RichardLess wrote: ↑April 18th, 2020, 1:24 pm Animation on TV has become a joke. Computers ruined the art of it. I miss the days of Ink & Paint. Batman The Animated Series and it’s beautiful backgrounds and colour scheme just couldn’t be done.
(It won't be much of a surprise for me to say this, but) I disagree. While there will always be an artistry to hand-drawn animation, and there are many, many excellent examples of it that have been preserved, computers haven't ruined the art. To be honest I think they've helped to perfect aspects of it.
As good as hand-drawn animation can be, there are also some downright awful efforts given to us in the medium. Even some of the better-quality shows of recent history before can be extremely hit and miss.
Compare five different episodes of
Batman: The Animated Series or
The Real Ghostbusters, and the quality varies considerably, sometimes you'll see an A-Team and a B-Team(
The Real Ghostbusters even introduce a C-Team (
On Leath Wings and
Christmas with the Joker for TAS, or
The Collect Call of Cathulhu,
A Ghost Grows in Brooklyn, and
Play Them Ragtime Boos or
A Fright at the Opera for RGB).
Even
Gargoyles has the A-Team/B-Team through its run, and it's frustrating that the show can have such high-quality animation in one story, and slightly ropier the next... Even more irksome when it happens through a multi-part story, which the show had a few of.
In the end, it's not the computer's fault that a crappy animation style has been chosen for a cartoon, in this instance the computer is solely the tool for execution... It's the artists and the people driving the cartoon's aesthetic design who should shoulder the blame.
Computers have helped to improve the consistency of a show's look... Often, true, in efforts that closer resemble high-quality flash cartoons, but even stuff that still has a foot in the traditional animation pool, like
Voltron: Legendary Defender.
For it's faults, many of whom were found in its story, Voltron is well animated. The genetics of the animation is traditional, but the final "inks and colouring", backgrounds, and special effects are largely computer-based, as are the majority of the space and fight sequences.
The 3D models don't sit flawlessly in the animation, but their cel-shading has come a long way from the early days of 3D integration into 2D, and ultimately help save hand-drawing some very complex sequences... And as we've seen, rendering a 3D fight by hand can be tricky, numerous animation/perspective errors in
Transformers exemplify this. Another benefit of using 3D for the fights is if you don't like the first pass, you can tweak it and then re-render it.
While the original 1980s
Voltron: Defender of the Universe has its charm, some of its animation is really quite ropey.
Another great example of computer use in animation with traditional stylings is 2002's
He-Man and The Masters of Universe. With digital character inking/colouring and background paintings, special effects... It was a marked step up over the original, and then there's the fixes in the aesthetics and story which catapulted it further.
Computers in animation aren't the problem, it's how they're used... An issue very similar to CG effects versus practical.
StarSpengledBanner82 wrote: ↑April 19th, 2020, 5:01 pm How much, if anything, do you guys think will make it into Afterlife that was planned for the recently leaked script?
The "not actually a script leak" script leak?