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.
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.