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Thank you for sharing your experience. Pencil mileage is a great way to sum up the difference between the two traditions. Sorry for sounding so down on Western

Thank you for sharing your experience. Pencil mileage is a great way to sum up the difference between the two traditions. Sorry for sounding so down on Western animation; it's true that I'm more used to the look of Eastern animation, having invested much more time invested in it (hence my mistake about Western films animating on ones vs. twos; it's been a while since I watched one of the classic Western animated films, oops), but I don't want to discount the work of Western animators. I have my biases, but there are gems in both traditions, and of course I'm saddened by way Western 2D animation has fallen by the wayside in mainstream Western (or at least American) culture since the dawn of 3D animation. As for games, I wanted to add a comment to my post about how I was mostly thinking about mid 80s-early 90s games, but Hacker News seems to have some restrictions keeping new users and throwaways from editing posts. Many European games from this time stood out to me as compromising gameplay at the expense of their animation. In contrast, many of the 90s and early 2000s Western mascot platformer games, as you mentioned, did great jobs of working charismatic, fluid animation into the medium. Crash Bandicoot in particular is notable for being one of the few games to use per-vertex animation; for each key frame of animation, the vertices that made up Crash were placed manually, giving the artists an unprecedented degree of control. Since then, sadly, most Western AAA devs have tended overwhelmingly towards more "realistic" art styles that make heavy use of inverse kinematics-driven procedural animation for gameplay, and motion capture for cutscenes, leaving the animators much less room for expression. Regardless, my intent was not to comment on Western animation as a whole, but (bringing it all back to the original commenter's remark about mobile games being sparsely animated) simply state that sparse animation doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, there's an entire school of animation built around it. Anyway, thanks again for replying, and I'll be sure to check your suggestions out.

wodenokoto 11y ago
What great 2D animation is left? Ghibli stopped producing features (or put it on hold) and Disney, and everybody else in the US moved to 3D I was thoroughly impressed Knights of Sidionia on Netflix, and though it can match some feature animation, it is still far from Ghibli/Disney. And it isn't even 2D! The other day someone posted a gallery from Ghost in the Shell on Reddit and I thought "When was the last time we saw art like this on the big screen?"
egypturnash 11y ago
* WARNING * "Raggedy Ann & Andy", IMHO, is NOT A GOOD MOVIE. It is a fascinating trainwreck of obsession. It is a weird damn thing you see when you are five, then halfway remember when you are twenty and wonder if you dreamed it. The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff. There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators. Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today. (But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.) Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.

wodenokoto 11y ago

What great 2D animation is left? Ghibli stopped producing features (or put it on hold) and Disney, and everybody else in the US moved to 3D I was thoroughly impressed Knights of Sidionia on Netflix, and though it can match some feature animation, it is still far from Ghibli/Disney. And it isn't even 2D! The other day someone posted a gallery from Ghost in the Shell on Reddit and I thought "When was the last time we saw art like this on the big screen?"

egypturnash 11y ago

* WARNING * "Raggedy Ann & Andy", IMHO, is NOT A GOOD MOVIE. It is a fascinating trainwreck of obsession. It is a weird damn thing you see when you are five, then halfway remember when you are twenty and wonder if you dreamed it. The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff. There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators. Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today. (But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.) Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.