The film opens with the camera flying over the rooftops and down into a little street, with no computer and no 3D. The simple trick first: to make a walker travel, hold it still and slide the world under it, exactly as fast as its planted foot. But one ordinary painting, slid, only moves sideways. So, in the words of a 1997 paper written with Walt Disney Feature Animation, "a single backdrop was painted that incorporated a kind of 'warped perspective'", then "revealed just a little at a time" through a small moving window. Daniel Wood, Adam Finkelstein, John Hughes, Craig Thayer and David Salesin turned it into a rule and a program: the window crosses the painting opposite to the way the world crosses the lens. Bend it far enough and one building is in it twice. "When viewed as a whole, the panoramas may appear strangely warped."

The village, the flight and the painting are our own, computed the paper's way; no frames from the film.

Which opening shot made you feel you were flying?

Sources: Daniel N. Wood, Adam Finkelstein, John F. Hughes, Craig E. Thayer and David H. Salesin, "Multiperspective Panoramas for Cel Animation", SIGGRAPH 1997.
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).