Yes, Bit
was indeed real CGI animation. There were some other designs tossed around that included a face and a more rounded appearance (as opposed to the sharp polygon look it ended up as) that might have been hand animated, but in the end, Bit was indeed true CGI, 100% computer animated... except for the trail it left sometimes when it darted off. That might have been hand animated, but I'm not sure. But that's not Bit, just his trail.
And yes, the MCP was 100% computer animated... well in some scenes anyway. For some shots of the MCP, I remember reading somewhere that the MCP was not computer animated. But when he's computer animated, he's 100% computer animated, as opposed to part CG and part hand drawn in the same frame.
I believe that Bit and the MCP are indeed the two first fully computer animated characters in a feature length film. TRON is not the first film to employ computer animation as we all know, but it was the first film to feature that amount of computer animation whereas other films before it just used computer animation for a quick effect here and there. Like in Star Wars, where the only real computer animation was the showing of the Death Star plans just before the battle of Yavin.
Funny thing about TRON is not just the amount of computer animation used in it, but also the traditional animation that was made to look as much like computer animations as possible. Funny how they tried to pass off hand drawn animation as computer animation back then when now they try and pass off computer animation as something real.
I get a kick out of that for some reason.
As a kid, I thought all of the imagery that took place in the computer (except for the actors themselves) was actually computer animated. They fooled me. At the same time, I noticed how odd looking some of the computer animation was. I knew computer animation was supposed to look perfect and render perfectly translated depth, etc. I clearly remember the recognizer sequence in which Flynn was flying through the canyons, seeing it from his view - it looked off to me. It didn't look like the depth was proper and some of the angles didn't look so perfect. At the time, I just figured it was poorly done computer animation. I didn't realize that it was hand drawn animation. There were many glitches in the animation I noticed back then, that turned out to be because they were not computer animated. I even thought the backgrounds were 100% computer drawn back then. Aside from the not so perfect animation at times (which no film has ever been 100% perfect), I thought they did such a wonderful job of blending all of that together. Man, I love that film!
