What is the most expensive animation in history?

Producing an animation is not as easy as it seems. In the beginning, it was necessary to draw all the scenes by hand, which took a long time to complete. Nowadays, technology has emerged to make things a little easier, and many animated films are made using computer graphics.

Despite being created to help animators, as well as to innovate productions that, over time, have become increasingly realistic, to use all these new technologies a lot of investment is required, both in terms of studies and finances.

Films like “Toy Story” or “Frozen” manage to impress the public due to their wealth of details, such as the lint on clothes, the shine of reflections, or even the swaying of hair in the wind, like Elsa’s, for example, which required exclusive software to be animated, in addition to having the participation of a celebrity hairdresser to make it even more real and beautiful.

However, although both productions truly surprise due to their wealth of detail, they were not the most expensive ever produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios.

The most expensive animation in history

The position of most expensive animated film in the history of cinema is occupied by a film released almost 15 years ago: “Tangled”, a plot that adapts the tale of Rapunzel, a young girl with long hair who is trapped in a tower.

According to data from Box Office Mojo (via Rolling Stone Brasil), at the time, “Tangled” had a budget of approximately US$ 260 million (around 1.4 billion reais at the current conversion rate) — and developing the film was truly a challenge.

Being the first Disney film to be made with CGI, to be able to animate the protagonist’s enormous hair, the studio needed to develop an unprecedented technology that could give movement to all the strands, after all, until then, no character had been produced with so much hair.

In total, as reported on Disney’s official website, Rapunzel’s locks have more than 100,000 strands, measuring exactly 20 meters in length, which, if placed side by side, from end to end, would total approximately 300 kilometers.

In addition, another moment that served as a challenge for the animators: the lantern scene. This is because, in order to create the beautiful moment in which the protagonist realizes her dream, and also has a super romantic moment with Flynn Ryder, also known in Brazil as José Bezerra, it was necessary to include tiny details that almost no one knows.

Each lantern flame, for example, has 10,000 micro-points of light. In the part that contains more lights — 46,000, specifically — we can add up to more than 460 million points of light.