Disney’s latest short, Lilo & Scratch (screening before the fantasy Hexed on November 25), finds the beloved mischievous alien (Chris Sanders) battling a cat-like pet that Lilo (Maia Kealoha) adopts. It represents the studio’s latest experiment with combining 2D and 3D techniques to emulate the hand-drawn, watercolor look of Lilo & Stitch (2002).

Indeed, it was a way of having “everyone involved with pencil, pixel, or paintbrush,” according to VFX supervisor Jeremy Sikorski, who helped develop the pipeline to seamlessly accommodate everything.

Early testing allowed them to study OG backgrounds from Lilo & Stitch at the Animation Research Library. The new ones were digitally painted in Photoshop with watercolor while some were hand-painted with paper. The goal was to recapture the same visual style as the feature. High-resolution scans of the OG paper were matched by the digital team.

They even developed a suite of tools to help animators visualize the 2D flat look of the final image. Alex Kuperschmidt, the supervising animator on Lilo & Stitch, worked on the short, animating on paper for select shots as well as doing draw-overs and providing advice.

In a frame modeling test, a watercolor, hand-painted background was combined with 3D sculptures of Lilo and Stitch playing the Elvis record. In a subsequent animation test, a CG Stitch held a blaster on a hand-drawn Scratch. The blaster then transitions from CG to hand-drawn when Scratch puts it in its mouth. With the animation, it was a negotiation between departments about the final look of the model.

“It’s our intention to bring back the fun of animation with lots of physical humor, and Stitch is a perfect character prime for diving in with a short like this,” said director Malcon Pierce (Versa short). “Stitch is such a well-known character and we wanted to remind people how weird and mischievous he is, and have fun bringing his edge back.”

“When we pitched this project, the initial idea was that Stitch is going to adopt a pet, and we didn’t quite know yet what that animal could be,” added director Fawn Veerasunthorn (Hexed). “And because Stitch has been called a blue dog, we thought the opposite of that would be [an orange] cat. And a cat has such a complicated relationship with people. This seems like a worthy opponent. And it’s an animal that is inherently already chaotic and hard to read.”

The 6-minute short contains a series of escalating set pieces involving a chase with a truck and an air battle. “They were constantly one-upping each other,” Veerasunthorn continues. “And then, early on, I think we were just playing around with how weird this cat could be, and we actually went too far and made the cat too spooky, and gave away the big reveal.

“And so part of the fun was trying to figure out what the balance was between a cute cat and a mischievous cat,” she adds. “That allowed us to go bigger later when she’s getting her head knocked back and then coming back or hijacking a truck, so that we could get as much range out of that character as we could.”

For Pierce, the air battle was the most challenging. “To have this sword fight between Stitch with a pool noodle and Scratch with a taxidermy swordfish with umbrellas falling was really difficult to pull off,” he explained. “It was like: What are we doing? But each part of the short has is own micro-problem to solve.

“You’ve got a gravity challenge there,” he added. “Yet, even how the clouds are moving past camera. How the truck tumbles over. Is it achand-drawn truck or a CG truck and the hand-drawn backgrounds? To be able to set up the short for both CG animators and hand-drawn animators took a lot of discipline for preserving the look and feel of the original film.”