Animation With Editors? Its More Likely Than You Think.

        When you watch an animated film you often never think about the work that goes into it. Or, if you do, you only think about the animator and no on else on the team. But animation has every job a live action film has, even down to requiring an editor.
        Editors come onto an animation team way earlier in the process than live action film editors. They could be brought on the team years in advance, so far in advance that not even the director has been chosen yet. It may seem strange to even edit an animated movie, but everything can be edited and an animation editor has the longest and most intensive job there is. Every movie starts and ends differently, like how The Black Cauldron had to be changed because of its dark tone even in a time where no one believed that animated films could not be edited.
        Ken Schrentzmann says that a way to look at it is with live action you shoot first and edit later, but with animation, you edit first and shoot later. Editors sometimes get to write part of the animation because they sit with the writer and director through the entire process. An editor is a key role in an animation, they are very involved in the movie. Screenplays are not just written and made into a movie, they are written and then built upwards from that. Ideas are then made into storyboards and the editor will sit and piece together all the storyboards into an animatic with the rough sounds and everything. If a scene doesn't fit well, it will then be remade. With each film having about 27 sequences there is a lot that can be done to fix it.
        An editor is the voice that pushes and guides an animation to the right place. Like with Fantastic Mr. Fox, the whole movie was rewritten and then every scene was rewritten approximately two times. No scene that made it to the movie was the same by the end. It gets rough when a scene gets locked and something needs to be changed like a shot or something or other. Animators know that they're going to be wrong and if they don't allow themselves to be wrong they'll only rely on things that they know will work. They don't plan to get everything right the first time, they plan to get a few things wrong and learn how to improve them.

        Animation is all about improvement and this video essay shows that. Even animated movies need to be edited, no matter how silly it seems. No one gets something perfect the first time, and you can see that in this.
        I wonder what is like to be brought on two years in advance and sit all the way through the process to the end. What is it like to dedicate your life to one movie for years? Or do animation editors work on multiple movies at one time? It seems unlikely, but so does dedicating all yourtime to one movie.