My job consists about 80% of solving actual narrative and literary problems, but I do think a lot about the movie as a whole—especially because I hear what audiences are saying.
One sentiment that comes up again and again is that animation just doesn’t feel the same anymore.
And often, the explanation that follows is: it’s because movies aren’t 2D anymore.
I’m not convinced that’s actually the problem.
There are 3D animated movies—Shrek, Tangled, and others—that audiences have embraced with the same kind of enduring affection we associate with animated classics. So I think the audience may be identifying a real feeling while attributing it to the wrong variable.
What if what we miss isn’t necessarily 2D animation, but visual specificity?
A disclaimer before I get into this: this isn’t a judgment of any individual movie or art style. I’m interested in this as a development conversation—something worth examining collectively as an animation industry if we want to understand why audiences respond differently to different eras of our work.
Think about the Disney classics.
They clearly share an artistic lineage. And yet, individual movies have their own visual flavor.
Take Aladdin.
When I look at Aladdin, I see circles and rounded, sweeping lines everywhere. Look at the curve of the characters’ hair, their noses, their clothing, their silhouettes. There is a recurring visual vocabulary across completely different elements of the movie.
It feels almost as though the same hand that decided how a nose should curve also decided how a pair of pants should curve.
Now compare that with Hercules.
The visual language changes.
Instead of those soft, rounded shapes, I see a much stronger relationship between concave and convex lines. You can find that tension everywhere—from the characters’ hair to their silhouettes to something as small as the shape of an elbow.
Both are recognizably Disney. But Hercules doesn’t look like Aladdin.
And I think that distinction matters more than we sometimes acknowledge.
Imagine, for a moment, if Hercules had been made using essentially the same character and shape language as Aladdin. The story would still be different. The world would still be Greece instead of Agrabah. The costumes and environments would change.
But something would be lost.
Each new film used to feel like entering not only a new story, but a new drawing.
That is where I think the 2D-versus-3D conversation becomes more interesting.
Perhaps what audiences are responding to isn’t simply the dimensionality of the animation. Perhaps part of what they miss is the feeling that every movie has invented its own visual grammar.
In that case, the question isn’t:
“Should animation go back to 2D?”
It might be:
“How do we give every animated movie its own handwriting again?”
