Most hand-drawn frames of animation in a videogame

Cuphead (Studio MDHR, 2017) is a run-and-gun boss rush game, where almost every level is a boss fight. Impressively, every frame of Cuphead, from the grotesque enemies, to the zoomed out world map, and even little Cuphead himself, is hand animated. According to the developers, there are over 45,000 hand-drawn frames in the main game, and 27,000 in the DLC, all in a traditional style inspired by the golden age of American animation that began in the late 1920s. Most specifically, it was inspired by Fleischer Studios.

The closest videogame to Cuphead’s 72,000 frames of hand-drawn animation is Space Ace (Cinematronics, 1984). As confirmed by Digital Leisure, publisher of the Dragon’s Lair Trilogy (which includes Space Ace) on PS4, the game had 34,116 frames of hand-drawn animation across its 23 minutes 43 seconds. This was closely followed by Dragon’s Lair (Cinematronics, 1983), with 31,431 frames, and Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp (Digital Leisure, 1991), with 26,541 frames.