Adorable. Imagine the detailed work of the hair movement which is on point.
Somebody put so much love into the animation of those curls.
don’t they usually animate hair like this with physics rather than actually animate it by hand?
Correct, hair is usually done using a physics simulation because to individually animate every strand (or even just every cluster) would take months or years.
CG hair actually has a pretty amazing history. If we go back to 2004, the time of The Incredibles (which notably features the long-haired character of Violet) long hair was basically impossible. The physics calculations would make it wrap against itself and stick in place or violently fly around haphazardly. The Incredibles had to engineer the technology to simulate Violet’s hair mid-production to get it to work as well as it looks in the final release (they also did great work with wet hair too).
Prior to that, the best example is 2001’s Shrek, where hair simulation had to be done wholesale for the character of Donkey and for Princess Fiona’s braid. Having the hair be short or restricted in its movement made it a lot easier to simulate, but Shrek was still very pivotal in how fabric simulation progressed (a whole other can of worms, to say the least).
Now we have movies like Monsters Inc. and How to Train Your Dragon, where not only is hair varied in style, length, and volume, but it’s all simulated with physics rather than animated in the traditional fashion. Characters like Sully or Stoic the Vast would have been utterly impossible only 10 years ago.
So yeah, it’s maybe a little bit of a let-down to find out that hair such as in these gifs isn’t hand-crafted on a frame-by-frame basis, but that doesn’t really make it any less impressive I think.
Cool commentary.