Just where does that animosity come from?
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I thought Tron was mostly just hand-drawn animation overlayed on top of the film.
To create the computer animation sequences of Tron, Disney turned to the four leading computer graphics firms of the day: Information International Inc. of Culver City, California, who owned the Super Foonly F-1 (the fastest PDP-10 ever made and the only one of its kind); MAGI of Elmsford, New York; Robert Abel and Associates of California; and Digital Effects of New York City.[2] Bill Kovacs worked on this movie while working for Robert Abel before going on to found Wavefront Technologies. Tron was one of the first movies to make extensive use of any form of computer animation, and is celebrated as a milestone in the computer animation industry. However, the film contains less computer-generated imagery than is generally supposed: Only fifteen to twenty minutes of actual animation were used, mostly scenes that use vehicles such as light-cycles, tanks and ships. Because the technology to combine computer animation and live action did not exist at the time, these sequences were intercut with the filmed characters.Most of the scenes, backgrounds and visual effects in the film were created using more traditional techniques and a unique process known as "backlit animation". In this process, live-action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white on an entirely black set, printed on large format high-contrast film, then colorized with photographic and rotoscopic techniques to give them a "technological" feel.[3] With multiple layers of high-contrast, large format positives and negatives, this process required truckloads of sheet film and a workload even greater than that of a conventional cel-animated feature. In addition, the varying quality and age of the film layers caused differing brightness levels for the backlit effects from frame to frame, explaining why glowing outlines and circuit traces tended to flicker in the original film. Due to its difficulty and cost, this process would never be repeated for another feature film.
