I came here to post this. The art on the left represents realistic humans. The art on the right is far more stylized. I'm of the opinion that the stylized art isn't as hard to draw as realistic, and I don't like it as much.
To add to this, the images on the left were likely all hand drawn, where as the images on the right were likely all done on a computer. The reason this is important is that the characters on the left had to be drawn by hand hundreds or thousands (I honestly don’t know much about animation) of times, where as on the right they had a computer to help with the animation process. My point being is that not only are the ‘80’s and ‘90’s characters more realistic, but they had to be hand drawn that way to a high level of precision over and over and over. They are not the same.
I'm not really into art, I just know what I like, so I had to look up CalArts Style. TIL:
There’s really no strict definition for what the CalArts style is. It honestly depends on who you ask. In general, though, it’s been used by critics in a derogatory sense to criticize animators for a lack of creativity and a generally lazy approach to animation. It typically involves thin-lined drawings, characters with rounded faces and noodle-like arms and legs, and generic colors and shapes. The characters also typically feature large heads, small bodies, and ovular eyes.
What I found even more interesting, is it the term was coined by the creator of Ren and Stimpy, and he alleges that it's the product of a school-to-work pipeline between the California institute of the Arts and Disney. Basically these people are just lazy animators because they know that they will get a job when they graduate. Interesting.
One other thing I've seen of the style that again fits with "lazy animators" is the flatness of the illustration - left side, there's shading there, there's extra lines that help you imagine the shape of the head being drawn.
Right side, it's a Mr Potato Head. No definition to anything - presumably, that'd slow down the output, and that's not something the Fun Factory can tolerate...
from how i understand it these awful styles like calarts and that one corprate clipart like one are desigend to be easy to learn and replicate so as to make artists using it easily interchangeable and replaceable.
You know exactly what I mean. Anyone that can draw the GI Joes on the left can draw Peppa Pig, but the reverse isn't true. Fuck, I can draw Peppa Pig and probably half of the characters on the right.
Art colleges don't even teach anatomy anymore. It takes many hours to be able to draw people in their proper proportions and with all the little bulges that show correct underneath muscles and bones.
that's not the argument at all. the argument is that GI Joe style is (objectively) more difficult to draw and that (subjectively) that property gives it more merit.
it's not as cheap as possible. it was as cheap as standards allowed. and as you can plainly see what was "cheap" back then is hell of a lot better than what we've got now, because the standards were changed. deliberately.
What I was about to say. If anything he confirms the point he was mocking. As an 80s baby I watched GI Joe, He-Man, Thundercats, Mask, Turtles, and they were drawn great to me
Your taste in cartoons matches your taste in comics!
GI Joe, He-Man, Thundercats, Mask, TMNT
Oddly enough when considering that list MASK had had no live action adaptation. Then again Matt Trakker is pretty much a poster boy for Aryans so that's one diversity casting locked in.
I’m honestly surprised nobody has decided to ruin….I mean adapt MASK. I actually didn’t hate those GI Joe movies from about 10 years ago. Weren’t great but weren’t horrible. Didn’t see that snake eyes movie. Also hope they leave the Centurions, Silverhawk, Lonestar, and COPS alone.
Also there was apparently a live action one kicking around in planning for at least a few years now. Names attached (no cast) were:
Director: F. Gary Gray (The Fate of the Furious, MIB: International, and a whole lot of rap music videos)
Writers:
Michael Chabon (Creator, and writer of Star Trek: Picard)
Cheo Hodari Coker (Executive producer: Luke Cage, Ray Donovan)
Lindsey Beer...
Okay, that last one is interesting. A single existing writing credit for a movie I've never heard of, but attached to 10 upcoming projects, including (I shit you not):
Michael Chabon (Creator, and writer of Star Trek: Picard)
Be afraid, be very afraid. Picard was total garbage; painful to watch.
Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light
I remember these toys with the holograms on their chest, back when hologram stickers were cool and new. It sounds like studios are licensing all the 80's cartoons in a wild stab at having a nostolgia-based hit.
I remember these toys with the holograms on their chest, back when hologram stickers were cool and new.
Pretty sure I had 2 of those toys and IIRC one of them was some grey/silver haired badguy from the evil faction in the cartoon. I think he had the power of some kind of arthropod as I vaguely remember a scene in the cartoon where he was stuck in a pitfall trap and needed to use his power to escape.
Look at what they did to my boy, Matt. I used to watch VHSs of MASK when I was a kid and still remember the episode where Matt was returning the crystal he had used to create the whole MASK technology back to some Incan/Aztec like group that could juggle boulders when the moon was just right. There was a play on words involving the sun and the chieftain's son that led to the downfall of VENOM that episode.
As a 90s baby we had X-men, Spiderman, Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, Gargoyles, those Disney Afternoon shows, Animaniacs, Freakazoid! to list a few.
I look at his post and it's a pretty narly self-own.
Even when they were bad, they could be made great. Through Razorfist, I discovered there was a cartoon of Battletech/Mechwarrior made in the 90's. It was absolute ham, completely over the top, didnt really fit the tone of most Battletech lore, and there were a lot of other non-canon things that happened with it. So the show only lasted for one season and then was ended.
BUT, the Battletech lore owners decided to run with it, and made the cartoon canon. Not that the cartoon story was canon, the cartoon itself is canon to the Battletech world. In lore, it was made as childrens propaganda for the Inner Sphere, which is why it portrays the Clans so over the top.
I just thought it was a fun way of sidestepping a bad product, and you would never see modern Hollywood think up something like that.
there was a cartoon of Battletech/Mechwarrior made in the 90's
Ah yes, the one with the augmented reality tech used by the invading battle clans. Yet another cartoon sadly cancelled just as it was getting into its stride story wise.
His image is disingenuous, at best. Dude is comparing a bunch of front facing and 3/4-profile head shots with a neutral expressions to images with more expressive faces while also including more than just the face. He is doing this in purpose.
Exactly. Not everything on the right looks like shit, It's that people pretend the calarts style isn't that prevalent when even Pixar has adopted it for their films. Nobody would be complaining about calarts if it wasn't for the fact that you see it in every cartoon now.
Because, newsflash, humans share a similar look and so when you are trying to be more realistic with your characters, they will look similar. The difference comes from their actual personalities which is something current cartoons have an issue with..
yeah anymore it seems the only way they try to make a charactor have personality is solely based on who thay wanna bang or as a flat one dimensional propaganda vehicle... hell the planeteers did that last one better then a lot of modern attempts.
Where's Johnny Bravo, PPG, courage, dexter and samurai Jack?! Hur dur I can do cherry picking idiot KNOWS he's full of shit, but deserves to be called out on it...plus the fucking calarts style needs to be burned to the fucking ground.
I have a soft spot for traditional animation. So here's a rant.
24 frames of animation per second.
Average kids show runtime is about 22 minutes.
24 x 60 x 22 is about 32k frames of animation.
Obviously not the same character in the same position over and over, but it was all hand drawn, so 32k frames of animation would take about 3-4 weeks to draw, 2 more weeks to properly film and animate. Add in an extra week to add in sound effects, foley and voice overs.
Not to mention that the ones on the left that I can recognize come from at least a few production companies. Rankin Bass, Funimation, 4Kids, WB Studios, Studio Canal, Nelvana Studios. Just to name a few.
The bulk of the animation however was done overseas. You'll find that there was a cabal of cheap to animate contract studios doing a ton of work on everything from GI Joe to The Real Ghostbusters and everything in between.
If it looks the same, or incredibly similar, it was by budget, not by design. Take Animaniacs for example. They changed looks from season to season. They were still on model, but they were done in a style taught by the studio that got contracted to make the bulk of the animation that was as close to model as possible.
With a computer, you still have to draw and animate, but the turn around time is way faster. I don't want to say it's better, because having a lot of PCs, drawing tablets, servers and a data center and such connected all day has to be quite a power draw, which might as well be akin to all the paper from the trees for the environmental footprint.
But I digress, the point of the rant was that you got really good at drawing a very specific way. Sort of like Disney. You go there with your art degree, and if you're lucky, they'll teach you to draw the Disney way, and you learn it. Same with Don Bluth, and several other instantly recognizable art styles. And even within Disney, there were style profiles that came forward from a few of the artists.
Tad Stones at Disney for example, and his specific style got used in Bonkers, Darkwing Duck, Mighty Ducks, and a few others.
People give CatArts and other styles a negative look because it looks like a kid could draw it sometimes. It doesn't have that professional quality look, compared to others. But then again, if that's the look they're going for, then they nailed it.
Keep in mind that King of the Hill, The Simpsons, The Head, Family Guy, and just about every original animation looked pretty shoddy, especially the early work, until someone came in and unformed the look and model of the characters.
It feels like in today's animation, there's a lot of off model work, even when it's a specific style that looks less realistic than others. And I think that might be part of the problem.
Filmation did re-use a lot of animation. Once a show got popular enough, they would re-use assets from other episodes and just time save a lot while keeping costs low.
I think they had to. They had a stable of six shows running at once at one point. Some corner cutting was necessary, even if I didn't like it as a kid. :)
Even with their faces hyper-zoomed-in so you can't see hair or outfit, unlike the latter side, they're actually more visually distinct to me than the mess of childish color and shape on the right side, which kind of morphs into a "blah" of CalArts and one random 3d-CG T-rex.
You could tell me the bottom row on the right was all not just the same cartoon, but the same character, and I would believe you, because nothing is visually distinct. But on the left side, there's no chance any of them are the same character.
To be clear, cartoons have a nasty habit of moving towards cheap animation, which badly degrades quality.
The 70's and 80's were fucking notorious for having some of the worst animated series in fucking history from a technical perspective, and it comes from how cartoons were monetized.
The drop-off is catastrophic. In 500 years, the 60's and 70's will be considered "The Dark Age of Animation" because "All animators were obviously killed in World War 2, and the basic skill sets of art would have to be re-learned".
Now, in reality, it's because cartoons in the 30's and 40's were broadcast, not on television, but in cinemas along with a double feature of movies. This was back in the day when you got dressed up to go to the theater with your family and neighbors to see two 2-3 hour movies in a row, and had an intermission for the kids. The cinema was a communal space where whole families and neighborhoods could go for 5-6 hours on a weekend, and enjoy the beautiful aesthetics and entertainment. This is why cinema's used to be fucking beautiful. There was a ton of money involved, and there was a worthwhile effort to make good animation.
But the 1960's and 70's emerged the concept of the "Saturday morning cartoons", where the shows were so cheap that the only way to make them profitable was to sell toys to children. Children aren't very good at focusing on technical quality, so the animation and art design fucking collapsed. It became cheap as fucking hell, and it showed.
Frankly, the first problem we are seeing with animation and cartoons today is that their quality is bad because Cal Arts is cheap. Cheap, mass produced, low quality animation that is being disseminated because the economic, academic, and institutional heart of animation is fucking poisoned.
The second problem we are seeing is that that institutional heart is poisoned with Leftism specifically. So, nihilistic, degenerate, mockery aesthetics are also seen as an inherent positive. Not only should you make it cheap as shit for cartoons, your cartoons should look like shit, because shit is good, and beauty is evil. I fucking defy you to find an animation with the class of a stripper rotoscoped as a lizard in 1940.
Our grandparents and great grandparents went to see strippers that had more class and femininity than most women do today god damnit!
Anyways, like Brutalism, CalArts is aesthetic terrorism, financially supported by corporations because it's cheap.
Everything moves towards becoming more productive based on technology, which also tends to drive down costs and then prices.
However, in cases where large companies exist, they intentionally drive down product quality, increase homogeneity in the product line, to make profits from margins that would otherwise be too small for any small business to survive with.
Games, honestly, have a ton of independent development and small studios. You'll notice that the worst quality control games are the ones coming from the ultra-massive companies who, as stated previously, had to cut quality control and increase homogeneity to make money.
Animation has a much longer history than games, and was basically monopolized by Disney, Warner, and basically everyone else. No one even had the physical skill that the old Disney & Warner animators had. What's happening now is that the CalArts pipeline is not pushing out any sort of real artists, but designers, who are just trained to replicate the cheap form of art they've been taught so that the major studios that own most of these shows make money from shit content production.
On the left side, there's an understandable emotion on every face. A normal person can look at literally any of those faces, and each one is very clearly expressing something different from the rest.
The ones on the right side have no more affect than a cereal mascot. It's all some variation of "DURR" or "BLAH" or, best-case scenario, bland affability. I'm familiar with enough of these characters too, and the underlying problem behind the art is that none have an actual human trait. They can be best described as "plucky (in a maximally non-offensive way)."
It is not the purpose of art to wallow in dirt for dirt’s sake; never its task to paint men only in states of decay, to draw cretins as the symbol of motherhood, to picture hunchbacked idiots as representatives of manly strength.…Art must be the handmaiden of sublimity and beauty, and thus promote whatever is natural and healthy.
Anyone ever seen LotGH? Its massive character ensemble all look like real people like the style on the left. Even anime has fallen from that decade. The original Berserk animation had similar detailing.
They do realize that the left side still looks better, right?
I came here to post this. The art on the left represents realistic humans. The art on the right is far more stylized. I'm of the opinion that the stylized art isn't as hard to draw as realistic, and I don't like it as much.
To add to this, the images on the left were likely all hand drawn, where as the images on the right were likely all done on a computer. The reason this is important is that the characters on the left had to be drawn by hand hundreds or thousands (I honestly don’t know much about animation) of times, where as on the right they had a computer to help with the animation process. My point being is that not only are the ‘80’s and ‘90’s characters more realistic, but they had to be hand drawn that way to a high level of precision over and over and over. They are not the same.
There's nothing wrong with stylized characters. The problem is when they're all stylized the same way.
I've heard similar comments regarding the "Cal Arts" style, which doesn't seem well suited to representing human beings...
I'm not really into art, I just know what I like, so I had to look up CalArts Style. TIL:
What I found even more interesting, is it the term was coined by the creator of Ren and Stimpy, and he alleges that it's the product of a school-to-work pipeline between the California institute of the Arts and Disney. Basically these people are just lazy animators because they know that they will get a job when they graduate. Interesting.
They forgot bean-mouth.
https://i.imgur.com/GkW8YsZ.jpeg
One other thing I've seen of the style that again fits with "lazy animators" is the flatness of the illustration - left side, there's shading there, there's extra lines that help you imagine the shape of the head being drawn.
Right side, it's a Mr Potato Head. No definition to anything - presumably, that'd slow down the output, and that's not something the Fun Factory can tolerate...
from how i understand it these awful styles like calarts and that one corprate clipart like one are desigend to be easy to learn and replicate so as to make artists using it easily interchangeable and replaceable.
It was going to say something about serious vs. comedy but then I realized that The Regular Show but it's Gung-Ho and Roadblock would be great.
No one tell him that realism is an artistic style.
You know exactly what I mean. Anyone that can draw the GI Joes on the left can draw Peppa Pig, but the reverse isn't true. Fuck, I can draw Peppa Pig and probably half of the characters on the right.
Art colleges don't even teach anatomy anymore. It takes many hours to be able to draw people in their proper proportions and with all the little bulges that show correct underneath muscles and bones.
Let's not pretend GI Joe wasn't done as cheaply as possible to sell plastic shit to little Bobby.
that's not the argument at all. the argument is that GI Joe style is (objectively) more difficult to draw and that (subjectively) that property gives it more merit.
it's not as cheap as possible. it was as cheap as standards allowed. and as you can plainly see what was "cheap" back then is hell of a lot better than what we've got now, because the standards were changed. deliberately.
"Is diffucult, therefor iz better"
Okay, boomer. Not like Disney ever reused entire scene.
I just tried to explain his argument to you but thanks for biting my head off.
What I was about to say. If anything he confirms the point he was mocking. As an 80s baby I watched GI Joe, He-Man, Thundercats, Mask, Turtles, and they were drawn great to me
Your taste in cartoons matches your taste in comics!
Oddly enough when considering that list MASK had had no live action adaptation. Then again Matt Trakker is pretty much a poster boy for Aryans so that's one diversity casting locked in.
I’m honestly surprised nobody has decided to ruin….I mean adapt MASK. I actually didn’t hate those GI Joe movies from about 10 years ago. Weren’t great but weren’t horrible. Didn’t see that snake eyes movie. Also hope they leave the Centurions, Silverhawk, Lonestar, and COPS alone.
I have been playing this since making my above comment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Z1yLO9C-Q
Extended version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5Bi0IGAxk
Did you mean Bravestar? From planet [New] TEXAS!
And this.
Of course even with that cast line up it still wouldn't be enough for the modern Woke Left.
Full version of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gla6FVEnJcg
Yes! Bravestarr and Galaxy Rangers. Also did you ever watch Bionic 6?
Bionic 6 is familiar but I don't think I ever watched that one.
A husband and wife with adopted kids and all have cybernetic parts giving them super powers.
They already did. IDW did some MASK comics. It went as you'd expect:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ev8BkLKGW90/V18hy0w2IBI/AAAAAAAAOWw/dj9-xy0NR50DqGqoGKrNfxBntqSFcUa-wCLcB/s1600/Mask_designsB.jpg
Fucking lol I knew Matt would get changed from a blonde, blue eyed male to that. Might as well call the show KANG, oh wait Marvel changed that too.
Also there was apparently a live action one kicking around in planning for at least a few years now. Names attached (no cast) were:
Director: F. Gary Gray (The Fate of the Furious, MIB: International, and a whole lot of rap music videos)
Writers:
Okay, that last one is interesting. A single existing writing credit for a movie I've never heard of, but attached to 10 upcoming projects, including (I shit you not):
Oh, no.
Oh, hell no!
Imagine this playing throughout that list.
Be afraid, be very afraid. Picard was total garbage; painful to watch.
I remember these toys with the holograms on their chest, back when hologram stickers were cool and new. It sounds like studios are licensing all the 80's cartoons in a wild stab at having a nostolgia-based hit.
Pretty sure I had 2 of those toys and IIRC one of them was some grey/silver haired badguy from the evil faction in the cartoon. I think he had the power of some kind of arthropod as I vaguely remember a scene in the cartoon where he was stuck in a pitfall trap and needed to use his power to escape.
Ha. That is exactly what I’d expect. Modern audience.
Look at what they did to my boy, Matt. I used to watch VHSs of MASK when I was a kid and still remember the episode where Matt was returning the crystal he had used to create the whole MASK technology back to some Incan/Aztec like group that could juggle boulders when the moon was just right. There was a play on words involving the sun and the chieftain's son that led to the downfall of VENOM that episode.
As a 90s baby we had X-men, Spiderman, Batman: The Animated Series, Superman, Gargoyles, those Disney Afternoon shows, Animaniacs, Freakazoid! to list a few.
I look at his post and it's a pretty narly self-own.
I was watching those as well. 80s and 90s tv and cartoons are great
Even when they were bad, they could be made great. Through Razorfist, I discovered there was a cartoon of Battletech/Mechwarrior made in the 90's. It was absolute ham, completely over the top, didnt really fit the tone of most Battletech lore, and there were a lot of other non-canon things that happened with it. So the show only lasted for one season and then was ended.
BUT, the Battletech lore owners decided to run with it, and made the cartoon canon. Not that the cartoon story was canon, the cartoon itself is canon to the Battletech world. In lore, it was made as childrens propaganda for the Inner Sphere, which is why it portrays the Clans so over the top.
I just thought it was a fun way of sidestepping a bad product, and you would never see modern Hollywood think up something like that.
Ah yes, the one with the augmented reality tech used by the invading battle clans. Yet another cartoon sadly cancelled just as it was getting into its stride story wise.
His image is disingenuous, at best. Dude is comparing a bunch of front facing and 3/4-profile head shots with a neutral expressions to images with more expressive faces while also including more than just the face. He is doing this in purpose.
the images on the left are also more zoomed in so all you see is the face
Exactly. Not everything on the right looks like shit, It's that people pretend the calarts style isn't that prevalent when even Pixar has adopted it for their films. Nobody would be complaining about calarts if it wasn't for the fact that you see it in every cartoon now.
Cartoon network sucks because all the characters look like shit
Correct take.
it isn't that cal arts all looks the same, it just looks like shit.
to qoute a commerical why not both?
Because, newsflash, humans share a similar look and so when you are trying to be more realistic with your characters, they will look similar. The difference comes from their actual personalities which is something current cartoons have an issue with..
yeah anymore it seems the only way they try to make a charactor have personality is solely based on who thay wanna bang or as a flat one dimensional propaganda vehicle... hell the planeteers did that last one better then a lot of modern attempts.
Where's Johnny Bravo, PPG, courage, dexter and samurai Jack?! Hur dur I can do cherry picking idiot KNOWS he's full of shit, but deserves to be called out on it...plus the fucking calarts style needs to be burned to the fucking ground.
I have a soft spot for traditional animation. So here's a rant.
24 frames of animation per second.
Average kids show runtime is about 22 minutes.
24 x 60 x 22 is about 32k frames of animation.
Obviously not the same character in the same position over and over, but it was all hand drawn, so 32k frames of animation would take about 3-4 weeks to draw, 2 more weeks to properly film and animate. Add in an extra week to add in sound effects, foley and voice overs.
Not to mention that the ones on the left that I can recognize come from at least a few production companies. Rankin Bass, Funimation, 4Kids, WB Studios, Studio Canal, Nelvana Studios. Just to name a few.
The bulk of the animation however was done overseas. You'll find that there was a cabal of cheap to animate contract studios doing a ton of work on everything from GI Joe to The Real Ghostbusters and everything in between.
If it looks the same, or incredibly similar, it was by budget, not by design. Take Animaniacs for example. They changed looks from season to season. They were still on model, but they were done in a style taught by the studio that got contracted to make the bulk of the animation that was as close to model as possible.
With a computer, you still have to draw and animate, but the turn around time is way faster. I don't want to say it's better, because having a lot of PCs, drawing tablets, servers and a data center and such connected all day has to be quite a power draw, which might as well be akin to all the paper from the trees for the environmental footprint.
But I digress, the point of the rant was that you got really good at drawing a very specific way. Sort of like Disney. You go there with your art degree, and if you're lucky, they'll teach you to draw the Disney way, and you learn it. Same with Don Bluth, and several other instantly recognizable art styles. And even within Disney, there were style profiles that came forward from a few of the artists.
Tad Stones at Disney for example, and his specific style got used in Bonkers, Darkwing Duck, Mighty Ducks, and a few others.
People give CatArts and other styles a negative look because it looks like a kid could draw it sometimes. It doesn't have that professional quality look, compared to others. But then again, if that's the look they're going for, then they nailed it.
Keep in mind that King of the Hill, The Simpsons, The Head, Family Guy, and just about every original animation looked pretty shoddy, especially the early work, until someone came in and unformed the look and model of the characters.
It feels like in today's animation, there's a lot of off model work, even when it's a specific style that looks less realistic than others. And I think that might be part of the problem.
And that's if they're always constantly moving. It's less if they're just standing around talking.
Filmation was notorious for this in the '70s and '80s, cutting corners whenever possible by having lots of dialogue, but little to no movement.
Filmation did re-use a lot of animation. Once a show got popular enough, they would re-use assets from other episodes and just time save a lot while keeping costs low.
I think they had to. They had a stable of six shows running at once at one point. Some corner cutting was necessary, even if I didn't like it as a kid. :)
There were like 2 animation studios. Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers. Y'think they might be slightly less varied?
But even without that consideration, even with cherry picking "same" characters, the guys on the left don't all look the same.
Liberalism is a hell of a drug.
Even with their faces hyper-zoomed-in so you can't see hair or outfit, unlike the latter side, they're actually more visually distinct to me than the mess of childish color and shape on the right side, which kind of morphs into a "blah" of CalArts and one random 3d-CG T-rex.
You could tell me the bottom row on the right was all not just the same cartoon, but the same character, and I would believe you, because nothing is visually distinct. But on the left side, there's no chance any of them are the same character.
What he didn't say... https://pic8.co/sh/v9l30a.png
Left keeps talking about realistic body proportions... but then they have cal arts. Lol. Cal arts are lazy and ugly.
"then the artists with degrees showed up"
To be clear, cartoons have a nasty habit of moving towards cheap animation, which badly degrades quality.
The 70's and 80's were fucking notorious for having some of the worst animated series in fucking history from a technical perspective, and it comes from how cartoons were monetized.
The drop-off is catastrophic. In 500 years, the 60's and 70's will be considered "The Dark Age of Animation" because "All animators were obviously killed in World War 2, and the basic skill sets of art would have to be re-learned".
Now, in reality, it's because cartoons in the 30's and 40's were broadcast, not on television, but in cinemas along with a double feature of movies. This was back in the day when you got dressed up to go to the theater with your family and neighbors to see two 2-3 hour movies in a row, and had an intermission for the kids. The cinema was a communal space where whole families and neighborhoods could go for 5-6 hours on a weekend, and enjoy the beautiful aesthetics and entertainment. This is why cinema's used to be fucking beautiful. There was a ton of money involved, and there was a worthwhile effort to make good animation.
But the 1960's and 70's emerged the concept of the "Saturday morning cartoons", where the shows were so cheap that the only way to make them profitable was to sell toys to children. Children aren't very good at focusing on technical quality, so the animation and art design fucking collapsed. It became cheap as fucking hell, and it showed.
Frankly, the first problem we are seeing with animation and cartoons today is that their quality is bad because Cal Arts is cheap. Cheap, mass produced, low quality animation that is being disseminated because the economic, academic, and institutional heart of animation is fucking poisoned.
The second problem we are seeing is that that institutional heart is poisoned with Leftism specifically. So, nihilistic, degenerate, mockery aesthetics are also seen as an inherent positive. Not only should you make it cheap as shit for cartoons, your cartoons should look like shit, because shit is good, and beauty is evil. I fucking defy you to find an animation with the class of a stripper rotoscoped as a lizard in 1940.
Our grandparents and great grandparents went to see strippers that had more class and femininity than most women do today god damnit!
Anyways, like Brutalism, CalArts is aesthetic terrorism, financially supported by corporations because it's cheap.
Could we argue that games and most entertainment has a similar pattern of moving towards cheap? Or why is animation the one that stand out?
Everything moves towards becoming more productive based on technology, which also tends to drive down costs and then prices.
However, in cases where large companies exist, they intentionally drive down product quality, increase homogeneity in the product line, to make profits from margins that would otherwise be too small for any small business to survive with.
Games, honestly, have a ton of independent development and small studios. You'll notice that the worst quality control games are the ones coming from the ultra-massive companies who, as stated previously, had to cut quality control and increase homogeneity to make money.
Animation has a much longer history than games, and was basically monopolized by Disney, Warner, and basically everyone else. No one even had the physical skill that the old Disney & Warner animators had. What's happening now is that the CalArts pipeline is not pushing out any sort of real artists, but designers, who are just trained to replicate the cheap form of art they've been taught so that the major studios that own most of these shows make money from shit content production.
Strong masculine men of diverse backgrounds vs whatever the hell that is on the right.
On the left side, there's an understandable emotion on every face. A normal person can look at literally any of those faces, and each one is very clearly expressing something different from the rest.
The ones on the right side have no more affect than a cereal mascot. It's all some variation of "DURR" or "BLAH" or, best-case scenario, bland affability. I'm familiar with enough of these characters too, and the underlying problem behind the art is that none have an actual human trait. They can be best described as "plucky (in a maximally non-offensive way)."
Show me an action scene from any of the shows from the left and show me an action scene from any of the shows from the right. I rest my case.
Anyone ever seen LotGH? Its massive character ensemble all look like real people like the style on the left. Even anime has fallen from that decade. The original Berserk animation had similar detailing.
The ones on the left look like human beings whereas the ones on the right look like something you'd see on toilet paper after bloody diarrhea.