Honestly, most people think animation is just pixels or drawings moving at 24 frames per second. But when you sit down to watch a painted animated film like Loving Vincent, your brain kinda short-circuits for a second. It’s not just a movie. It is 65,000 oil paintings on canvas, physically created by over 100 artists who spent years in a studio in Poland and Greece, basically breathing in oil fumes and trying to channel the ghost of Vincent van Gogh. It’s insane. Nobody in their right mind should have made this movie because the logistics were a total nightmare, yet it exists.
The sheer audacity of the painted animated film medium is what makes it stick in your head long after the credits roll. It isn’t just a filter. It isn’t some AI-generated trickery that we see everywhere in 2026. It is a slow, methodical, and arguably painful human process of painting, photographing, scraping the paint off, and painting again.
Why Loving Vincent Changed the Rules
Before Loving Vincent dropped in 2017, the idea of a feature-length painted animated film was mostly a pipe dream or relegated to short indie projects. Hugh Welchman and Dorota Kobiela, the directors, didn't just want to tell a story about Van Gogh; they wanted the story to be told by his style. That’s a huge distinction.
They used a technique called "oil-painting animation." Most people get this wrong—they think the artists painted 65,000 separate canvases. They didn't. That would be physically impossible to store. Instead, they used a process called "re-animation." An artist would paint a frame on a canvas, then they’d move a tiny bit of the paint for the next frame, and photograph it. Frame by frame. It’s essentially stop-motion, but with wet oil paint. Because oil takes forever to dry, it stayed workable. If they made a mistake? They had to scrape it off with a palette knife and start over.
The Workforce Behind the Brush
It wasn't just a few people in a basement. They had to recruit 125 professional oil painters from all over the world. These weren't animators; they were fine artists. They had to go through a grueling training camp to learn how to replicate Van Gogh’s specific impasto style—the thick, rhythmic brushstrokes that look like they’re vibrating.
Think about the discipline required here. Imagine being a world-class painter and being told you have to spend six months painting the same ear moving three millimeters to the left. It’s a specialized kind of torture. But that’s why the film feels so heavy and textured. You can see the actual ridges of the paint. You can see the light catching the oil.
The Competition: The Old Man and the Sea
We can't talk about the painted animated film without mentioning Aleksandr Petrov. Long before Loving Vincent, this Russian animator was the undisputed king of the genre. His 1999 short film, The Old Man and the Sea, is legendary.
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Petrov doesn't use brushes much. He uses his fingertips.
He paints on glass. Multiple layers of glass, actually. He’ll paint on one level, then another level underneath it to create a sense of depth and "motion blur." Because he’s using slow-drying oil paints on a non-porous surface like glass, he can blend colors directly on the "screen." It results in this ethereal, dreamlike quality that looks more like a moving Renaissance painting than a cartoon. It won an Oscar for a reason.
Petrov’s work is arguably more "fine art" than Loving Vincent, which used rotoscoping—filming live actors first and then painting over them—to keep the character movements realistic. Some purists argue that rotoscoping is "cheating," but honestly, if you’re hand-painting 65,000 frames, I don’t think anyone can call you lazy.
Why This Medium is Dying (And Why That’s Great)
Let’s be real: from a business perspective, a painted animated film is a terrible idea.
It takes too long. It costs a fortune in labor. You can’t easily fix "glitches" in post-production. In an era where you can prompt an AI to "make this look like Van Gogh," the commercial incentive to hire 100 painters is basically zero.
But that is exactly why these films matter more now.
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When you watch a painted animated film, you are witnessing human stamina. There’s a "jitter" in the paint. The colors shift slightly from frame to frame because a human hand can’t perfectly replicate a shade of yellow 12 times in a row. This "imperfection" is called crawl. In traditional animation, crawl is considered a mistake. In oil-painted films, crawl is the soul of the movie. It’s what makes the sky in Loving Vincent feel like it’s actually swirling, just like Vincent saw it in his episodes of psychosis or religious fervor.
The Technical Grind
If you’re wondering how they actually did it, here’s the breakdown of the workflow:
- Live Action Shoot: They filmed real actors (like Saoirse Ronan and Chris O'Dowd) on green screens.
- Reference Plates: These shots were edited into a "normal" movie.
- PAWS (Painting Animation Work Stations): This was the custom-built tech. It was a wooden booth with a camera, a light, and a canvas.
- The First Frame: The artist paints the first frame of the shot, matching the actor's pose.
- The Move: They scrape and move the paint to match the next frame of the reference video.
- The Snap: Take a high-res photo.
- Repeat: Do this for two years.
Common Misconceptions About Painted Films
A lot of people think Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or The Bad Guys are painted films. They aren't. Those are 3D models with "shaders" that mimic the look of paint or ink. They look incredible, but they are digital constructs.
A true painted animated film is analog. It’s messy. If you touched the "master" of Loving Vincent while it was being made, you’d get blue paint on your thumb.
Another misconception is that it’s just for "art house" snobs. While the subject matter often skews toward biography or poetry, the visceral experience of seeing that much color move is something kids and casual viewers usually find mesmerizing. It’s like a magic trick that never reveals the prestige.
The Future of the Painted Frame
What happens next? We’re seeing a weird split in the industry. On one hand, tools like EbSynth allow creators to "paint" one frame and have the computer map that style onto a whole video. It’s efficient. It looks... okay.
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But there’s a small, stubborn group of filmmakers who refuse to let go of the physical medium. There’s a certain weight to oil paint that digital can't quite catch—the way light refracts through layers of glaze, the "impasto" texture that creates actual shadows on the canvas.
The painted animated film is a testament to the fact that sometimes, the hardest way to do something is the only way to do it right. If Loving Vincent had been made with a digital filter, nobody would be talking about it today. We talk about it because it represents millions of hours of human focus.
How to Appreciate the Medium
If you want to actually "get" why this matters, don't just watch these films on your phone. The compression kills the detail. You need a big screen.
- Watch the edges: Don't just look at the characters. Look at the corners of the frame. You’ll see the brushstrokes dancing. That’s where the "life" is.
- Compare the masters: Watch Petrov’s The Old Man and the Sea and then Loving Vincent. Notice how Petrov’s glass painting feels like water, while the Van Gogh film feels like clay.
- Look for the "Crawl": That flickering movement in the background isn't a mistake. It’s the vibration of the artist’s hand.
The painted animated film is probably the closest thing we have to a living, breathing museum. It’s a bridge between the 19th-century obsession with the "hand" of the artist and the 21st-century's mastery of the moving image. It’s slow art in a fast world.
Actionable Insights for Art Lovers
If you're inspired by the world of the painted animated film, you don't need a million-dollar studio to start.
Start by experimenting with oil on glass animation. It's the most "accessible" entry point. You need a piece of plexiglass, a light box, some slow-drying oil paints, and a smartphone on a tripod. Paint a simple shape, move the paint with your finger, take a photo. Repeat. You'll quickly realize how much respect these filmmakers deserve.
Support indie animators on platforms like Vimeo or at local film festivals. These projects often take years and rely on grants and crowdfunding. When a movie like The Peasants (the follow-up from the Loving Vincent team) comes to a theater near you, go see it. The box office numbers for these "impossible" films are the only thing that keeps the medium alive.
Finally, study the artists themselves. The films are better when you understand the source material. Reading Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo while watching his paintings come to life is a transformative experience. It stops being a "movie" and starts being a conversation across time.