Director John Kahrs had a vision for his animated short Paperman. There was just one problem. The technology to make it didn’t exist yet.

A Pixar film is a beautiful thing. Long after Toy Story’s 3-D novelty wore off, artists refined their techniques, so Up could make us cry. But in these computer-generated worlds full of perfect shapes and gradients, we inevitably lost some of that old Disney magic--the nuance of incredible, hand-drawn lines.

“Isn’t there a way we can bring that hand of an artist back?” John Kahrs thought. 

At the time, he was working on his storyboards for Paperman--what has since become Disney’s 2013 Oscar-nominated animated short. It was going to be “an urban fairy tale in a beautiful world of light and shadow,” showcasing the latest in CG technology like global illumination and radiocity (light-based physics). But another thought had been haunting him. Working on Tangled alongside legendary 2-D animator Glen Keane (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast), Kahrs watched Keane sketch on top of the CG animations during the production process. Software allowed Keane to reshape 3-D figures with his pen strokes, but ultimately, his beautiful lines were lost in the process. It seemed like such a waste.

Late in the storyboarding process, Keane’s vision for Paperman was born anew. What if it could be a hybrid of the old and new schools of animation? What if it could be 2-D and 3-D at the same time?

Kahrs began investigating that possibility in the only place he could, Disney’s R&D department. He lucked out when he met software engineer Brian White, who had already been working on a new piece of animation software called Meander that specialized in 2-D interpolation (using software to reason out gaps in sketched animations). With modification and refinement, it just might work.

“You hear people talking a lot about innovation--innovation comes out of necessity,” Keane says. “The necessity in this case was we had to figure out how to have a CG underlayer that dragged these drawn lines on top of it.”

Click HERE and WATCH Oscar Nominated Paperman courtesy of HULU