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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Anime Industry may be getting popular right now, but internally what's happening is getting highly unsustainable. The industry has lost alot of the confidence in return for excessive risk-tasking today, with the complete decline of ambitious originals and OVAs in favour of continous adapatations and remakes. But they're running of material to adapt now, but they won't do originals, which is leaving between a rock and a hard place.
I've come to accept that a large amount of poorly made slop is simply a necessary part of the ecosystem. It means funding is aplenty and new hires have cheap projects to work on. The philosophy of only funding big budget winner projects means every new project is ride or die, and leads to less risk-taking. You need to give projects the opportunity to fail in order to get truly interesting media.
Unfortunately it's actually the opposite. The 90s and 2000s which had far less funding and popularity also coincided with a large amount of ambitious originals and OVAs. We can almost directly correlate the increasing popularity of the medium since 2015 and the decline of such originals in favour of cheap adaptations and remakes.
The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.
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.
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.
Actual 2D animation has been dead everywhere for 20 years, yes. The death was pretty much simultaneous in the US and Japan with Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? & Astro Boy (2003) being the last shows fully animated on cels, in 2003.
Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013.
Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free.
Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted.
And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
"actual 2D animation" being limited to pen/paper on animation cels is a narrow definition. Shows such as Primal are digitally animated using modern techniques, but it's still hand drawn rather than being fully puppeted like many other shows
The question is how much is hand drawn? In the context of animators 20 years ago talking about "save 2d" they were talking about animation on twos (or even ones or threes).
Nowadays with hand drawn stuff you're mostly seeing keyframe work being done and the computer doing all of the heavy lifting with inbetweening with maybe some tweaking here and there by junior animators.
The tools are good enough now where it doesn't even look like shitty Flash animation anymore.
Also don't know what you're trying to show me with this 10 minute video. There's maybe 15 seconds of animation work being done this whole video? I see storyboarding and background painting and audio work but this shows shockingly little animation process...(and what I can see clearly is someone drawing keys...)
I agree it wasn't the best example for the point I was trying to make, but it was the best I could find in short notice. It just sounded to me like the "save 2D" people you described were more focused on preserving a very particular kind of 2D animation methodology, and saying because this methodology is dead the entire medium is dead. I was trying to propose that 2D animation that imitates the old style very well does exist in the modern era.
I'll admit, though, that while I know and have talked to some people in the animation industry it is not my area of expertise, so I could be completely off base with my observations.
*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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
But my point was that they at least halved their production output. Not that they don’t have great shows. How many of those shows you listed are distribution deals rather than actually produced and developed. Go to their front page and what do you see My Adventures with Superman or Rick and Morty?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.