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The collapse of American 2D animation is so sad. 3D animation has its place and charms too, I’m not knocking it, but 2D animation has a certain magic that’s inc

The collapse of American 2D animation is so sad. 3D animation has its place and charms too, I’m not knocking it, but 2D animation has a certain magic that’s incredibly difficult to replicate in 3D. It’s a beautiful art form that deserves better. One worry of mine is that it won’t make a comeback before the masters who worked at Disney, WB, Cartoon Network, etc all pass away and all of that knowledge and expertise will be lost.

footlose_3815 1y ago
*Hand-drawn 2D animation. There's tons of 2D animation out there right now, and I hate it all from "A little bit" to "It's unbearable to look at". Animation rigging, squeezing and bouncing every part of the character to convince the viewer it's alive, but all it's doing is calling computer routines to wobble each part, instead of actually animating the damn character. Everything is shortcuts now. Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. Trying to watch anything modern from the same creator, everything is just unbearable to look at. Everything looks like disjointed parts, and screams low-effort. All the flash animators of the 2000s grew up, and they're now running things. And everything just looks like wobbly flash. There's some shows that did this modern animation style well though. But not many. So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.
- jonhohle 1y ago
  > So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people. That’s really it. The medium is just a medium and not why people show up. Anyone who says this method or that method are superior are missing the point. Humans connect with characters and stories, not with meshes or acetate sheets. Oral, written, photographed, painted, sung, performed, filmed, drawn, animated - all these are in service to the message being communicated. The technique might get immediate attention, but substance is what makes a classic.
  - the_af 1y ago
    > The medium is just a medium and not why people show up. I sort of disagree with this. Sometimes the medium is the message. Or part of the message. Like how LAIKA studios could have made Coraline or Kubo fully in CGI, or live action, but instead chose puppets (for the most part). It matters that these are puppets and not CGI, anime-style drawings or live action people. It matters to them and it matters to me. Not saying story doesn't matter, but in movies it's sometimes overrated. You can have a gorgeous movie with barely any plot, and it can be engaging.
- jsheard 1y ago
  > Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. "CalArts" as a pejorative really has lost any meaning, if it ever had one beyond "animation I don't like". The creator of Dexter's Lab literally went to CalArts and made the first iteration of it as one of his projects while he was there.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  The overly dynamic Flash animation style kind of worked for the era Flash was really popular in. I think it is sort of a late gen-X/early Millenial thing. Tools and sharing became so much more accessible as we were growing up, so part of the joke was this self-deprecating thing where the creators (who were amateurs and barely knew what they were doing) were just turning on every toggle, and uploading the results. The line between incompetence and self-parody is blurry, it works. The joke doesn’t make any sense on cable TV though, because there’s no real reason for stuff on TV to have ever sucked in that way. Compare to stuff like Harvey Birdman or Sealab 2021, they make a lot more sense because they were parodying the medium they existed in.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  There are some studios that’ve managed to achieve a more subdued, near-hand-animated look with puppets (Titmouse with Star Trek: Lower Decks comes to mind), but yes it’s rather bizarre seeing something that’d be more at home on Newgrounds airing on broadcast TV.
lubujackson 1y ago
Don't worry, Japan's got this. There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there. The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Oh I know, I’ve been keeping up with anime for the past 20+ years. It has its own set of concerns, mainly centered around worker conditions and oversaturation, but there’s plenty of good stuff to be found. It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s. American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
- busterarm 1y ago
  Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor... For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai. Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term. Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too. With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
V__ 1y ago
Though spanish, the Netflix movie Klaus from a few years back was a real surprise. It looked so lovely, almost film like. I hoped its success would have sparked more such movies but apparently not.
- gedy 1y ago
  That was such a terrific and clever story, I was more into it than my kids.
eboynyc32 1y ago
Eh, if you look at old tv animation , it’s pretty piss poor. Not very quality at all. Even the 70’s animation always had hairs and dirt on the frames. Really annoyed me as a kid.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  If we’re talking cheap productions like Hanna-Barbara stuff, yeah for sure. There’s plenty of good American animation too, though. Disney movies were always top class, as were most of the Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry among other TV animation. Donald Bluth movies also come to mind.
  - vunderba 1y ago
    The original Duck Tales series from the late 80s is another good example of high budget quality animation.
  - bryanrasmussen 1y ago
    classic Tom & Jerry is Hanna-Barbera, although started out at MGM in the 40s.
BoxOfRain 1y ago
I'm not sure of the veracity of this, but apparently the Disney set the film Treasure Planet up to fail specifically so it could wash its hands of the very cool but expensive hybrid technology the film used where traditional animation and CGI were combined. Personally I'm really sad this kind of technique never caught on more in Western films, Treasure Planet was panned at the time but I think it's actually a bit of an overlooked classic. The art style works really well, take Long John Silver for example whose body is traditionally animated but his cybernetic limbs are CGI - this looked fantastic in 2002 so imagine what could be done now.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  IIRC that whole mess had more to do with internal politics than it did with technologies/techniques but I’m not an expert on the subject either.
- Filligree 1y ago
  No need to imagine. That kind of hybrid is frequently used in modern anime, though it's getting less and less visible with time. These days it's basically only apparent with low-budget productions, or by looking for scenes that are animated too smoothly and consistently.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    One of the major determining factors of if CG blends well with 2D animation is if the 3D was farmed out to another studio or done in-house. All of the biggest 2D-3D hybrid success stories in anime (such a ufotable, the studio behind Demon Slayer) have an in-house CG team that works in tandem with the 2D and compositing teams.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
socalgal2 1y ago
Hollywood might not be making them but aren't there plenty of non-hollywood animated 2d series on Cartoon Network, Netflix, etc???
- righthand 1y ago
  Uhhh…Cartoon Network is cable funded network TV. I don’t know if you noticed the downward slump for cable but Cartoon Network/Adult Swim have drastically reduced their production output the last few years. I think Adult Swim doesn’t even produce new shows beyond Rick and Morty anymore. Especially as investors fund Llm shops generating art instead of artists drawing art.
  - Slow_Hand 1y ago
    Adult Swim just released a new series ‘Women Wearing Shoulder Pads’, which happens to be animated with stop-motion maquettes. So I think it’s safe to say they’re still going.
    - righthand 1y ago
      They did not produce or develop that show, they are just the distributor with HBO Max as well. They mostly reair or distribute content now.
  - jjpones 1y ago
    They've (somewhat) recently produced Smiling Friends, a show spear-headed by two creators who had their start in animation in the early youtube era. And I'd say it's pretty successful given it's recently starting its 3rd season.
    - righthand 1y ago
      Yes but they used to produce double to triple the amount of shows was my point.
  - pseudocomposer 1y ago
RobRivera 1y ago
I find my favorite YT animators to be SO INSPIRING specifically because they get pretty darn good and their impetus is their passion. They are fueled by merch and patreon these days, so I am happy to see they can make it work, however when industry trends to a race to the bottom, to the point where many layers of contracting lead to illegal North Korean labor being part of the process (the whole INVINCIBLE affair) it leaves a vacuum for upstarts and its awesome. THE BALANCE!
- NuclearPM 1y ago
  YT?

footlose_3815 1y ago

*Hand-drawn 2D animation. There's tons of 2D animation out there right now, and I hate it all from "A little bit" to "It's unbearable to look at". Animation rigging, squeezing and bouncing every part of the character to convince the viewer it's alive, but all it's doing is calling computer routines to wobble each part, instead of actually animating the damn character. Everything is shortcuts now. Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. Trying to watch anything modern from the same creator, everything is just unbearable to look at. Everything looks like disjointed parts, and screams low-effort. All the flash animators of the 2000s grew up, and they're now running things. And everything just looks like wobbly flash. There's some shows that did this modern animation style well though. But not many. So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.

jonhohle 1y ago
> So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people. That’s really it. The medium is just a medium and not why people show up. Anyone who says this method or that method are superior are missing the point. Humans connect with characters and stories, not with meshes or acetate sheets. Oral, written, photographed, painted, sung, performed, filmed, drawn, animated - all these are in service to the message being communicated. The technique might get immediate attention, but substance is what makes a classic.
- the_af 1y ago
  > The medium is just a medium and not why people show up. I sort of disagree with this. Sometimes the medium is the message. Or part of the message. Like how LAIKA studios could have made Coraline or Kubo fully in CGI, or live action, but instead chose puppets (for the most part). It matters that these are puppets and not CGI, anime-style drawings or live action people. It matters to them and it matters to me. Not saying story doesn't matter, but in movies it's sometimes overrated. You can have a gorgeous movie with barely any plot, and it can be engaging.
jsheard 1y ago
> Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. "CalArts" as a pejorative really has lost any meaning, if it ever had one beyond "animation I don't like". The creator of Dexter's Lab literally went to CalArts and made the first iteration of it as one of his projects while he was there.
bee_rider 1y ago
The overly dynamic Flash animation style kind of worked for the era Flash was really popular in. I think it is sort of a late gen-X/early Millenial thing. Tools and sharing became so much more accessible as we were growing up, so part of the joke was this self-deprecating thing where the creators (who were amateurs and barely knew what they were doing) were just turning on every toggle, and uploading the results. The line between incompetence and self-parody is blurry, it works. The joke doesn’t make any sense on cable TV though, because there’s no real reason for stuff on TV to have ever sucked in that way. Compare to stuff like Harvey Birdman or Sealab 2021, they make a lot more sense because they were parodying the medium they existed in.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
There are some studios that’ve managed to achieve a more subdued, near-hand-animated look with puppets (Titmouse with Star Trek: Lower Decks comes to mind), but yes it’s rather bizarre seeing something that’d be more at home on Newgrounds airing on broadcast TV.

lubujackson 1y ago

Don't worry, Japan's got this. There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there. The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Oh I know, I’ve been keeping up with anime for the past 20+ years. It has its own set of concerns, mainly centered around worker conditions and oversaturation, but there’s plenty of good stuff to be found. It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s. American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
busterarm 1y ago
Lulwut. Economics have been bad for anime studios and there have been tons of closures in recent years. Outsourcing to other countries has been standard practice since the '70s -- lots of production is moving to China and donghua popularity is growing (just look at To Be Hero X)... TV series season lengths have been cut in half for the last decade+ and the amount of variety in shows produced has gone through the floor... For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai. Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term. Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too. With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.

V__ 1y ago

Though spanish, the Netflix movie Klaus from a few years back was a real surprise. It looked so lovely, almost film like. I hoped its success would have sparked more such movies but apparently not.

gedy 1y ago
That was such a terrific and clever story, I was more into it than my kids.

eboynyc32 1y ago

Eh, if you look at old tv animation , it’s pretty piss poor. Not very quality at all. Even the 70’s animation always had hairs and dirt on the frames. Really annoyed me as a kid.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
If we’re talking cheap productions like Hanna-Barbara stuff, yeah for sure. There’s plenty of good American animation too, though. Disney movies were always top class, as were most of the Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry among other TV animation. Donald Bluth movies also come to mind.
- vunderba 1y ago
  The original Duck Tales series from the late 80s is another good example of high budget quality animation.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago
  classic Tom & Jerry is Hanna-Barbera, although started out at MGM in the 40s.

BoxOfRain 1y ago

I'm not sure of the veracity of this, but apparently the Disney set the film Treasure Planet up to fail specifically so it could wash its hands of the very cool but expensive hybrid technology the film used where traditional animation and CGI were combined. Personally I'm really sad this kind of technique never caught on more in Western films, Treasure Planet was panned at the time but I think it's actually a bit of an overlooked classic. The art style works really well, take Long John Silver for example whose body is traditionally animated but his cybernetic limbs are CGI - this looked fantastic in 2002 so imagine what could be done now.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
IIRC that whole mess had more to do with internal politics than it did with technologies/techniques but I’m not an expert on the subject either.
Filligree 1y ago
No need to imagine. That kind of hybrid is frequently used in modern anime, though it's getting less and less visible with time. These days it's basically only apparent with low-budget productions, or by looking for scenes that are animated too smoothly and consistently.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  One of the major determining factors of if CG blends well with 2D animation is if the 3D was farmed out to another studio or done in-house. All of the biggest 2D-3D hybrid success stories in anime (such a ufotable, the studio behind Demon Slayer) have an in-house CG team that works in tandem with the 2D and compositing teams.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

socalgal2 1y ago

Hollywood might not be making them but aren't there plenty of non-hollywood animated 2d series on Cartoon Network, Netflix, etc???

righthand 1y ago
Uhhh…Cartoon Network is cable funded network TV. I don’t know if you noticed the downward slump for cable but Cartoon Network/Adult Swim have drastically reduced their production output the last few years. I think Adult Swim doesn’t even produce new shows beyond Rick and Morty anymore. Especially as investors fund Llm shops generating art instead of artists drawing art.
- Slow_Hand 1y ago
  Adult Swim just released a new series ‘Women Wearing Shoulder Pads’, which happens to be animated with stop-motion maquettes. So I think it’s safe to say they’re still going.
  - righthand 1y ago
    They did not produce or develop that show, they are just the distributor with HBO Max as well. They mostly reair or distribute content now.
- jjpones 1y ago
  They've (somewhat) recently produced Smiling Friends, a show spear-headed by two creators who had their start in animation in the early youtube era. And I'd say it's pretty successful given it's recently starting its 3rd season.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Yes but they used to produce double to triple the amount of shows was my point.
- pseudocomposer 1y ago

RobRivera 1y ago

I find my favorite YT animators to be SO INSPIRING specifically because they get pretty darn good and their impetus is their passion. They are fueled by merch and patreon these days, so I am happy to see they can make it work, however when industry trends to a race to the bottom, to the point where many layers of contracting lead to illegal North Korean labor being part of the process (the whole INVINCIBLE affair) it leaves a vacuum for upstarts and its awesome. THE BALANCE!

NuclearPM 1y ago
YT?