There’s a moment in The Little Mermaid — right around the time Ariel is swimming through her collection of human treasures, the light filtering down through the ocean water in shimmering, layered waves — where I completely forgot I was watching a cartoon. I was a kid who had grown up on the Disney classics that my parents dutifully carted us to see during their periodic theatrical reissues. I had the VHS tapes. I knew what Disney animation looked like. But The Little Mermaid felt different. It felt alive in a way I couldn’t quite articulate at the time.

I couldn’t have told you then that what I was responding to was the Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS, a digital ink-and-paint pipeline developed for Disney by a little company called Pixar. I just knew something had shifted. The colors were richer. The movement was more fluid. The whole thing felt more real than animation had any right to feel.

That’s kind of the through-line of Disney’s entire history, actually. Every few decades, some new technology comes along that fundamentally changes what the studio is capable of — and the best of those moments don’t just improve the product, they transform what animation can be. Let’s talk about the big ones.

Sound: The Obvious Starting Point That Still Deserves Its Flowers

We tend to take synchronized sound for granted now, which is a little wild when you think about it. Before Steamboat Willie debuted in November of 1928, cartoons were silent. Mickey Mouse’s first two shorts, Plane Crazy and The Galloping Gaucho, had already been completed — but they weren’t making the cultural splash Walt Disney needed. So he gambled on sound.

Steamboat Willie premiered with a synchronized musical score, sound effects, and the now-iconic image of Mickey whistling at the wheel of a steamboat. Audiences went absolutely bananas. The Mickey Mouse series of sound cartoons quickly became the most popular cartoon series in the United States, essentially overnight.

What’s easy to miss here is that synchronized sound wasn’t just a technical upgrade — it was an artistic revolution. Sound gave animation rhythm. The music didn’t just accompany what was happening on screen; it dictated the tempo of the movement itself. Disney’s follow-up series, the Silly Symphonies, leaned into this completely, building entire animated shorts around musical compositions. The technology didn’t just change how cartoons sounded. It changed what they were for.

Technicolor and the Multiplane Camera: Making Depth Out of Flatness

By the early 1930s, Disney had secured a two-year exclusive deal with Technicolor for its new three-strip color process, and the results were immediate and stunning. Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first commercially released film produced in full Technicolor, and it won an Academy Award. All the Silly Symphonies were subsequently produced in color. The visual vocabulary of animation expanded dramatically overnight — and Disney had exclusive access to it for two years, which was a pretty savvy business move on top of everything else.

But color alone didn’t solve the fundamental flatness problem of traditional animation. Everything existed on a single plane. Characters moved in front of painted backgrounds, but there was no real sense of depth — no feeling that you were looking into a world rather than at a picture of one.

Enter the multiplane camera, developed in the mid-1930s and first used to significant effect in the Silly Symphony short The Old Mill (1937). The multiplane camera worked by separating animation artwork into several layers — foreground elements, middle ground, background — and filming them through a vertical camera that could rack focus between layers. The result was something genuinely startling: a sense of dimensional space in a medium that had been relentlessly two-dimensional. When the camera pushed slowly through a forest at the opening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, audiences were watching something they had never seen before in animation. It felt like looking through a window rather than at a canvas.

Walt Disney reportedly described the multiplane camera as giving animation a “feeling of depth and solidity.” That understates it, honestly. It gave animated worlds a sense of place. And a story only lands as hard as the world it inhabits feels real.

Xerography: The Accidental Aesthetic

This one’s a little different, because unlike most of the other tech on this list, xerography didn’t make Disney animation more beautiful. It made it scratchier. And somehow, that became its own kind of beautiful.

By the early 1960s, the process of hand-inking animation — painstakingly tracing pencil drawings onto transparent acetate cels — was enormously expensive and time-consuming. The studio had gone nearly bankrupt on Sleeping Beauty (1959), a film that cost $6 million and underperformed badly enough to trigger massive layoffs. Something had to change.

Xerography, introduced prominently with One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), allowed animators’ pencil drawings to be photochemically transferred directly onto cels rather than hand-traced. It cut costs dramatically. It also eliminated the smooth, clean line quality that had defined Disney animation since Snow White. The xerographic line was rougher. More mechanical. You could see the construction marks in the drawings.

Here’s the thing, though: that rawer aesthetic actually worked beautifully for certain subjects. One Hundred and One Dalmatians has a sketchy, graphic quality that suits a story about spotted dogs in a modern London setting in a way that the lush, painterly look of Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t have. And that distinctive xerographic line — sometimes derided at the time as a step down — defined Disney’s visual identity for two full decades.

It’s a good reminder that technological compromise doesn’t always mean artistic compromise. Sometimes the constraint becomes the style.

CAPS: The Invisible Revolution

Okay, back to The Little Mermaid and why it hit me the way it did as a kid.

CAPS — the Computer Animation Production System — was developed by Pixar for Disney in the late 1980s and first used in limited capacity on The Little Mermaid (1989). By The Rescuers Down Under (1990), it was being used for the entire production pipeline.

On the surface, CAPS sounds fairly unglamorous. It was primarily a digital ink-and-paint and compositing system. It replaced the physical cel and camera setup with a digital equivalent. No more painting cels by hand. No more physical camera compositing layers of artwork. Everything happened in the computer.

What this actually meant in practice was staggering. Suddenly, Disney animators had access to an almost unlimited color palette — no more constraining choices based on what paints were physically available. They could composite dozens of layers seamlessly, achieving depth and complexity that would have been physically impossible (or prohibitively expensive) with traditional methods. The underwater scenes in The Little Mermaid, the sweeping camera moves in Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence in that same film that I’ll get to in a moment — none of that was possible before CAPS.

And yet most audiences had absolutely no idea any of this was happening. That’s kind of the genius of it. CAPS didn’t announce itself. It didn’t make Disney animation look like a computer. It just made Disney animation look more like the ideal version of itself that the animators had always been reaching toward. The hand-drawn art was still hand-drawn. The technology was the invisible scaffolding that let it soar.

The CGI Integration: From Subtle to Unavoidable

If CAPS was the invisible revolution, the integration of actual computer-generated imagery was considerably more visible — for better and worse.

Disney’s first significant CGI sequence is often cited as the climax of The Great Mouse Detective (1986), which used early computer animation for its climactic clock tower sequence. It’s charming in a creaky sort of way now, honestly — very obviously rendered in a way that reads as distinctly computer against the hand-drawn characters. But it was enough to convince studio executives that the technology had a future.

By Beauty and the Beast (1991), the ambition level had jumped considerably. The famous ballroom sequence, in which Belle and the Beast waltz beneath a domed ceiling of intricate CGI architecture, remains one of the most breathtaking things Disney had accomplished to that point. The camera swoops and glides through three-dimensional space in a way that would have been literally impossible in traditional animation. And crucially, it’s integrated with the hand-drawn characters rather than standing apart from them. The ballroom doesn’t look like a video game. It looks like a fairy tale.

The Lion King (1994) pushed this further with the wildebeest stampede, a massive sequence rendered in early 3D that used the computer to create the kind of overwhelming, chaotic scale that no team of hand-animators could have achieved. Again, it was used to serve the story rather than to show off — though I’ll admit it absolutely showed off.

The full transition to computer animation, when it finally came with Chicken Little (2005), was a different matter. The studio spent nearly a decade trying to figure out what its own creative identity looked like in a fully digital medium, producing a string of films that ranged from “fine” to genuinely excellent but never quite felt like they had the same soul as the hand-drawn classics. It wasn’t the technology’s fault. It was a creative crisis dressed up as a technological one.

The Hybrid Question: Can We Have Both?

The most interesting technological development of the last decade at Disney Animation might be one most audiences have barely noticed: the ongoing attempts to merge hand-drawn and computer animation in a single coherent visual language.

Paperman (2012), the short that accompanied Wreck-It Ralph in theaters, used proprietary software called Meander to blend hand-drawn and computer animation at the level of the individual character — not compositing them together, but actually merging them. The result had the warmth and expressiveness of hand-drawn animation with the dimensional solidity of CGI. It was genuinely something new. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, and the studio said it was developing the technique for future projects.

Those future projects have been slow in coming, but the ambition hasn’t gone away. Encanto (2021) still shows flashes of that hand-drawn warmth in its stylization. The studio has confirmed ongoing development of hand-drawn animation in some form.

Which brings me to where I land on all of this, and I’ll be honest — it’s not an entirely comfortable place.

The Part Where I Get a Little Wistful

Every technological leap in Disney’s history has been made in service of human artistry. Sound gave composers and animators a new rhythmic language. The multiplane camera gave background painters a way to make their art feel three-dimensional. CAPS gave hand-drawn animators tools to realize visions that had previously been physically impossible. Even the xerographic line, for all its accidental origins, was still the work of human hands expressing something.

The conversation happening in the animation industry right now — about AI-generated imagery, about the potential replacement of human artists with systems trained on those artists’ work without their consent — represents something genuinely different. Not a new tool in the hands of an artist, but potentially the removal of the artist from the equation altogether.

I don’t know exactly where that goes. Nobody does. What I know is that what moved me in that Little Mermaid screening wasn’t really the CAPS system or the color palette or even the music, as extraordinary as all of that was. It was the unmistakable sense that a human being had drawn every frame, had made thousands of choices about how light falls through water and how a young woman moves when she’s in love with the idea of a whole world she’s never seen. Technology, at its best, just helped that person do what they were already dreaming of doing.

The question of whether future generations will grow up feeling that same thing — looking at the screen and sensing the human on the other side of it — feels like one of the most important questions in art right now. And I genuinely don’t have a neat answer for you. Just a slightly uneasy feeling that something irreplaceable might be at stake.

Which, now that I think about it, might be exactly how people felt when hand-inking cels gave way to a photocopier in 1961. Maybe I’m wrong to worry.

But I’m probably going to keep worrying anyway.