Thought it was a interesting video, they bring up some good points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARhFi0XoTzY
I regularly watch their show since show debut in 2015.
But still love they researched their sources to debunked their conspiracies and urban myths of Cartoons.
Damn, the animation nerd in me agrees with all this guy's points, but the rest of me hates their presentation and style. I almost stopped watching during the shallow faux-profoundness at 2:15.
Older cartoons had to deal with an insanely low resolution compared to today (Less than 720p vs 4K, lower number of frames) and lower quality televisions in general. However, they made up for it on a massive scale through animating very fluidly and naturally and using a very unique artistic design philosophy that created worlds and amused millions.
I'm not going to say "older cartoons were better!", but they very much made up for the lack of resources.
https://youtu.be/3eG0XiWGRxo
This is the best animation I've seen yet, further cementing my point, thank you.
If we're talking about TV animation, the animation was very not-fluid and that lack of quality and the design philosophy was a consequence of the low quality of televisions and lack of money/resources. If we're talking about early MGM or Disney film animation, the quality of animation was fluid precisely because they had millions of dollars and no lack of resources.
There's no real, substantial difference between the objective level of effort/quality put into animation in the 1960s/70s/80s/90s and animation created today, just different compromises which were made between level of detail, character design and animation fluidity related to whichever of the numerous decades you are refering to as the vague mythical period in which cartoons were better (which usually tends to roughly correlate to whenever you or I, or whoever is making this claim happened to be an impressionable child).
Nor were the animation or artistic philosophy more creative because (with the exception of maybe the golden age of animation in the 1930s because they were inventing the medium) most artists were simply basing their style or producing outright homages to the things they were brought up with as a child (hanna-barbera, early western anime imports a la dragonballz, sailor moon and pokemon).
This isn't to say that, as a whole, the animation industry is not creative, but the specific time you or I or anyone was brought up as a child tends to dictate whichever period of time we, as adults, arbitrary dictate as the most unique, creative period of animation.
It's a mix of vague nostalgia combined with our human tendency to want to put things into the most simple contextual checkboxes that leads to this 'things were better in the olde days' mentality regardless of the subject matter being discussed.
Let Me Just Post Some REAL(not calarts) Cartoons
https://youtu.be/nOnKQ63EEFo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmNdbdSCuC4
https://youtu.be/mtQ_RSF1jYU
it's like looking at the ruins of the library of alexandria...
where did we go wrong....
"I am your host Shirvan and this is the CalArts Report"
Personally I just hate that most cartoons are going for similar art styles nowadays, and the goddamn lazy tweening and animation reusage out the ass so they can churn out 12 minute episodes on a weekly basis with as little difficulty as possible. Individual cartoon quality on the other hand is a much more complicated story.
I still feel like Teen Titans Go and similar shows are not something kids should be subjected to.
Can we bring this style back?
https://s3.amazonaws.com/intanibase/iad_screenshots/1991/11299/13thumb.jpg
https://78.media.tumblr.com/7a05f93a3a2868078472278315708d47/tumblr_inline_ozcd54mJcn1tf94yw_540.jpg
https://s3.amazonaws.com/intanibase/iad_screenshots/1990/11404/11thumb.jpg
https://25andfly.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/ren-bad-day.png
Ren & Stimpy was notoriously expensive to animate because Kricfalusi didn't allow the animators to reuse literally anything, even facial expressions.
If we're talking about early MGM or Disney film animation, the quality of animation was fluid precisely because they had millions of dollars and no lack of resources.
Early MGM and Disney by no means had millions of dollars and easy access to resources and they still put out great quality even during the WWII era when they were all struggling for money due to just coming out of the depression.
While you are correct in that these films were being produced during a time where the economy was recovering from the great depression, the budgets of all of Disney's animated feature films DID have budgets of millions of dollars. Snow White and The Seven Dwarves had a budget of 1.48 million (25 million in today's money), Pinochio was 2.28 mil (40 mil today), Fantasia was also around 2.28 mil, etc.
The MGM animated film shorts, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, etc. are harder to cost since they were sold to theater owners in packages and the exact cost estimates are hard to come by. But a single 10 minute short in 1950 cost upwards of 50,000 per episode (half a million today), and they were sold as entire seasons. We know that MGM actually sold many of their theatre packages at a loss, as their business model relied on resell value to remain profitable, especially as time went on and outside film 'entertainment' (news reels, animated shorts, etc. which used to accompany a film in the movie theatre) became less and less tenable as televisions became more profitable.
Overall, it's correct to say that Disney and MGM had millions of dollars and access to resources, even during WW2, since they were huge multi-hundred million dollar entertainment corporations even back then. Cartoon Network does not have anywhere near the media empire of Disney in the 1930s.
I'm not a big fan of this video. They don't really address the complaints about the modern, mostly cartoon network style and just go with "People call it the CalArts style but that's always been a term of derision so there." So? Who cares what people are calling it? They could call it the the ShitBlob style and have the same complaints. Or they say that the original Thundercats came from an era where everything had detailed art but limited animation, which is true, but heavily insinuate that the simpler 'CalArts' style allows for more expressive characters while showing an image of Steven Universe with an extremely exaggerated face, as though you have to have exaggerated drawings to make characters expressive.
The actual reasons people complain about the 'CalArts' style are these:
They think it looks bad. This is personal opinion and no one is really wrong whether they lie or loathe the style, but seeing old favourites adopt a style you don't like is never pleasant.
They think it looks samey. The intentionally simplistic and detail lacking style makes every show look the same, even if the characters are technically distinct. You can see this in the old Cartoon Network shows from the 90s, a lot of the shows Butch Hartmann ran for Nickelodeon, and pretty much everything Hannah-Barbera ever made. I used to know people who wouldn't watch Cartoon Network, when I was a kid, because all their cartoons looked the same, and I knew people who only watched it for that reason.
They think the art style is derivative and boring. Seeing the same style, or similar styles, gain massive popularity in animation can be draining for some viewers. There was, and still is to a degree, a derided character design which gained popularity in anime where the characters all had soft features and slightly rounded faces to make them look cute. It became known as the "Moe-blob" style because characters stopped having any real defining features in their faces and relied on their eyes and hair to differentiate the characters.
All these shows take place in similar settings. They're all fantasy adventures which feature plots bigger than the main characters. It's kind of old.
I don't like the 'CalArts' style at all. I think it looks bad and I hate that companies seem to want more of it (it must be fairly cheap to produce), but I also wasn't a fan of the Cartoon Network style of the 90s either, or how every Butch Hartmann show looks the same (even though I tend to enjoy the shows themselves), and while I do have a soft spot for the 80's style I recognise that most of those shows looked the same too.
The best eras for art in cartoons are the 30s, when cartoons were all films with proper budgets, and the 90s where companies would throw shit loads of money at a cartoon because they knew they'd make huge profits in toy sales. Aside from those there's never been a budget which can accommodate a show which is richly detailed and has great animation. And there was plenty of cheap crap made in those times too.
Just be glad we're no longer in the early 2000s to early 2010s of fucking flash tweening for every cartoon. Now it's just cheap crap like Teen Titans Go that use that.
The hell are you talking about
Cartoons have always been at 24 fps with TV animation generally working on twos, and these types of cartoons in general don't have visual elements that rely on resolution at all
there was no lack of resources whatsoever compared to today, just technical differences that don't impact the result to any major extent
https://youtu.be/WqJS_FqZNJ0
https://youtu.be/kHpXle4NqWI
https://youtu.be/E0iazs7EX7o
I'm referring to older animation like this stuff. It looks way the hell better to me than any cal-art cartoon. It might have occasional errors but it looks great.
ok the framefrate thing was silly, but it's ridiculous to say that there is not a lack of resources compared to today.
Being able to digitally render a cartoon is really impactful, it can make the process sooo much faster.
yeah cartoons used to be great! the new stuff all sucks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63vQ9sEv4aw
You're only remembering all the good cartoons, there are tons of shitty cartoons out there in the past. Nobody ever remembers bad art.
The video is cool and all but he really is just kinda talking around the issue most people have. Bottom line, that contemporary artstyle is still quantity over quality.
I'll admit obvious bias there, I watch more older cartoons that recent though tbh
Not exactly, most cartoons up until the digital era were shot on film and could totally be rescanned in HD now if they wanted to. Resolution isn't an issue.
And cartoons are still usually hand-drawn unless they're the rig-based tweened type which none of the cartoons we're talking about are, drawing on a tablet doesn't take less effort than drawing something on paper. The only difference is there's less of a cost in materials and grunt work, basically the stuff that american studios all send off to korea anyway. The part that's done in America is still roughly the same, and differences between now and the 90s don't impact animation quality or art style
You actually animate for real so I can't disagree because I dont have the same knowledge as you with this stuff
While I do think it’s time for a change up in styles, I actually really like the aesthetic of the new Thunder Cats.
It's pretty obvious that every generation of something has stinkers and gems. Generally the quality of animation has improved with technology but that doesn't correlate with creativity or original art styles. I wouldn't think much of this. It's a bit obnoxious because I see a lot of artists thinking they are profound by using a formulaic art style but its obviously nothing new.
You realize Courage the Cowardly Dog, Samurai Jack and Ed, Edd n Eddy came out in the Early 2000s, yeah? Courage run from 1999 to 2001.
Obviously I was being hyperbolic, not every cartoon was made in flash, and not every flash animation used tweening. I wouldn't count shows which started in the 90s and ran into the 2000s as 2000s shows though, just like I wouldn't consider a show which started in 1988 and ended in 1991 to be a 90s show.
There has always been bad animation and there has always been good animation, the quantity of each just depends on how much budget and time the studios get. Which, both historically and right now, is not much of either. The 90s was an exception because there was an economic surge at the time so the shows meant to sell toys could be well animated and still see a large financial comeback, and the increased revenue meant cartoon channels had more money to fund better cartoons. Once that started to slow down so did the production of high quality art, because time and ink aren't cheap.
Also, all three of those shows used tricks to greatly lessen their costs. Ed, Edd, and Eddy all used the collar trick to let them animate just the heads, as well as being set in an area where they could reuse backgrounds a lot, Courage used implication and off screen horror to avoid usingtoo much animation and the actual characters didn't move around much (except Courage, of course), and Samurai Jack used a very simple art style which allowed them to get away with not animating a lot of shit, like legs, also a lot of the action scenes were just effects shots, which are super cheap to animate.
Not that there's a problem with any of that, it's just that if you're going to use those kinds of tricks you have to play into them and do them well. Which all those shows, and many others, did.
I think quantity over quality in general is sort of the rule in tv animation. As @Janus Vesta pointed out, some cartoons were better at maximizing their budget and what time they had to make the cartoons. If you see crappy animation it's probably because one or both of those two factors got compromised at some point in the production.
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