Now This Is a Superhero

This makes me feel happy and wistful all at once: Robb Pratt, who worked on many Disney animated movies of the ’90s and ’00s (as both an in-betweener and a full animator; he’s credited with doing some animation on the lead character in Atlantis: The Lost Empire), decided to do a tribute both to old-school Superman and old-school animation. He designed and created a hand-drawn animated Superman segment, about a minute long, set to the music from old Superman movie serials and with all the old-fashioned things in place: Superman in the phone booth, Superman fighting robots, Superman as a good guy around kids. The design for Lois Lane is not what I think of when I picture the character, and the designs in general remind you that Pratt worked on Kim Possible, but the love of real hand-drawn animation and its power to convey personality does come through in the short. It’s followed by a segment where Pratt explains why and how he made the film.