15 Films That Took Major Strides In Animation
13. The Iron Giant
Another Brad Bird directed animation, The Iron Giant mashed 2D animation and 3D animation together to great effect. Brad Bird has said that the mixed-medium was used in order to give the titular robot a clear distinction from everything else - since he was an alien - and having the robot be CGI gave him a mass, weight, and scale otherwise unobtainable if he were animated in two dimensions.
What the animators were able to accomplish was astonishing since Warner Bros. gave them a third of the production budget and a smaller window to complete the film, in comparison to other animated movies. Besides those odds however, they had a burst of creative freedom when it came to the project and melded the perfect balance of 2D and 3D elements along with a heartwarming tale.