Animation is an art form that has more than its fair share of contradictory impulses. The medium has virtually unlimited potential for an artist to bring a compelling and unique vision to life simply through the power of their imagination and skills as an animator. But it’s also a labor-intensive art form, and creating animated films in any kind of reasonable time frame requires the talents of multiple animators working in many different disciplines.

The bringing together of multiple artists in the pursuit of a single creative vision creates unique styles of its own. Many studios have developed such distinctive and successful styles that make their work instantly identifiable to fans regardless of the individuals who may have worked on any given piece of animation. Understanding how extremely different studio styles have emerged from the same goal of creating animated films is key to understanding the history of the medium and to predict its future.

The most influential and popular studio style to date has to be that of The Walt Disney Co. The elements that would become the Disney style evolved during a period of intense development and technical advancement that began with the buoyant cartoony-ness of the first sound Mickey Mouse cartoon, 1928’s Steamboat Willie, and culminated in the breathtaking realism and high-flying fantasy evoked in such feature films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi.

Disney’s style evolved quickly in this era. It was driven on the technical side by the desire to get out of the short film business and find a way to make a feature-length film. On the creative side, Disney analyzed everything about the process of making cartoons, and tried to define standards and improve quality at each step.

“If you look at that 10-year period [from 1928 on], there was more accomplished in terms of technical aspects, creative aspects – just about everything, when it comes to animation in that 10-year period than there has ever been before or since,” says Stephen Worth, director of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive.

Worth says Disney was driven to innovate because he wanted to make a feature length animated film and used the shorts to develop the tools and skills needed to pull off that unprecedented goal. The emphasis was on craftsmanship, with every aspect of the animation process broken down and analyzed to find ways to improve it, resulting in a very high quality of animation and the beginnings of a distinct style.

“Disney cartoons from the ’30s are generally solid, they move smoothly, they don’t distort much in the way they move,” Worth says. “The shapes are generally very simple and generic.”

Animator Tom Sito says this period of experimentation extended into the feature films.

“If you look at the first five [Disney feature] movies, there is no style in that respect,” says Sito. “Snow White doesn’t look like Bambi, Bambi doesn’t look like Dumbo, Dumbo doesn’t look like Fantasia. They’re different.”

Overall, however, Disney was developing a style that emphasized realism and character performance. This style really set in the 1940s and carried through the 1950s under the supervision of the studio’s famous Nine Old Men, says Sito.

“He definitely made a definition of what the high-water mark would be for American animation,” he says.

The success of the Disney style lead almost directly to a completely opposite approach, found most vividly in the style of the UPA studio.

Staffed by many animators who had done excellent character work at Disney, UPA cartoons emphasized design over character, eschewed talking animals and fairy tales for human characters, and took their creative cues from modern life and art.

“The UPA artists didn’t think of themselves as cartoonists, but as artists making cartoons,” Sito says. “They were trying to make a new way of looking at animated cartoons.”

And they succeeded. Even the most mainstream UPA cartoons, such as Gerald McBoing Boing and the Mr. Magoo series, differed radically from what was being done at any other studio. While such short films as The Tell-Tale Heart and Rooty Toot Toot! were both popular and highly acclaimed, many UPA creations sacrificed entertainment value in their pursuit of artistic integrity.

“Ultimately, the studio got to the point where their films were more critically acclaimed than entertaining,” says Worth.

One technique the studio used frequently was to create backgrounds with bold colors, and the barest suggestions of setting, offset with solid human characters in neutral colors, says Worth. They were usually flat and featured very stylized designs, which in the best examples of the studio’s work, were combined with smooth and dimensional movement. It was a hard trick to pull off, but when it worked it was phenomenal, Worth adds.

Many of their cartoons went so far into design that there was little actual animation in them. Worth says that had an unfortunate side effect, as it lead other animators to try limited animation, cutting corners and leading to the kind of low-quality animation that ruled Saturday mornings for decades.

In contrast, nothing exemplifies the CG animation of modern times like Pixar, which produced the first feature length CG movie and remains the most acclaimed user of this technique.

Given the tools used to create Pixar movies and the speed with which computer animation technology has changed, it can be hard to say that a fully formed style has emerged from the studio.

What’s clear is that Pixar follows very much in the Disney tradition, with an emphasis on characters, performance and telling wholesome stories. They also have made advances in cinematography, moving from a constant mid-day, blue-sky look in their early films to a much more nuanced appearance, starting with Ratatouille.

Sito says Pixar has been especially aware of the limitations of CG animation at each film and used it to its advantage.

“Early on, when they were doing the Toy Story [movies], people would always say 3D animation looks rather plastic; it doesn’t look real. So [they did a movie about] toys,” Sito says.

The focus on performance has worked out well, Sito says, saying the studio in particular has done some excellent work with eyes. But Worth says the limits to the way characters move are also clear, given that characters can only move in the ways their rigging allows them to move.

“The Pixar movies have a tendency to not move enough and certainly not move in fun ways,” Worth says. “They move in realistic ways, rather than in fantastic and animated ways.”

Pixar also has shown signs of innovation in its past few features that could point the way to a completely new animation style. “In Cars and the first 20 minutes of WALL-E, they’re creating this new kind of reality in animation, where it’s hyper-realistic but it doesn’t feel fake, it doesn’t let you down,” says Sito. “It’s almost like it’s more real than 3D animation, but it’s not live action, it’s somewhere in the middle. I’d like to see them explore a whole movie that way.”