Topic: The death of 2D hand-drawn animation?

In 1995, Pixar's Toy Story was released in theaters, and it sparked a phenomenon within the animation industry. Computers could create complex 3D animation that was simply impossible to do by hand. Since that time, there have been dozens of imitators: DreamWorks, Blue Sky, Imagi Entertainment, Sony Pictures Animation, etc. The 3D animation boom is in full-force today, and it shows no signs of slowing.

With all this hype surrounding 3D computer animation, hand-drawn animation is now only used for TV cartoons. But now it's being replaced by Flash animation. Shows like My Little Pony, the new George of the Jungle, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Total Drama Island (and it's spinoffs), etc. all use Flash animation. I personally hate how most Flash animated cartoons look. They look too clean, too stylized, and the art itself is too flat. I love the roughness of hand-drawn animation, the muted colors, the motion blur when a character runs fast (this can't be reproduced very well with Flash).

Is Flash and 3D computer animation killing traditional hand-drawn animation? I understand that animating with computers is much more efficient than drawing every frame by hand, but hand-drawn animation has a certain quality that can't be replicated by Flash. Disney tried to resurrect hand-drawn animation with their Princess and the Frog film, but is that a sign of a resurgence, or just a one-time thing?

Nickelodeon seems to be backing away from hand-drawn animation. New shows like Planet Sheen, Fanboy and Chumchum, and the DreamWorks-produced spinoff "The Penguins of Madagascar" all use 3D computer animation. SpongeBob still uses hand-drawn animation, and it seems like it's the only one left to do so.

On the other hand, hand-drawn animation is still popular with more "adult"-oriented cartoons. Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad) and Matt Groening (The Simpsons, Futurama) still use it for their shows. But once those shows end, there won't be anything else left to carry on the tradition.

So is hand-drawn animation a dying art form? I hope not.

I do notice that old cartoons like Tom and Jerry are animated very well, while modern cartoons seem to just repeat certain frames over and over and pass it off as a cartoon. Tom and Jerry must have taken forever to draw.

Exactly. Seth MacFarlane's cartoons (Family Guy, American Dad, etc.) use what I call "pose to pose" animation, where the characters are drawn in a specific pose and animated very slightly, with most of the animation done in the mouth movements. Notice when Peter talks that only his mouth moves, his body gestures are very stiff and rigid.

This is in direct contract to the fluid motions of the old Disney, Warner Bros., and MGM cartoons. They animated the entire body, giving characters life and vibrancy.

And Flash animation makes everything look so sloppy in my opinion. It looks too flat and stylized, like they are all paper cutouts. There's no depth to the way characters look.

Whether we like it or not, time marches on and traditional hand-drawn animation is on its way out. CGI animation is the wave of the future, and is here to stay. I predict even Flash animation will eventually be replaced by CGI animation.

I don't know if it will die, but it will never be common again. The shows you mentioned that still use it take much longer to produce, and I think Futurama even uses some CG segments. Most cartoons give up hand-drawn quality in favor of meeting shorter deadlines.

Foster's was hand-drawn, IIRC.

Yes.

It might have been hand-drawn, but it was scanned into computers and animated with Flash (or some equivalent program).

CGI and Flash are quicker and easier to produce than doing it all by hand. Doing it by hand can sometimes take a few weeks if not months to fully produce, that is draw it, tidy it up, add color, animate it, stylize it, add the depth, give it extra detail etc. that all takes time, while with CGI or Flash you only have to use computer animation and you've got it all done in a few hours, days or maybe just a week, a month tops.

I've noticed in The Simpsons though that the newer episodes seem less hand drawn and more like they were done via a computer, unless they've gotten a lot better with hand drawings because it really looks quite amazing. I would hate to have to draw The Simpsons Movie though, that movie alone must have so much hand-drawn slides in it it's ridiculous but yet it always looks outstanding.

The one thing CGI can never capture and that is the artists fingerprint so to speak, doing it via CGI or Flash is just laziness but if it's hand-drawn you know that that artist took his/her time with it to make an utter masterpiece.

This. 1000 times this. Disney shouldn't be so reliant on Pixar. They can do things both ways: Disney producing 2D animation, and Pixar doing 3D computer animation. It doesn't ALL have to be CG.

That style was started by some old Hanna Barbara cartoons from the 1960's, namely The Flintstones. It's popular cause it's easier to draw flat stylized characters with hard lines.

Fairly OddParents has the same style, and I actually think it works well for that cartoon. The characters look charming and unique.

The medium doesn't matter. It's what you do with it.

I suggest you watch through these. The later ones are better but you should start from the beginning. (They're listed in reverse order, so the first one is at the bottom right.)
http://bitey.com/category/animation/brackenwood/

Wow. I'm impressed. That was all done in Flash? O_O

Foster's couldn't have been pure flash animation. I remember it looking so hand drawn. Maybe some background characters, but Mac and Franky looked pretty hand drawn to me. The opening animation especially. Spongebob seems to be using Flash lately in my opinion. At first you could tell it was obviously hand drawn, but now I don't know; honestly. I'll be surprised if it's all still hand drawn.
As for CGI and Flash taking over: yes. Polygons took over pixels. I agree a lot of the Flash animated shows look really dull compared to shows drawn by hand. Regular Show looks so much more colorful and upbeat then Total Drama Island. I really don't like how flash shows have such heavy outlines around the characters. Like Johnny Test. The animation doesn't seem to be as good as hand drawn shows either. But that part is just my opinion. I just hope in the future we won't have nothing but CGI and Flash animated cartoons. Cartoons that are really bendy and stretchy like Ed Edd N' Eddy would just look so wrong. I love hand drawn shows/movies. At least a lot of animes still draw by hand. I will never forget the Digimon movie's art style. I just loved it so much.

But using flash or other digital software doesn't mean it's not hand-drawn. The same way artists in the 21st century paint digitally in Photoshop, animators can use digital mediums to do essentially everything that was done on physical mediums and more.

The issues your identifying in modern animation are more a matter of the techniques used for "efficiency," because the more work involved in an animation process the more it costs to make. Anime has been "guilty" (not that there's really anything wrong with it) of high-efficiency techniques since years and years ago, such as reusing the same animation frames over and over and etc. They really developed many of the techniques before anyone else, I believe, but it's an important part of animation in general. More recently, people found out that you could make commercially viable comedy 'toons on a dirt-cheap animation budget, which is where we got things like South Park and later Adult Swim cartoons like Aqua Teen, which don't even try to impress anybody and made that part of their charm. Of course computer software does come into this as it gave animators tools that could make many things easier than ever before, so it has influenced the quality of animation in general and opened the way for some of these zero-budget animation styles.

The thing you have to keep in mind though is that just because software enables animators to take easy shortcuts where they may, that doesn't mean that the software restricts them to doing so. Animation of any quality and detail is still very much possible, arguably even more possible, in digital mediums.

You want hand-drawn animation as the dominant force? Live in Japan.

Reusing the same frames over and over started long before anime. Hanna Barbara's cartoons from the 1960's utilized limited animation. And practically all TV cartoons from the 1960's thru the 1980's used limited animation. This was done as a means to conserve budgets.

During the late 1950's, movie studios no longer saw any profit from animated shorts, so they disbanded many of their animation studios. It wasn't until Hanna Barbara pioneered TV cartoons in the late 1960's that animation saw a revival in the form of the "saturday morning cartoon". Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, etc. proved that cartoons could have new life on TV. But the budgets of TV animation are far less than theatrical animation, this spawned the whole "limited animation" technique that was done to conserve budgets.

From the 1960's through the 1980's, animation was seen as a cheap way to provide entertainment for children. Licensed cartoons became the norm during the 1980's and budgets were minimal. This resulted in cartoons that were sloppy, derivative, boring, and uninspired.

The animation industry saw a huge resurgence after the release of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988, which inspired cartoonists to be more creative and break the mold. Cartoonists like John Kricfalusci (Ren and Stimpy) began the whole "creator driven cartoon" movement, which continues to this day. Animaniacs, Dexter's Lab, Rocko's Modern Life, Ren and Stimpy, SpongeBob, Fairly OddParents, etc. may have never happened if Who Framed Roger Rabbit hadn't been made. That single film practically revived the entire industry, and it certainly renewed interest in classic animation.

And it's very telling that Japanese animation has more detail and care put into it than a majority of American TV cartoons. Do the Japanese view animation as more of an art form? I believe so.

What I meant wasn't that the Japanese did it first, but that they really "developed" the techniques well. The Anime style has always been extremely efficient, and it's quite apparent just by watching it. They put the work in where it has the most impact and save time where it's less important. Talking animations are extremely simple 100% of the time (great for localisation efforts as well). A simple walk animation may have 4 frames while an intense action moment may have tons, all in the same scene. Western animation tended to be a lot more "consistent," but of course over time the influence of the Japanese style spread everywhere and we picked up a lot of their tricks, so to speak.