Apparently Disney Used To Recycle Animation Scenes, And It's Blowing Our Minds

Whoa there, Disney.

A new video has cast some doubt on the originality of a few of your favorite childhood films, because apparently Disney animators used to reuse movements from a lot of their old scenes. The technique is called rotoscoping and was used to help cut costs when cartoons relied on armies of human animators.

The style of animation was first used to help animators capture scenes with movement, like Sleeping Beauty dancing or Alice in Wonderland talking to a doorknob. Animators would trace or draw their scenes from live-action footage of similar movements. But the technique was also used to help stay within budgetary constraints on later features: Cartoonists would refer to an earlier movie's characters to create new ones, often with nearly identical results.

The mashup contains clips from "Sleeping Beauty," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Robin Hood" and "The Aristocats." Disney appears to have done this quite a lot, and there's an entire cache of recycled animation stills here.

If you don't believe it, just take a look at this before and after GIF of Baloo and Little John. MINDS BLOWN.