Cambridge Animation Systems

» see cam-ani.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

This one reached Turkey without its name attached. Space Jam and The Iron Giant both played here, and Winx Club ran dubbed on Turkish television for years in front of an audience of children who had no idea it was Italian, let alone that a piece of software from Cambridge was among the tools used on its first four seasons. Animo is the kind of product that is invisible by design. If you can tell it was used, something has gone wrong.

What Animo did was digital ink and paint, plus compositing, for animation that was still drawn by hand on paper. The drawings get scanned, the software finds the lines, fills the regions with the right colors, holds the levels in the right order and composites the result over a background. Before that, a human painted every cel in acetate and a camera shot them one frame at a time. Disney had built its own system for this and kept it. Cambridge Animation Systems sold one to everybody else, and over 300 studios bought it.

The company was registered on 28 February 1990 under the name Feltonian Limited, which it carried for twenty-two days before becoming Cambridge Animation Systems Limited on 22 March. Animo arrived in 1992, built on a package called Compose in Color that the company had acquired from its developer, Oliver Unter-ecker. It started on SGI O2 workstations and later came down to Windows and Mac OS X.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ink and paint ~

The British animation industry ran on this thing for the better part of fifteen years. Cosgrove Hall was on it, as were Telemagination and King Rollo Films, along with a long tail of smaller houses. Then it went abroad, which is where the list gets strange, because a small Cambridge company ended up under Warner Bros Feature Animation and DreamWorks at the same time.

By 2000 the problem was no longer coloring, it was the collision between hand drawing and computer graphics, and Animo went after it. Animo Inkworks let Maya and 3ds Max users push 3D data into Animo and integrate it through a plug-in called Scene III. A year later came Swiffworks, which went the other way and brought Flash output into Maya. English Wikipedia's prose calls that second one Animo Sniffworks, but the trade announcement it cites spells it Swiffworks, and the announcement is the one to believe.

~ what the studios used it for ~

The credit list is long enough to be its own argument. Space Jam, Quest for Camelot, The Iron Giant, Osmosis Jones, Christmas Carol: The Movie. The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado both used it alongside Toon Boom's own tools, years before Toon Boom bought the company. Kung Fu Panda used it for the 2D sequences only. On television it did Courage the Cowardly Dog, Angelina Ballerina, Maisy, Franklin, Clone High, Kim Possible and the Winx Club seasons already mentioned.

Almost none of those credits say Animo anywhere a viewer can see. This is the ordinary condition of production tools: the name on the screen belongs to the studio, and the software that made the studio's week possible is a line item in a technical director's budget.

Animo 6.0 shipped on 8 December 2004 and was the last major version. Four years is a long quiet stretch for a product in that category, and what filled the gap was Flash getting good enough for television while Toon Boom got good enough for everything else.

~ the name came off ~

On 8 January 2009 Toon Boom Animation announced it had closed a definitive agreement with Cambridge Animation Systems to acquire all of the intellectual property of Cambridge and the Animo product line. Read that sentence carefully, because it is the whole ending: Toon Boom bought the software, not the company. Joan Vogelesang, running Toon Boom at the time, framed it as reaching Animo's European and Asian customers. Post Magazine, covering it the same day, noted that Animo was currently in version 6, which it had been for four years.

The Companies House file finishes the story in two lines. On 19 January 2009, eleven days after the announcement, company 02475402 changed its name from Cambridge Animation Systems Limited to New Software Solutions Ltd. Its registered office by then was an accommodation address at 79 Knightsbridge in London, with a company-secretarial firm installed as secretary the previous December. The last accounts were made up to 30 June 2008, and the company was dissolved on 12 October 2010. Thirty-seven officers passed through that file across twenty years and thirty-five of them resigned. Animo was never updated again and can no longer be bought.

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