When Walt Disney set out to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, the press called it "Disney's Folly." No one had asked an audience to sit with drawn characters for eighty-three minutes, and the studio invented a multiplane camera and a new philosophy of weight and personality to hold them there. It worked, and it set a pattern that has held for nearly a century: the landmark Disney character almost always arrives strapped to a problem no animator had solved yet.
The problem changes with the medium. Hand-inked cels gave way to computers, computers to Pixar's fully three-dimensional worlds, and each jump left a signature character behind - a genie who morphed faster than any cel could keep up with, a queen whose ice and hair needed software written from scratch. The modern canon still runs on that same engine of invention.
Consider Maui. His body is a mountain of muscle rendered in three dimensions, but the stories tattooed across it are flat, hand-drawn, and alive - and a hand-drawn line does not naturally sit on a surface that flexes and turns. Bridging those two worlds took a tool built for one character alone.