How cartoons were made in the 1990s depended on the studio, the budget and the type of production. A television episode might still rely on pencil drawings, painted cels and a film camera. Elsewhere, drawings were being scanned, colored and combined with backgrounds on computers. Several ways of working existed alongside one another throughout the decade.
Follow a short scene in which a character hears something, turns and walks out of the shot. The action might last only a few seconds. Behind it are decisions about where the character stands, how the movement unfolds, which drawings can be held and how the picture fits the recorded voice. A traditional 2D production divided those decisions into a series of connected jobs.
Planning a scene before animating it
The script established the action and dialogue. Storyboard artists then worked out how to present that action as a sequence of shots: what the audience would see, where a character would enter and when to cut to another view. Layout developed the staging in greater detail, including perspective, the positions of characters and their relationship to the background.
Model sheets gave artists a shared reference for the characters. They could show a head from several angles, the proportions of a body or a selection of expressions. Those references mattered when different people were drawing the same character, particularly when part of the work went to another studio.
Voice recording fitted into this preparation, with the exact order varying between productions. Recorded dialogue gave animators a performance to work with: the length of a word, a hesitation, a change in emphasis. Mouth movements and gestures could then be timed to that performance. This was the original production recording; dubbing a completed cartoon into another language was a separate process.
Why a frame did not always need a new drawing
At an animation desk, an artist could flip through a stack of drawings to check how the poses related to each other. Key poses established important moments in the action. Breakdowns shaped the movement between them, and in-between drawings supplied the additional stages required. Cleanup prepared the rough artwork as clear, consistent lines for the next part of production.
A frame of screen time and a new drawing are different things. In a sequence timed at 24 frames per second, a drawing held for two frames produces animation “on twos.” That can mean 12 different drawings within a second, before allowing for longer holds or repeated drawings. The example describes a working rhythm, rather than a universal television broadcast format.
An animator could hold a reaction, repeat a walk cycle or move rapidly between two poses. The number of drawings depended on the action and its timing. A laborious production method could still produce a rapid chase; a long pause on screen could be a deliberate choice that made an expression readable.
How cels and backgrounds became a finished shot
In traditional cel animation, the moving character and the background were separate pieces of artwork. The character outline was transferred to a transparent sheet called a cel, which was painted and placed over the background. An animation camera photographed the assembled image. Changing the cel changed the character's pose while allowing the same background to remain in place.
Consider a bird standing on a path. The landscape could be a single painted background, with the bird on a clear sheet above it. As successive drawings changed the bird's position, the path and trees could stay unchanged. A production shot might use several layers for characters, foreground objects and effects, with instructions determining which artwork appeared in each frame.
Color consistency required its own preparation and supervision. Color models and paint references helped artists maintain the intended appearance of a character. Hand painting did not automatically produce a small or dull palette: the Walt Disney Archives documents a dedicated Paint Lab that developed materials and expanded the range of colors long before the 1990s. The final look also reflected artistic choices and the resources of the production.
Television animation was a coordinated studio operation
A television series could distribute its work across several companies. Scripts, design and creative supervision might be handled by the main studio, while outside teams completed parts of the animation. Artwork had to travel through that process, be checked and, where necessary, return for corrections. A consistent character model helped connect the work of artists who might never share a room.
Batman: The Animated Series provides a documented example. In a 2012 interview, producer Eric Radomski recalled an initial order for 65 episodes and as many as seven studios in four countries working simultaneously. Comments from the crew, reproduced from Animato! magazine, also describe the pressure involved. Director Frank Paur said a tight schedule allowed small problems to slip through. Hand-drawn television animation involved deadlines and production compromises as well as craft.
Computers were already changing animation early in the decade
Disney's The Rescuers Down Under, released in 1990, is a useful feature-film comparison. Its characters were still drawn by hand, but the production used CAPS, the Computer Animation Production System developed through Disney and Pixar's collaboration. Scanning, digital coloring and compositing replaced stages that had previously depended on painted cels and physical camera work. Pencil animation could therefore be part of a substantially digital finishing process.
Digital ink and paint was different from 3D computer animation. Pixar's Toy Story, released in 1995, built its characters and spaces as computer models. That was a different approach from scanning a sequence of hand-drawn poses and adding color. These feature films show distinct uses of technology; they do not establish how every television studio worked.
South Park offers a separate television example. In a July 1999 Ars Technica interview, its technical staff described a computer-based process designed to preserve the appearance of paper cutouts and deliberately jerky movement. They also said episodes were seldom finished more than 36 hours before broadcast. Its methods and schedule belonged to that particular production, illustrating the variety within 1990s animation.
Voices, music and effects followed different schedules
Sound was a collection of jobs with different purposes. An early dialogue recording could guide a character's performance. A song or working recording could establish the timing of a musical sequence. Background music could be composed to fit scenes whose action and length were already established. The order depended on what the scene and the production needed.
For Batman: The Animated Series, Bruce Timm described discussing the musical treatment of “The Laughing Fish” with composer Shirley Walker. He wanted a horror-film atmosphere for the episode. That account shows music being shaped around a specific dramatic intention, rather than a general rule that every cartoon scene followed a soundtrack recorded in advance.
Footsteps, impacts, creaking doors and other effects also had to be selected or recorded, edited and synchronized. A production could use specially created sounds alongside material from sound libraries. The final mix brought dialogue, music and effects together, balancing the elements so that a line remained clear and an action received the right emphasis.
On your next viewing, watch a short conversation closely. Notice whether the background stays fixed, whether a character's body holds while the mouth changes, or whether a glance is given a longer pause. Then compare the timing with a chase or a sudden turn. Those details reveal practical choices about where movement was needed and how long a drawing should remain on screen.
For related reading, explore why cartoon characters often have four fingers, revisit TV mornings in the 1990s, or browse our classic cartoon facts.
Sources and further reading
- Dave Burgess: Timing — The 12 Basic Principles of Animation, Animation Mentor, 2017.
- At the Helm of Ink & Paint, Walt Disney Archives, 2020.
- Producer Eric Radomski Discusses Twenty Years of Batman: The Animated Series, The World's Finest, 2012.
- Batman: The Animated Series crew comments from Animato!, reproduced in a later web transcription by The World's Finest.
- The Rescuers Down Under, D23's Disney A to Z.
- Our Story, Pixar Animation Studios' official chronology.
- The Ars Technica South Park Interview, July 26, 1999.
- Audio for Animation, Animation World Network, 2006.