Great points all around. 🙂

I’m not sure if I could consider two shorts the start of a “new Golden Age… ” but it will certainly be nice to see a return to some of the practices that made animation what it is today, that’s for sure!

I’m not an animator so the only innovation that I noticed was the changes in camera angles.

I think the only thing this has to do with technology, is that producers didn’t force Glen to make anything commercial, that would appeal to the masses, because they want to market the short with technology. So they given him a freedom about the content, just said to make it “beautiful and emotional”. And Glen Keane showed us a next level of what beautiful and emotional can mean for traditional animation.

A few years ago he pushed Disney CG to next level, trying to add handdrawn qualities to CG, resulting in much better CG animation that ever made before. Still, the best CG animation from recent Disney features starts to look weak when compared to Duet. Glen Keane reveals the true potential of traditional animation, which is far beyond even his own previous works. If anyone admired Bill Tytla’s animation and wondered how far would Tytla get if he stayed at Disney, and how far would animation develop with him, Duet is a hint. I hope Glen Keane and other great 2D animators will follow with more wonderful productions, that would probably never be produced in a commercial studio.

I think this short technically could be done in 1930s Golden Age, even the graphical style reminds me a bit of Arabian Dance from Nutcracker Suite, but probably the technology allowed for better preservation of original pencil strokes and reduced manpower needs with cleaning up and shading. However, in past 60 or 80 years, probably there wasn’t many animators who could pull out such a performance! Even Glen Keane himself, probably needed all these years to reach the current skill which is absolutely amazing. If Andreas Deja manage to make something equally wonderful with his Mushka short, we can announce the new Golden Age of traditional animation! Who cares about big studios, when such masterpieces are being produced without them!

I’m guessing that it’s called “Duet” because it has only two humans.