Snow White animation cel process

Early Disney animation involved hand painting on clear sheets and layering frames upon each other to create movement, this is the process of cel animation. 

Snow white was the first feature film Disney created in 1937, and cel animation was the technique used to create it. A background would be painted and used as the bottom layer. In the video above, you can see how still it is, compared to animation now where you could see trees or clouds moving. here a scene has been painted and the main focus then is on the more vibrantly painted characters. I do admire this technique as it would have been a very tedious process, but then I can compare it to now as we use layers in Photoshop to create the same kind of thing