SyFy has "Samurai Jack" creator Genndy Tartakovsky quoted as saying that he wants to bring back hand-drawn cartoons to big studio animated films.
"I think one of the problems he will face is convincing executives that those animations will still produce the profits that 3D animated films are producing. My 2-year-old daughter loves Moana and Frozen, but she is bored stiff trying to watch hand-drawn 2D animation. She actually gets upset if I put on a cartoon that isn’t incredibly rendered like Word Party or Secret Life of Pets have been rendered. She’s been spoiled and I don’t see her changing her mind until she’s old enough to start grasping storylines and dialog intricacies."
I hope he succeeds. 2D animation has always had a certain unique charm unmatched by its 3D equivalent.
The last full-length Disney film that was drawn using traditional (aka 2D) animation/no computerized assistance? 2011’s "Winnie the Pooh." And, as of right this minute, there are absolutely no plans for a new traditional/2D films from Disney or its rivals. Although, the master of the craft, Hayao Miyazaki did un-retire to make another film, so we do have that to look forward to.
Director Brad Bird ("The Iron Giant") had some interesting things to say about the future of traditional animation last year [Brad Bird Wants to Make a New 2D-Animated Film Someday]: "I actually think it’s a lot more valid than other people do. I think the industry tends to like to think in the narrow sort of mindset of a businessman, and businessman absolutes and movies really exist in a much grayer region of dreams and stuff like that, and instinct is prized in movies, it’s not prized with the businessmen in movies, but movies themselves often reward instinct rather than pie charts. And what has not been done is that there’s been no American animation done on Disney-level quality that has really gone into different genres. For instance, there’s never been a horror movie in animation executed at a Disney-level quality and hand-drawn, I’m not talking about CG I’m talking about hand-drawn, but it doesn’t take a lot to imagine how cool that would be. If you think of the scariest parts of Snow White or Pinocchio or Fantasia with Night on Bald Mountain, you could do something really scary in animation and I think if you did it right, if you did it with all the art that Spielberg did Jaws, I think that it would be an amazing experience because there’s something intuitive about when people are drawing directly with their hands."
"The problem is that every time people have deviated from the Disney playbook in hand-drawn animation, they’ve done so with staff that is nowhere near the Disney-level talent or Disney-level budgets. So you have things like Heavy Metal, which not all of them are great, but a couple of them are really interesting, but they didn’t have the money or the artists to pull them off at the level that maybe they should’ve been pulled off. Whereas in live-action film there are all kinds of new films being done in different genres where people can really execute an idea at a top level. It’s just that animation rewards grooming a team and keeping a team in place. That’s why when studios try to emulate Disney on the quick-and-cheap they always fail because Disney has refined their animation team over years, they have a history of it, people go to Disney and know that there’s going to be a job after the movie, there’s going to be another movie. And when you assemble animation teams the way you do a live-action film, you’re often struggling a bit to get a cohesive team together, so if you have a team that works well together, you’re hoping for another film so that you can refine the team.""But for someone like me who wants to move back and forth between animation and live-action, that becomes its own challenge, but I absolutely think that hand-drawn animation is valid and I actually hope to do one in the future with a large budget and a longer schedule than we had on Iron Giant."