What is hand drawn animation?

 

Traditional animation (or classical animation, cel animation or hand-drawn animation) is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand. 

 

In the traditional animation process, animators will begin by drawing sequences of animation on sheets of transparent paper perforated to fit the peg bars in their desks, often using colored pencils, one picture or "frame" at a time. A peg bar is an animation tool that is used in traditional (cel) animation to keep the drawings in place. The pins in the peg bar match the holes in the paper. It is attached to the animation desk or light table depending on which is being used.

 

While hand-drawn animation has a certain charm that can’t be replicated by a computer, the question of what is or what isn’t “hand-drawn animation” gets complicated when the existence of tools like Wacom tablets, open-source software programs, and the extensive (and controversial) use of Flash and Photoshop on a number of animated TV shows are factored in.

 

Simply put, we’ve now come to an age where the digital tools provided by the computer can lend as much assistance to the creation of 2D animation as they can to CG animation.  Just as we have a significant number of software programs that we can use to craft CG animation, we also have quite a few programs that allow us to do 2D animation on the computer.