“Look how much variation there is when I compare 80 years if animation trends to 5 years of animation trends.”
Of course animation has trends. It’s not new. Just look at the Hanna-Barbara cartoons of this 60s, when cheaper animation designed for television replaced the Golden Age animation styles. Look how many of these characters are, “blockey-torsoed animals with a superfluous neck accessory that allows us to animate the head and body independently, which saves us time and money.”
It’s not limited to this one studio either. Look at the Rocky and Bullwinkle characters. Tell me, do these blocky, simplistic character designs have more in common with the Hanna-Barbara characters above or the rounded, more fluid designs of the Disney/Warner Brothers/MGM characters of the 40s?
I mean…
We are so old even the brand new “now” is a decade ago.
This is a trash take.
I think it’s a joke? Or bait?
All of these characters, old and new, look like the below faces when drawn in a happy-go-lucky pose. OP went and found distraught/mischievous/disgusted frames of old characters and displayed them opposite concept art-style sketches of modern characters’ happy-go-lucky poses.
its also using fanart of 10+ year old shows as examples
Yeah the CalArt style did get a bit overdone, but I see little qualitative difference with any other decade’s popular cartoon style. Ultimately I like it, it’s heavily stylized and evocative of a time.
Not my picture! this is something my friend messaged me after finding it on Reddit
I would give you my Lemmy Gold, but I won’t scroll through my gallery, so have this other meme I saved
I don’t think Dipper ever makes that face, Gumball looks nothing like the other shows (love Gumball’s style tho, amazing mix of style), I haven’t watched the other two much
Also the top covers like 80 years of animation and not 10
Both Gravity Falls and the Amazing World of Gumball have absolutely top tier writing. 100% both Dipper and Gumball are “off-model” in OPs image. For this seemingly being a “we’re so sick of the CalArts style” example people must not know that the creator of Gumball, Ben Bocquelet, is fucking French and the show is produced in Europe.
I’m in my forties and Gumball is legitimately one of the funniest cartoons I have seen in two decades.
Also, Gumball stands out on it’s own because the norm for cartoons for a long time has seemed to have been the Gravity Falls/Adventure Time/Steven Universe formula of comedy mixed with a bunch of serious undertones and long-form story. There is no long-form story with Gumball, with the voice actors literally resetting multiple times and making jokes about switching voices no less. There hasn’t really been an extremely funny cartoon of that variety (that I have seen personally) since the Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, and Gumball positively outshines Flapjack.
Finally, it also ignores how Gumball absolutely pulls faces like this. Here’s a couple screenshots I just pulled from episodes I remember.
EDIT: In other news a new season of Gumball after a seven year haitus is dropping later this month.
I believe the bottom is from a “how to draw characters from X show in Y show style”
Sh-shut UP this is MY meme about NOSTALGIA so I am going to compare what I LIKE versus what is NEW!!!
Choosing gumball as an example of how samey cartoons are shows the person who made this has never watched the show.
Also phineas and ferb would like a word.
I love that there are Hanna Barbera characters snuck in there
To some extent it’s a result of how American animation has evolved to embrace animation software to reduce costs and moved away from hand drawn inbetween frames.
It’s not a bad thing, just an approach that leads to certain restrictions.
In terms of artistic quality and creativity, it most certainly is a bad thing. You can literally see the decline in quality and homogenization of style.
ah yes where would we be with out the artistic heights of bugs bunny. Clearly steven universe and gravity falls are complete artistic failures in comparison to that monument of cultural achievement.
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.
Mmmmm, that’s some damn good bait.
Agreed. Hell, look at how they massively toned down the toonishness in The Simpsons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQcSAM7APYU
Marge has a dead-eyed stare and doesn’t emote at ~0:30 given the software limitations. The animators said they can’t do any wacky stuff anymore because the software freaks out if they do anything like the old school animation smears, e.g. https://ca.pinterest.com/pin/476677941782317699/
The Simpsons one is telling. Just look at how Bart moves at the very beginning, the reaction to the bell going off. The OG bart is more “animated” (full of motion) than the rest, especially the modern version, even if it is more sloppy. Yet, that sloppiness was part of the charm of Simpsons. That’s what made them feel like toons.
Yea the modern version has “depth” with the 3D effects but everything looks so stiff.
sans undertale??
Sans: Star After Not Surviving
I can hear that Ren and Stimpy episode (both frames are from the same episode).
And you wanna know what else? I’m gonna hit ya! And you’re gonna faaaallll… *points at ground* And I’m gonna look down, and I’m gonna laaaaugh…
ah yes the CalArts effect
