EIGHTY years after Walt Disney put pen to paper to create Mickey Mouse, his studio has abandoned hand-drawn animation.

Some 650 Disney employees, from top management down, are being laid off in a cost-cutting exercise repeated across the film industry. The number of animators employed by the company has been reduced by two thirds in recent years as it focuses on computer-generated films rather than 2-D hand-drawn imagery.

But amid the restructuring former employees are breathing new life into traditional skills that Walt would recognise. Eight animators who made Disney films such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, have started a specialist studio of their own — a sign of a growing artistic challenge to the domination of computer-generation.

Tim O’Donnell, who worked at Disney for 28 years, lamented that animators using hand-drawing were becoming “a rare or extinct species”.

Troy Gustafson, a Disney employee for 12 years, said he had mixed feelings, of sadness and anger, and did not want to see hand-drawn animation die out: “It’s a talent. It’s a skill. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

The eight are among a dozen animators who have founded Miracle Studios in Wisconsin. They are now working on their first feature film, about a character called Miracle Mouse — an eternal optimist who happens to meet a perpetual pessimist.

The driving-force behind their company is Tom Hignite, who started planning it after he took a studio tour at Disney.

He told The Times yesterday: “I wondered where the animators were. There weren’t any artists behind the desks. They were in the midst of deciding to close the studio down.”

He felt that part of American culture was being swept away by technology, noting that Disney once employed more than 2,000 people on hand-drawn animation and that other American studios had all but abandoned the hand-drawn tradition. “Walt was always a great innovator, but he spent his life loving hand-drawn animation,” he said. On the difference between computer-generated imagery and hand-drawn versions, he said: “It’s not better or worse — but the advantage of hand-drawn imagery is that it looks more human, more artistic. The human touch is so evident.”

The traditional way is also pursued by Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese director who won an Oscar in 2003 for Spirited Away. He criticises Hollywood studios for abandoning artistry in favour of computing, and believes that their approach is dictated by computer games and the number-crunching success of computer-generated crowd-pullers such as Shrek.

Miyazaki’s film, Howl’s Moving Castle, a two-hour feature that involved thousands of hand-drawn frames — 24 per second — was based on a story by Diana Wynne Jones, a British author.

When John Lasseter, the director of the computer animated films Toy Story and Cars, was made head of Disney films this year, he said that the studio was still committed to producing hand animated films.

Aardman Animations, the British studio that has been showered with awards for Wallace and Gromit, announced this year that it had forsaken its Plasticine models to create characters and will use computer graphics for its next film, Flushed Away — a comedy about rats in the sewers of London. Although the creators of box-office hits such as Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-Rabbit say that they will return to Plasticine figures, they admit to having been overwhelmed by the potential of computers.

One reason for using technology in the new film is that animating water is almost impossible with Plasticine. Peter Lord, a co-founder of Aardman Animations, added that he found using computers quite liberating. Mr Lord said that until he tried computers, he was sceptical, but “when I see the finished footage I am struck by its beauty in terms of performance, lighting, camerawork — things that make good films”.

But Dan Daly, one of Miracle Studios’ animators, who worked at Disney for 12 years, said: “A lot of us spent most of our lives learning to draw and work in this particular medium. There is a feeling about hand-drawn animation that you don’t see in computers.”

HOW IT ALL BEGAN ... AND ENDED

• In the 1920s Walt Disney joined his brother Roy and his friend Ub Iwerks to establish an animation studio. Together they created Mickey Mouse. Their first animated film with sound was Steamboat Willie (1928)
  
• Fantasia (1940) married animation with classical music, outraging some music purists
  
• The first fully computer- generated animated film was Toy Story (1995)
  
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) helped to change the face of animation in successfully merging live action and cartoons
  
• The last hand-drawn feature film Disney produced was Home on the Range in 2004
  
• Last year an army of 180 animators from 17 countries was recruited by Ealing Studios for Valiant, the first major computer-generated feature film to be made in Britain
  
• Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn Spirited Away won an Oscar in 2003 and made $270 million (£150 million) in Japan alone