Jul 28, 2017

30 years ago: Disney released its first fully CG animated short story "Oilspot and Lipstick"

This anniversary won't be marked by many people, but Disney released a historic film on this day thirty years ago.

The studio's first fully-cg animated short, Oilspot and Lipstick, debuted on July 28, 1987, at the SIGGRAPH conference, held in Anaheim, California that year. The short, as far as we know, was not released to the general public. (A clip from the short can be viewed below.)

In the animated piece, Oilspot and Lipstick are two small mechanical “junk” dogs who are threatened by a junk monster. The film, directed by Mike Cedeno, had actually been produced a year or two earlier, but released at SIGGRAPH in 1987.

Though it was Disney's first full-cg short, the studio had experimented with computer animation techniques and incorporated cg elements into other projects it produced in the early- and mid-1980s. Among those projects were the 1982 live-action feature Tron, a 1983 test by John Lasseter and Glen Keane that combined hand-drawn characters with computer-generated backgrounds, and the 1986 feature The Great Mouse Detective, which incorporated computer-generated backgrounds in the climactic clocktower finale.

Tina Price, an animator who worked on Oilspot and Lipstick, wrote about the film in a Cartoon Brew comment some years ago, offering some details about the production:

Here's a list of creative credits for the historic short. The group that made the film called themselves the “Late Night Movie Group” due to the long hours they put into making the project.

Director: Mike Cedeno Creative Consultant: Burny Mattinson Story Development: Mike Cedeno, Bruce Morris, Gary Trousdale Original Concept: Lem Davis Music: Jay Ferguson Animators: Ruben Aquino, Mike Cedeno, Tony DeRosa, Tina Price, M.J. Turner Effects Animator: Barry Cook Assistant Animators: Brian Clift, Jim Houston Layout Artist: Fred Cline Background Artist: Brian Sebern Production Graphics: John Emerson Sound Effects: Robby Weaver Video Editing: Bob Lambert Film Editing: Dave Wolf Technical Directors (Production and Animation) Tad Gielow, M.J. Turner Technical Directors (Compositing and Effects) Lem Davis, David Coons, Jim Houston Special Thanks To: Wavefront Technologies, Inc – Loan of production software Edge Computer Corporation – Loan of hardware for production Pixar – Loan of hardware/software for animation tests