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The Princess & The Frog is the new musical hand-drawn animated comedy from Disney. It comes out on the 5th Feb and is set in New Orleans giving a modern twist on the tale of the frog prince who can only become human from a kiss.

The guys behind 'The Little Mermaid' and 'Aladdin' have worked on this one, and we've got a look at the 5 stage process it takes to turn hand-drawn images into an animated film.

At first the guys and girls (and mice?) at Disney create concept art for each character and enviroment to get an idea of how the film will look. Then they get the script and work on storyboard art to map out scene by scene.

The next stage is the layout phase (pictured below). A combination of set design, how the environments will look and the cinematography.

The rough animation phase (pictured below) comes next and is the first foray into actually animating the film. Pencil strokes and other marks appear in the animation - it's not yet ready for the big screen, but allows the directors to see the characters in motion and the acting within the scene.

After this the backgrounds need to be painted in as you can see below. There are static paintings of the full background environments and background artists work closely with the other artists to make sure everything is in sync.

Then it needs to be cleaned up, by artists who remove extraneous marks and refine the lines of the animation. At the same time the colour model is done so that characters and their immediate surrounds remain consistent throughout the film.

. Getting towards the end of the process they ink & paint the drawings using the info from the colour model. The animators take individual frames and drop colours and ink lines into the animation.


Finally the colour model department takes the fully ink and painted scene and begins the work with the art director to merge the characters with the environment. This is where every colour and ink line is tweaked to perfection. When all of the elements -animation, effects, background - are combined together, layered onto one another, that is called 'compositing the shot'. When that is done, the shot is complete and looks exactly like it will on the movie screen.