As an animated work, Steven Universe is kind of garbage. There are YouTube essays out there detailing its problems, but it’s most glaring when a guest animator takes over a small portion of the series and blows the entire thing out of the water.
The OP is disingenuous, but animation is having a problem these days with restricted budgets, homogenized designs, and poor use of digital tools. Quality animation was always expensive and therefore in the minority, but the everyday budget stuff is worse than in the past. There are recent series that I can’t even watch due to awful framerates and bad CGI.
I’d say that animation has always had an issue in the US about having never been taken seriously as art and thus never really been funded well, outside of rare exceptions. The people currently working in the industry are working with in the constraints of what is available, and a lot of them do a pretty good job with in those constraints.
I don’t think that returning to purely hand drawn works is realistic or practical given the realities of the industry, nor necessarily desirable even with better budgets. The digital tools available certainly need to be better developed, and there are a lot of techniques that could be implemented to make better uses of the available budgets.
As an animated work, Steven Universe is kind of garbage. There are YouTube essays out there detailing its problems, but it’s most glaring when a guest animator takes over a small portion of the series and blows the entire thing out of the water.
The OP is disingenuous, but animation is having a problem these days with restricted budgets, homogenized designs, and poor use of digital tools. Quality animation was always expensive and therefore in the minority, but the everyday budget stuff is worse than in the past. There are recent series that I can’t even watch due to awful framerates and bad CGI.
I’d say that animation has always had an issue in the US about having never been taken seriously as art and thus never really been funded well, outside of rare exceptions. The people currently working in the industry are working with in the constraints of what is available, and a lot of them do a pretty good job with in those constraints.
I don’t think that returning to purely hand drawn works is realistic or practical given the realities of the industry, nor necessarily desirable even with better budgets. The digital tools available certainly need to be better developed, and there are a lot of techniques that could be implemented to make better uses of the available budgets.