Dexter and Powerpuff were literally both made in the 90s. Dexter got a bad redesign, as shown there, at the tail end of its life and everyone hated it.
The 90s themselves were the peak, because they were having to "prove" themselves to all the execs that they deserved to exist and be funded as their own thing, instead of just being sponsered by toy companies. This meant you had a wild amount of variety all being created at once to try and find what stuck.
Modern Cartoon creators all use the same digital tools, and outsource companies, that require minimal talent or effort to create. Conservative creators aren't interested in actually making any form of visual medium, they just want a vehicle for their writing and politics to be given to kids. The Left isn't any better in this regard, but they also have enough industry support to make stuff that isn't always that way to let it be more digestible to a wide audience. And are also childish barely mentally above children to begin with.
I'm a mid-80s baby, loved so many of those cartoons, but while the 80s had so many classic characters, the animation quality was peak in the 90s. You'd see weekly cartoon shows that had almost movie quality animation.
One thing about these days is that big studios are just mass producing computer animated 3D stuff, so 2D gets pretty neglected.
The 80s was trying to sell you something else, so it needed to be quality enough to get you obsessed with the idea. The 90s was trying to sell itself, so the quality had to be within.
Both produced some top tier stuff for their time, though I think the 80s doesn't hold up well without nostalgia in a lot of cases, and without the principle behind it later stuff became a lot more generic and mass produced with the "linear storyline" often becoming the only common differentiator.
The ‘digital tools’ are a larger part of the change. Computers handle geometry better than people can and at reduced budgets, hence the Stephen Silver inspired era of Flash looking cartoons, many of which were made in Flash.
As someone working in the industry at times, you do tend to prefer styles that aren’t entirely based around realism as time goes on because at a certain point, drawing just isn’t the right vehicle for it. I’ve never been a fan of the overly geometric styles in the slightest, but I do prefer cartoons to be cartoony, appreciating things more like classic Disney and the like. Disney and the Nine Old Men basically invented 2d animation and the illusion of life drawings can create.
Why do people keep putting Gumball with the "Calarts" crap? It only takes ten seconds of watching the show to see it's a complete powerhouse of unique and creative animation.
Really animation is just dying in general these days. Between every form of media becoming the same, homogenized, "safe and relatable" mush, the inescapable stigma that "Animation is just for stupid kids, so don't bother making something worthwhile," and the unfortunate reality that it's time-consuming and expensive, there's no incentive for our corporate overlords to make anything new at all, let alone anything good....
I don't know if I can badmouth AI here, but I fear that it's going to continue this trend and general decline even if I will say it's had it's upsides and I have had a lot of fun making pictures using SD and other tools.
I think that Gumball itself is usually added in because the main character is drawn that way, even if the show goes above and beyond with the number of art styles it uses.
Hell, I think the only real western animated show I have even considered watching in recent years is Miraculous Ladybug, and even then a portion of that is driven by curiosity as to how much further Thomas Astruc or someone else will screw it up (or not). I do like the movie, though, and might recommend it to people who haven't completely written off superhero shows. There might be a few others I have interest in like Primal, but those are far and few between.
AI Tools are a Pandora's box, because it is so powerful. It empowers people, which means that it makes it easier to do whatever they wanted to do.
Most of the time, what they wanted to do is work just hard enough to not get fired. This means they can be even lazier than before. I've seen teachers use AI tools for lesson planning, students use AI for writing their homework and the teachers use it for marking.
At the moment, big money from the top end of town is influencing the market. People are not getting to choose merit through the market. Disney can make flop after shitty flop because they don't care if they loose 300 million. Ubisoft and EA can make terrible games because they don't care if they sell or not.
Hopefully the shake-out of new technology will meet the accountability of a real market an we can have new companies making new entertainment and actually getting paid for it. We have seen some new independent projects launch pilots on YouTube, and then get funding.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
For the record, I don't hate AI; but I think that most people are selfish, willfully ignorant morons, who are empowered by AI tools. Outsourcing actual thinking to something (corporate managed) that has less neurons than a garden slug has the potential to be the worst thing that ever happened to civilization.
and the unfortunate reality that it's time-consuming and expensive, there's no incentive for our corporate overlords to make anything new at all, let alone anything good....
The sad thing is, with today's tools it doesn't have to be time-consuming and expensive. I think this is the most frustrating part about it. Ark System Works showed us we can get hand-animated-quality cel-shading (made in UE4 no less) that looks like it was done in 2D, but done in 3D. Cost-effective and looks amazing, like this:
https://youtu.be/mmTnuuXnw9A?t=7
We also see that with a mixture of 3D cel-shading tools, superimposition, and AI we can get art-styles that previously were only used as promotional matte designs or posters, but actually animated, like here:
https://youtu.be/rhNZe_TjN9E
There's a wealth of opportunities for creators to get creative, but you are right that most big studios only want to push Leftist slop with "The Message", and anything else they simply do not care about. The indie animation scene on YouTube is flourishing with a lot of great stuff, showing that with a bit of ingenuity and the right mind-set it's possible to pull off some great stuff on a low budget.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, with the ability of using mixed media tools, you can also do some really creative stuff with today's software at very low costs. One guy made this in his spare time:
https://youtu.be/_fy4StK4TBs
Just think what we could get if a major studio just put a little time and effort into backing someone like that?
Just watching animation in some of these older shows, particularly the 90's you see so much visual detail throughout almost every scene. I took that for granted when I was a kid, but I'm impressed now with how much time and work that is to do.
Yeah.. now we got lame ass netflix, amazon and disney trying to buy out anime or make some basterdized shit and mimic anime. But these cocksuckers just want to steal the art style and try to imply its anime.. but they dont want to take the spirit of it (like fan service or gore).
Its like remakes. These assholes remake movies from the 90s and prior. They take the name and plot but sterilize it to eliminate "problematic" stuff and stuff in their own dei woke shit into it. Aka.. make it lame and gay.
1950s: Osamu Tezuka stuff, like Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy. Stiff and choppy compared to what came later.
1960s: Mach GoGoGo/Speed Racer. Not much more animated than the above, but in color.
1970s: Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers and Mobile Suit Gundam. Stiff in places, especially early on, but the evolution was showing.
1980s: Akira, Gunbuster. Katsuhiro Otomo's movie and Hideaki Anno's six-episode OVA revolutionize the medium, and still look amazing today.
1990s: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax somehow turn limitations into art that has endured for 30 years. I came into it only two years ago, yet it now may be my favorite anime of all time. Sailor Moon and (most of) Dragon Ball Z less so, but only because Toei forced them to do one episode a week, EVERY week, 52 weeks a year, like they still do with One Piece today.
2000s: Gurren Lagann. The last hurrah for Studio Gainax before it all went to hell for them and so many split to form Studio Trigger, but at least they went out with the biggest of bangs.
2010s: Kill la Kill and anything else done by Studio Trigger. Also anything done by Kyoto Animation...which is why I'm still so pissed that Shinji Aoba murdered 36 of them in his arson attack.
2020s: Still ongoing, can't make a judgment here yet, especially since I haven't seen so much of the new stuff yet, including Freiren.
Hurry up and watch Frieren. They assembled a team of legends to work on it, included the creator in every step of the process. Everyone involved cared about the project & it shows.
Se.02 in Jan '26!
Dexter and Powerpuff were literally both made in the 90s. Dexter got a bad redesign, as shown there, at the tail end of its life and everyone hated it.
The 90s themselves were the peak, because they were having to "prove" themselves to all the execs that they deserved to exist and be funded as their own thing, instead of just being sponsered by toy companies. This meant you had a wild amount of variety all being created at once to try and find what stuck.
Modern Cartoon creators all use the same digital tools, and outsource companies, that require minimal talent or effort to create. Conservative creators aren't interested in actually making any form of visual medium, they just want a vehicle for their writing and politics to be given to kids. The Left isn't any better in this regard, but they also have enough industry support to make stuff that isn't always that way to let it be more digestible to a wide audience. And are also childish barely mentally above children to begin with.
I'm a mid-80s baby, loved so many of those cartoons, but while the 80s had so many classic characters, the animation quality was peak in the 90s. You'd see weekly cartoon shows that had almost movie quality animation.
One thing about these days is that big studios are just mass producing computer animated 3D stuff, so 2D gets pretty neglected.
The 80s was trying to sell you something else, so it needed to be quality enough to get you obsessed with the idea. The 90s was trying to sell itself, so the quality had to be within.
Both produced some top tier stuff for their time, though I think the 80s doesn't hold up well without nostalgia in a lot of cases, and without the principle behind it later stuff became a lot more generic and mass produced with the "linear storyline" often becoming the only common differentiator.
The ‘digital tools’ are a larger part of the change. Computers handle geometry better than people can and at reduced budgets, hence the Stephen Silver inspired era of Flash looking cartoons, many of which were made in Flash.
As someone working in the industry at times, you do tend to prefer styles that aren’t entirely based around realism as time goes on because at a certain point, drawing just isn’t the right vehicle for it. I’ve never been a fan of the overly geometric styles in the slightest, but I do prefer cartoons to be cartoony, appreciating things more like classic Disney and the like. Disney and the Nine Old Men basically invented 2d animation and the illusion of life drawings can create.
1970s era: Hannah Barbara - static matt backgrounds and animated characters only.
The Hannah Barb-era. lol
Filmation was even worse.
Remember that scene from the 1980 Fantastic Four cartoon with Magneto and the wooden gun?
Look how stiff and unmoving almost everything is.
That was typical Filmation.
There's a reason they died.
All 'Adult Cartoons' look exactly the same
Especially now. Nearly every single one looks like Rick and Morty
Venture Brothers was awesome for that reason.
Why do people keep putting Gumball with the "Calarts" crap? It only takes ten seconds of watching the show to see it's a complete powerhouse of unique and creative animation.
Really animation is just dying in general these days. Between every form of media becoming the same, homogenized, "safe and relatable" mush, the inescapable stigma that "Animation is just for stupid kids, so don't bother making something worthwhile," and the unfortunate reality that it's time-consuming and expensive, there's no incentive for our corporate overlords to make anything new at all, let alone anything good....
I don't know if I can badmouth AI here, but I fear that it's going to continue this trend and general decline even if I will say it's had it's upsides and I have had a lot of fun making pictures using SD and other tools.
I think that Gumball itself is usually added in because the main character is drawn that way, even if the show goes above and beyond with the number of art styles it uses.
Hell, I think the only real western animated show I have even considered watching in recent years is Miraculous Ladybug, and even then a portion of that is driven by curiosity as to how much further Thomas Astruc or someone else will screw it up (or not). I do like the movie, though, and might recommend it to people who haven't completely written off superhero shows. There might be a few others I have interest in like Primal, but those are far and few between.
AI Tools are a Pandora's box, because it is so powerful. It empowers people, which means that it makes it easier to do whatever they wanted to do.
Most of the time, what they wanted to do is work just hard enough to not get fired. This means they can be even lazier than before. I've seen teachers use AI tools for lesson planning, students use AI for writing their homework and the teachers use it for marking.
At the moment, big money from the top end of town is influencing the market. People are not getting to choose merit through the market. Disney can make flop after shitty flop because they don't care if they loose 300 million. Ubisoft and EA can make terrible games because they don't care if they sell or not.
Hopefully the shake-out of new technology will meet the accountability of a real market an we can have new companies making new entertainment and actually getting paid for it. We have seen some new independent projects launch pilots on YouTube, and then get funding.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
For the record, I don't hate AI; but I think that most people are selfish, willfully ignorant morons, who are empowered by AI tools. Outsourcing actual thinking to something (corporate managed) that has less neurons than a garden slug has the potential to be the worst thing that ever happened to civilization.
The sad thing is, with today's tools it doesn't have to be time-consuming and expensive. I think this is the most frustrating part about it. Ark System Works showed us we can get hand-animated-quality cel-shading (made in UE4 no less) that looks like it was done in 2D, but done in 3D. Cost-effective and looks amazing, like this: https://youtu.be/mmTnuuXnw9A?t=7
We also see that with a mixture of 3D cel-shading tools, superimposition, and AI we can get art-styles that previously were only used as promotional matte designs or posters, but actually animated, like here: https://youtu.be/rhNZe_TjN9E
There's a wealth of opportunities for creators to get creative, but you are right that most big studios only want to push Leftist slop with "The Message", and anything else they simply do not care about. The indie animation scene on YouTube is flourishing with a lot of great stuff, showing that with a bit of ingenuity and the right mind-set it's possible to pull off some great stuff on a low budget.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, with the ability of using mixed media tools, you can also do some really creative stuff with today's software at very low costs. One guy made this in his spare time: https://youtu.be/_fy4StK4TBs
Just think what we could get if a major studio just put a little time and effort into backing someone like that?
because the animation is Cal Arts, retard. Its ok if you like it, but its still cheap Cal Arts schlock
I'm still more impressed with Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves (1937) than any modern cartoon series.
Didn't even include Bruce Timms "Dark Deco" Batman cartoon, which still looks cool as hell to me to this day
Or early Ren and Stimpy or Rocko's Modern Life.
Just watching animation in some of these older shows, particularly the 90's you see so much visual detail throughout almost every scene. I took that for granted when I was a kid, but I'm impressed now with how much time and work that is to do.
Yeah.. now we got lame ass netflix, amazon and disney trying to buy out anime or make some basterdized shit and mimic anime. But these cocksuckers just want to steal the art style and try to imply its anime.. but they dont want to take the spirit of it (like fan service or gore).
Its like remakes. These assholes remake movies from the 90s and prior. They take the name and plot but sterilize it to eliminate "problematic" stuff and stuff in their own dei woke shit into it. Aka.. make it lame and gay.
Anime took the reverse path.
1950s: Osamu Tezuka stuff, like Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy. Stiff and choppy compared to what came later.
1960s: Mach GoGoGo/Speed Racer. Not much more animated than the above, but in color.
1970s: Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers and Mobile Suit Gundam. Stiff in places, especially early on, but the evolution was showing.
1980s: Akira, Gunbuster. Katsuhiro Otomo's movie and Hideaki Anno's six-episode OVA revolutionize the medium, and still look amazing today.
1990s: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Hideaki Anno and Studio Gainax somehow turn limitations into art that has endured for 30 years. I came into it only two years ago, yet it now may be my favorite anime of all time. Sailor Moon and (most of) Dragon Ball Z less so, but only because Toei forced them to do one episode a week, EVERY week, 52 weeks a year, like they still do with One Piece today.
2000s: Gurren Lagann. The last hurrah for Studio Gainax before it all went to hell for them and so many split to form Studio Trigger, but at least they went out with the biggest of bangs.
2010s: Kill la Kill and anything else done by Studio Trigger. Also anything done by Kyoto Animation...which is why I'm still so pissed that Shinji Aoba murdered 36 of them in his arson attack.
2020s: Still ongoing, can't make a judgment here yet, especially since I haven't seen so much of the new stuff yet, including Freiren.
Hurry up and watch Frieren. They assembled a team of legends to work on it, included the creator in every step of the process. Everyone involved cared about the project & it shows.
Se.02 in Jan '26!
How do we place Scooby Doo?
These are all cartoons for children.