[footlose_3815]

*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.

[jsheard]

> 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]

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]

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.

[jonhohle]

> 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]

> 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.