You can see it in quotes like this:

“Yoga Monkey, a character whose role in the magazine is to provide the young readers with colouring opportunities, is created by Paul Noble, best known as a “Young British Artist” – quite something when you consider that most comic characters for children are drawn by computers.”

That’s from The Guardian of Oct 2003 about children’s magazine, Okido.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/03/okido-new-childrens-comic

There’s also this article – ‘Computers draw a new chapter in comics”; if you were to just read the title, it would reinforce the belief, but the article is better, of course.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/dave-gibbons-watchmen-interview

This post was mentioned on Twitter by bloghorn: Cartoons are about ideas and creativity, not the tools used: http://is.gd/7sUD4...

And you’re right, the traditional animators on the film pointed out on the recent South Bank Show about Lasseter that their paper drawings are still scanned and animated on computers. I haven’t seen this film, but if you look at a fairly recent 2D film like The Iron Giant you can tell that a lot of the movement of the robot character is similar to CGI, it just has the appearance of “hand drawn”.

Actually, the term CGI, computer-generated imagery, is equally misleading. Surely artist generates it, not the computer?

The “hand-drawn” elements that had been eliminated had little to do with artistic or creative ability, and much more to do with a steady hand and great patience, working on the hundreds of thousands of ‘paint and trace’ cells required to make up an animated movie.

What would be interesting to find out is just how much of that human effort has been reinstated in order to produce this latest movie. It would seem like economic madness to turn back the clock fully to the way things were, much as it would be welcome employment for a heck of a lot of people. But I have a sneaky feeling that although this new movie has the appearance of old 2D effort, that the truth of the matter may be less “hand-drawn” than they’d like to make out.