I was struggling to animate a man walking away from the camera for my Joe Pera animation and again for an upcoming animation. It’s hard to animate a person walking away! I even took reference video but had trouble getting it right.

A person from the Moon Restaurant Animator discord server gave me a tip: Go to turbosquid.com or sketchfab and you’ll find 3d animated animals, machines and people. I was able to find many examples of characters walking and rotate them to see from behind. Comparing dozens of these walks alongside clips from anime and footage from real life, I got a sense of how a walkaway should look - how the arms sway, the head rocks back and forth as the feet and hips swing along.

It helped!

I believe rotoscoping is a shortcut that can be bad in the long run, unethical if misused. But I learned a lot and made something I’ve never made before.

Rotoscoping puts me in the perspective of another artist, while tracing footage connects me directly to reality.

I’m realizing rotoscoping will be one of the tools in my animator’s kit. Similar to using AI to generate ideas, it’s morally shady but effective.

I’ll end this with a quote from Richard Williams’ book, ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ which goes:

I managed to get hold of a 35 mm print of Chuck Jones’s “Broomstick Bunny” short. I traced off, frame by frame, Ken Harris’s marvellous animation of the character ‘Witch Hazel’ and some of the three drawing runs of Bugs Bunny.

I copied these runs for my two monsters in “The little island.”

Chuck Jones was impressed with my film and he took me to dinner in London.

At one point Chuck said they had studied my monster runs on the Moviola editing machine at Warner Bros.

I told him, “but they were yours! I copied yours!”

So that goes to show we should learn from the best.

For comparison, here is Broomstick Bunny. You can see Bugs Bunny walking at 1:40

In The little island, you see some similar walks at 3:58 but it certainly doesn’t look traced from Witch Hazel. I suppose tracing is a good way to start and the animation develops with the character.