Rotoscope: Encyclopedia II - Rotoscope - History

Rotoscope - History

The technique was invented by Max Fleischer, who used it in his series "Out of the Inkwell" starting around 1914, with his brother Dave Fleischer dressed in a clown outfit as the live-film reference for the character Koko the Clown.

Fleischer used rotoscope in a number of his later cartoons as well, most notably the Cab Calloway dance routines in three Betty Boop cartoons from the early 1930s, and the animation of Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels.

Walt Disney and his animators employed it carefully and very effectively in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, primarily used in the animation of Prince Charming.

Ralph Bakshi used the technique quite extensively in his animated movies Wizards (1977) and The Lord of the Rings (1978). Bakshi was refused by 20th Century Fox for a $50,000 budget increase to finish Wizards, and thus had to resort to rotoscoping to finish the battle sequences. (This was the same meeting at which George Lucas was also denied a $3 million budget increase to finish Star Wars.)

Don Bluth used the technique in two major films, the successful Anastasia and the disastrous Titan A.E..

Richard Linklater produced a digitally rotoscoped feature called Waking Life, creating a surreal image of live action footage, a technique which is now being used to produce the movie A Scanner Darkly.

It was also used in the 1985 A-ha music video Take on Me.

Additionally, a 2005-06 advertising campaign by Charles Schwab uses rotoscoping for a series of television spots, under the tagline "Talk to Chuck." This distinctive look is the work of Bob Sabiston, an MIT Media Lab veteran who brought the same "interpolated rotoscoping" technique to the Richard Linklater film Waking Life.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki