Seems that Disney is closing down its last remaining hand-drawn cartoon facility and concentrating wholly on computer generated imagery (CGI) instead. Traditional cartoons are now dead.

Of course, future Disney features will not be made by robots but by skilled human animators working with a different kind of tool. But the demise of hand-drawn animation at Disney is a sad and significant cultural watershed that deserves a proper mourning rather than a brief P.R. notice.

For it was at the Disney studio that hand-drawn personality animation–an indigenously American contribution to the international art form of animation–soared to its greatest heights.

I really don’t know how skilful you have to be to use CGI. I write code for a living and maybe my view is therefore tainted but I’m not at all impressed with technical wizardry. But drawing - creating lines, shades, texture, expression, movement and mood all with the nib of a pen or pencil… Ah, now that’s skill as I understand the word.

Somehow you know a person has laboured over a drawing. You realise he or she worked patiently and endlessly on the result that you’re now enjoying and that every single bit of it had to be manually created. I can picture a person working - alone - at his desk, hour after hour, skilfully altering an image tiny bit by tine bit until the combined effect of sheets of paper is life.

I just cannot equate that with someone sitting at a computer as I am now.

And when hand-drawn cartoons become more realistic it’s because the artists have, as a result of toil and trouble, moved steps closer to the perfection of their art. It’s not a technological improvement that has occurred within an industry but a personal improvement, the result of striving, that has occurred within a man.

Over the years, Disney drawings became more and more expressive and better able to define delicate human emotions, sensibilities and personalities. “I want characters to be somebody,” Walt said in 1927, one year before he begat Mickey. “I don’t want them just to be a drawing.” He believed that for drawings to connect with an audience’s emotions, they must become believable caricatures of reality.

Mickey Mouse’s evolution is illustrative of the way in which manual labour led to changes in the way he looked and behaved:

In the beginning, Mickey’s head and body were simple circle shapes and his limbs resembled rubber hoses, a design cloned from Felix the Cat, the reigning toon superstar of the 1920s. Soon Walt opened an on-site drawing school at his Hollywood studio to train novice animators in the art of draftsmanship and motion studies. As their skill at life drawing increased in the classroom, so did their ability to capture life on the screen. Disney drawings became a lingua franca for animators learning a new craft, and careers were made or lost at the studio based on artists’ abilities to express themselves in communicative sketches.

Hand-drawn cartoons aren’t dead, of course - they’re just dead so far as Disney is concerned. But as with the latest Star Wars movies - and some others - ‘look at me!’ style technology has a nasty habit of being the end in itself, the whole point of the movie. Where people respond to characters and stories studios sometimes believe they need to be digital and flash in order to appeal.

Ultimately, Walt–an instinctive showman–knew that audiences are attracted not by technology alone, but by engaging stories and appealing characters. The Disney studio’s recent string of expensive hand-drawn feature failures, such as “Treasure Planet,” “Brother Bear” and “Home on the Range,” were the result of poor story choices and corporate meddling in the creative process, not the wrong kind of animation.

As Disney’s great admirer Steven Spielberg recently said, “If storytelling becomes a byproduct of the digital revolution, then the medium itself is corrupted.”

I would add that, when you know that everything you’re watching was drawn by a chap sitting alone hour after hour at a desk then even the most ordinary story has a special magic to it. We all admire a craftsman.

Or maybe it’s just me..?