Why can't we bring back traditional animation?
Because it's cheaper and faster to do it digitally, even if it's worse. Immensely cheaper and faster.
>>152016247Entropy happened. Can't go back now.
>>152016247My father-in-law is an animator. It is difficult to get his attention in the theatre because he is lost in wonder. We were watching Walt Disney’s Fantasia together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to make it today. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.'"
>>152016875>spider verse budget of $100 million>snow white 1937 budget adjusted for inflation is $34 millionthey do it because they hate art
>>152016247You gonna pay for it?
You can still have it if it's done independently. But the days of corporations selling expensively made traditional animation to you as a product are very much over.
>>152016247Also traditional animationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYs_GCy9PRk
>>152016247Because we literally don't have the technology anymore. There are three places in the entire world that still have the equipment for cel animation, and as of only one that's actually been used.
>>152016899Disingenuous when Snow White is predominantly traced over live-action
>>152017092>don't believe your lying eyes
>>152017092whether you trace over live action or draw from reference, you're still making thousands of drawings all by hand
>>152016247You do realize there are examples of traditional shows being cheaply made (examples being works made by dic animations). Just say you want traditional so that we have variety in the economy.
>>152016247Because you keep spamming these bad faith MS Paint collages with cherry picked examples on /co/.
>>152017092>anon learns feature film animation uses live action referenceAnimators film themselves for their assignments today, it’s not additional labor cost anymore unless you went out of your way. Rotoscope use doesn’t decide the quality of the production either, as you can see in the obvious differences between Snow White and Bakshi’s LOTR.
>>152016875Same reason we're going to drown in AI slop.
>>152016899Half of that budget goes to celebrity voice actors, quarter goes to licenced music
The real reason was that CGI movies were at the forefront of the make-or-break budget extravaganza that dominate modern entertainment.Disney made between x2 to x3 their budget on their animated films. Generally spending around the modern equivalent of $150m.Pixar spent a lot more and made x4 to x5 times that.
>>152016892>'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.'"Your father-in-law is retarded. The technology is not lost. The problem is a financial one, not a technical one. Disney animated features employed an army of artists and specialists. They had the capital to invest in this army, and the returns were tied to things other than box office performance, notably their theme parks and related businesses. Every innovation in animation has been about reducing the man hours and personnel involved to push down cost. Companies would rather invest in technology than people, and the dream is to own machines and software that minimally trained and easily replaced operators can use. So they CAN make a Fantasia like animated feature, but they WON'T because it just costs too much money.
>>152016247Because things have gotten too expensive with even less returns.All that time wasted for a small chance of getting big when a 9 to 5 while soul crushing is consistent pay
>>152016892We're in a world where we can do nanometer silicon lithography but can't rebuild a multiplane camera designed by Ub Iwerks in the 1930s.
>>152017436
so what happened to all the asian animation farms? did they just trash all their equipment?
>>152017436Half of the budget goes into the pockets of "producers".There's a good chance the movie actually costs astronomically less to produce.
>>152016247stupid thread
>>152016247why don't you be the change?
Digital has a million advantages over cel. The thing is that digital is overly being used as a crutch, where stuff like puppets and rigging are normalized. If you look at Japan, they don't do it like that. The problem isn't digital, the problem is a profound lack of trying, because they're lazy.
>>152016247Whats so different from using a tablet instead of paper?You mostly use the same skillset, its traditional whether its digital or analogue
>>152018818after the paper, parts of each frame are hand painted onto a thin piece of plastic called a "cel". these cels are then layered and photographed to make a frame of animation on film.
>>152017231This. The fault lies with OP
>>152018847and you don't think you can do that in a painting program
>>152018918with the way physical paint and analog film work, no, you can't get the same results in a painting program.
>>152018847And digital drawing is done on individual layers that do the same job as different celsThe cels do not create any artistic output by themselves, its just a necessary way to be able to separate out the moving parts of a drawing to make it easier to animateThis is exactly the same function thay digital layers accomplishPhotographing is an unnecessary middleman that adds imperfection without creating any intentional change, if you replaced photography with scanning, the outcome is the sameAnd if you removed the middleman entirely and just had your drawing already drawn on to the medium you intend to show, all the better
>>152018934all the techniques from traditional can be emulated on digital at a faster rate and with undothe special parts of trad are just things like texture
>>152016247Go do it
>>152018918You can’t tell the difference between cel animation and digital animation?
>>152019043The platonic ideal that cel animators wanted their art to look like is just what digital looks likeLooking at what a cel looks like in person before the transfer process looks almost like what you would see had it been done digitally, with deep colors, no fuzz, and smooth linesA lot of what we consider "traditional" animation in the 90s was already partly or totally digital anyways
>>152019073Except it's the colors, textures and shadows from cels which make it look better than digital
>>152016247>Why can't we bring back traditional animation?Several reasons for this were given already in other posts. Here's a quick recap as well as some other stuff to add.>Digital is cheaper and it allows for quicker adjustments (reworking scenes, character design changes, etc.) than traditional. It's just that some recent animators don't put as much effort as earlier animators did despite the advances in tech.>The traditional animation pipeline is practically nonexistent in most places. Rebuilding those pipelines will be difficult and even futile if modern traditional animated movies fail to make a profit.>Rotoscoping is rarely used nowadays.>Would audiences even show up for a traditional western animated movie in theaters nowadays? Not likely.>Comparing The Secret of Nimh, Pinocchio, and earlier Spongebob to recent dreck like nuBen 10, Thundercats Roar, and Velma is one hell of a lopsided argument.>>152016938True, but to be fair, that's an 80's 30-minute toy commercial with a limited budget, hence the low production values.>I'll admit that I actually watched this show when I was a kid.
At this point, the only studio I've seen who can accurately emulate the look of cel animation digitally is Sunrise, and they only seem to do it for their mobile games instead of their actual shows.https://youtu.be/YTFRdksL89chttps://youtu.be/m9UWxAhu4ZwThis is from 2021.
>>152016247>propaganda
>old animation was better because they drew on paperRetarded ass
>>152017092How is that disingenuous? Rotoscoping is cool.
>>152019808>Come to a conclusion on your own>Decide your own conclusio is stupid Don't be so hard on yourself, retard.
>>152019136>Except it's the colorswith a perfect transfer process, the colors would look identical to the colors on digital>textures the entire purpose of painting on the back of the cel was to prevent the paint from even having a texture in the first place>and shadowsshadows would only show up if you botched the transfer process
>>152016247Start something nigga
>>152016970Where are they?
>paper texture>imperfect coloringwoooow you can't do this on a computer
>>152016247>>152016875>>152017512>>152019163To add to this, wasn't the unionization of 2D animators also a factor in the industry's shift?
>>152017520It's a skill set no one has anymore dumbass. Money can't buy expertise no one has.
If you actually did some research into how tedious and inefficient cel animation was, you'd understand why artists don't do it anymore. Same thing with filming on film vs filming on digital
>>152019880One is in my house, the other in OP's and another one is in japanese Disney (none of use want to share).
>>152020421no one even hand painted or hand inked them by the enddisney started photocopying lines in 101 dalmations and photocopying colors in rescuers down underby the disney renaissance, only lines were drawn on paper before being directly scanned on to the computer and colored and edited digitallythe move to tablets to draw simply means that you skip the scanning go straight to drawing, this isnt really a functional difference in the processthe nine old men would actually prefer it this way, because it means the artists drawing is literally what is seen in the final productthey actually supported photocopying lines, even when the process was still crude and caused quality loss, because it meant that their drawings were what ended up on screen instead of having an inker draw over their pencils when transferring to from paper to cell
>>152016247>most cherrypicked image in existence>please validate my ludditism
>>152016247Usually these threads are dumb as fuck but I'll ask a niche question here, how did they manage to get paints that are super saturated like Goku's gi here? When I look in CSP's eyedropper that's straight up a value and saturation of 100, I was always under the impression that traditional paints didn't get so bright
>>152016888This is true, nobody knows how to do traditional animation.
>>152020630True
Seems like they are trying to get out of animation altogether. Every animated movie is getting a "live action" remake.
>>152020837>why do you want animation luddite it's current year do better sweaty
>>152020837the “live action” remakes are animation too
>>152019932These textures look soooooo good
>>152016247A few anons in this thread understand. Cel animation is immensely tedious. Nobody wants to go back to ink-and-paint, mistakes were costly and the visual difference is ultimately negligible. The skillset is too high.The perfect tradeoff- and I know a few animators that still do this- is animating on paper, scanning those frames in, and (depending on the production) doing digital clean-up. Although it's much more trendy to leave the lines in for most productions like that.Some anons understand that the issue isn't in the technique, it's the fact that digital 2D encourages shortcuts at the cost of direct skill. Anybody who's ever animated with integrity should know good and well that it's not the tools that make the artist. Hire a good team, you get a good production.Also, traditional (digital) feature animation is well and alive in Europe. Most of those films are produced at a fraction of the budget of any big-name US production, so you can shove aside any notions of "traditional being too expensive," because that's just a myth.
>>152022299>The skillset is too high.So CalArts fags are retarded?
>>152022443Yes. My old college gradually dropped traditional animation over the years and while the graduation films came out flashier you can tell there's a giant gap in raw animation skill. It's a shame because the only convenient way to learn paper was at school so I guess now it's reserved for animation buffs and autists
>>152022443CalArts has been trying to produce more showrunners than animators ever since the Powerpuff Girls. Countries that invest more into development of the populace don’t cripple their talent pools for skilled work like in the US.
>>152022443Yes? The "CalArts" critique has always been a weird meme. One look at that school's student films and it's clear that they push far more than industry trends.When I say "high skillset," I'm mainly referring to the raw technical skill of everything cel animation used to require behind-the-scenes. There are a lot of technical jobs in animation nobody considers anymore because wide-eyed idealists gun for lead animator or storyboard artist. Traditional ink-and-paint and backlight effects jobs don't exist in their original form, and good luck finding an animation sheet timer that isn't the same guy the industry's been using for 40 years. That's a long-dead skill. Most of these skillsets are dead because technology has either made these processes easier or irrelevant.>>152022609I know plenty of colleges that still teach traditional, but I also know there are some that axed those programs in favor of 3D. It really depends on the instructors you get and how bad you fight to preserve those programs. Most animation professors are retired industry vets, so it's always worth asking around.
>>152016247This smells like another 1pbtid garbage thread content farming for Reddit or one of those Twitter gimmick accounts.Digital pros:>can be cheap>can be fast>relatively low skill floor>can easily undo/edit errors>no material cost>off-site backups>shortcuts and cheats to save time/effort>don't have to mail your shit overseas, risking damage/loss>can slap in shaders and effects in one click>can draw/animate/model from anywhere, even fuckin' Starbucks, and just email your work to your boss>one person could solo it "professionally" if they wanted>possible to emulate any art quirks and flaws, if needed>AIDigital cons:>relatively low skill floor>shortcuts and cheats are tempting at all times, a "cheat" to get out of effort, like using tweening to cut costs>since you're not doing everything "by hand", it's easier to skip out on details>stock assets/effects are much easier to use (abuse)>fuckin' everyone uses uniform line weight>tools can go out of date, or become unusable due to OS changes>possible losses to hacks/viruses>AITrad pros:>higher skill floor means everyone's (probably) actually damn good>sovl>access to some cool lighting effects>can sell cels after you're done>since everything's done by hand, there's personal touches and artist/animator quirks>can't get fucked by software issues>can sketch anywhere, even without powerTrad cons:>takes damn near forever to git gud>filming rigs are permanent fixtures that are huge as fuck and expensive>needs specific tools, papers, and even desks to do right>fucked by humidity>hard to store long-term>the oils in your skin ruin the paper over time>specific clays and paints might become literally extinct>no cheats or tricks, no QoL, everything's done by hand>have to mail your work overseas>easy as fuck for errors like hairs and scratches>hard for indies to put their work online>often have to digitally touch up your work anyway>even changing pens can be visible in your work
>>152019136those can be emulated to an extent, not including them in is now more of a choice for artists trad has a lot of givens that the artist just has to work withdigital is a perfect canvas, but that also makes it harder because now the artists need to consider some things they never would have before
>>152019747Go watch some Cartoon Saloon, Wolfwalkers has a sequence animated with literal charcoal and looks amazing.
It sucks that only the Japanese occasionally bother to replicate traditional animation with digital technology.
>>152016247Anything you can do with traditional animation you can do with digital.It's just that people get lazy with digital, and it's easier to cut corners to save money.So that's why you can't bring traditional back. It will always be easier to just use digital well.
>>152016899Adjusting for inflation falls apart when given even the slightest bit of scrutiny.
>>152016247Someone will figure out a digital pipeline to make digital animation look like traditional cel animation.
>>152023275simpsons has gotten pretty decent at emulating the season 4 style in digitalonly decent though
>>152016247Karl marx said that profits naturally fall over time due to increases in pricing efficiency. The monetary model of indie cartoons is very tight in the margins (ad revenue + plushies) and big companies do not believe they could turn as big of a profit (or even lose money) (see: treasure planet, el sid)
>>152022299This. Digital animation isn't the problem, using it poorly is. Its not the medium's fault that american cartoons decided to be intentionally childish and ugly over time. Nobody MAKES shows like Smiling Friends and Adventure Time look like something you'd find in 6th grader's notebook. They did that by choice.
>>152016247As many people said: Even through many cartoons are still hand-drawn, It's far easier, cheaper and faster to do coloring and compositing digitally rather than doing it with cel animation. Due of this, pretty much all animation studios switched to digital animation around the early 2000s and cel animation started dying out as a medium.Notably (this is an /a/ example), Sazae-san (1969) was actually the very last anime to fully switch to digital animation in 2013, and even then I think it was because by that point they were running out of providers for cel animation supplies / personal that knew how to do cel animation. Despite the switch, however, they still tried to sort of emulate the cel animation feel.There's still internet artists, however, that sometimes do actual cel animation. Here's an example of an fanmade SpongeBob cel animation:https://youtu.be/8YjZeHtqZSw?si=AjKwNj3S1bNYzK_3&t=869
>>152019844Yet digital animation always looks worse, color-wise, than cel animation
>>152023506It's mostly that the childish styles are cheap. It's a medium designed for maximum art reuse.The old days had low budget animated shows too, and they were absolute trash like Birdman.
>>152023275Japan does some interesting stuff with emulating specific older styles. Like in this recent thing from last season where they managed to make scenes that convincingly looked like they were from old 70s tokusatsu shows.
>>152016875So with that logic, Digital will be replaced with AI in the future?
>>152023806This is an art direction problem, digital color design doesn’t have to be the way it is
>>152024178For most cartoons, yea, probably.The only animation that will survive in the future will be animation aimed at enthusiasts who genuinely like animation and passion projects funded by wealthy benefactors or gacha games.
>>152024178Only some future, theoretically improved version of AI. Current gen AI can save time on generating some simple bullshit, like clouds in the background of a scene, but is dogshit for anything that requires intentionality, consistency, or choreography. An animated fight scene made by AI would be *dogshit*, with the characters sort of failing at each other vaguely as their position around the battlefield slips and morphs with with dreamlike incoherence. It can help do things like prototype character designs or something, but there is a far cry from that and actually animating an episode of a show with any degree of quality.
>>152024308>An animated fight scene made by AI would be *dogshit*, with the characters sort of failing at each other vaguely as their position around the battlefield slips and morphs with with dreamlike incoherenceThis is why it’s only good enough for porn addicts right now and even the porn is dogshit
>>152016247Because no one has the skillset anymore.In the west they are taught to use vector puppet software because that's what has become standard across the industry.Japan still utilizes hand drawn frames whether scanned paper or digital illustrations because that's what they're taught/learned.If someone wanted to they could start an animation studio that used Cel animation and they would get contract work.The only problem they would face is finding people who actually know the process of doing Cel animation.>>152016875It's not.It's just what most people know.Stop motion animation costs the same amount and time.
>>152024610>The only problem they would face is finding people who actually know the process of doing Cel animation.Companies used to train people up on industry skillsets to meet their needs in-house and invest in their workforce. Nowadays, no company will ever hire you without 2-5 more years of more experience on your resume than the job actually needs, and willing to work for the same rate as someone with 2-5 years less experience than the job requires.
>>152016247Anon, the argument is about CG vs. hand-drawn feature animation. Not cel-animated vs. digitally-inked animation. The latter can still look great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cwuJpZYJDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9Wo4Qrst9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8mScKWj3kQ It all comes down to proper compositing and color styling.
>>152023806That's more on the flash animation studio 9Story fucking up an otherwise fine intro by "remastering" it. Man, that switch to flash made post-season 16 episodes of Arthur a chore to watch. The characters' faces had some weird vacant looks, the walk cycles were kinda stiff and clunky, and some characters' color schemes were off. The same thing happened with someone "remastered" one of the openings for Garfield and Friends recently.
It's genuinely astounding how fucking stupid literally all of you are
>>152016875Its not cheaper, stop repeating this lie.
>>152017520You're responding to a copy pasta you fucking retard
One thing I notice nobody ever talks about in these threads is how traditional animation does leave studios with animation cels and "master prints" that can be sold to collectors for big bucks in a way digital files can't be. I went to a comic con in June and one of the oldheads there mentioned that even if an artist works mostly in digital, he strongly recommended they at least do the cover traditionally, because having them in your back pocket and being able to sell them can be a massive windfall financially.
>>152025716Prove that anon wrong then. I'll wait.
>>152016247>man who's never drawn a frame of animation in his life wonders why old inconvenient practices arent still usedGOD i love /co/!!!
>>152016247I think the biggest shame is the loss of painted backgrounds.Not because digital couldn't make something like them, but rather because the speed at which digital animation can be done, means people rarely put in nearly as much work on the backgrounds for each shot.
>>152017092Rotoscoping is a valid animation style. Yeah, it's "tracing" but it is still a hand guiding a tool to make it. It isn't having someone dance and putting a filter on them (although with how good filters have gotten, I'm sure that day is coming.)
>>152018847The actual qualities that you lose switching from cel to digital are cel shadows, paint texture, underlight effects and film grain. Do you even understand what it is that you're romanticising?
>>152024610>Japan still utilizes hand drawn frames whether scanned paper or digital illustrations because that's what they're taught/learned.I don't know if you are familiar with modern anime but the only time digital anime looked good was in the early 00s. I remember watching FLCL and thinking wow, years later I watched Madoka and I was even more amazed by Japanese digital.
By that logic, Clutch Cargo is superior to all digitally produced cartoons. Fuck off, ya daft cunt
>>152019880The only place for sure I know still uses Cel Animation is Tatsunko Productions, hence the new game getting its look, its one of the few things that still uses cels https://youtu.be/ayAjwXFEtdc?si=zdHo4RZty7F-MdCk
>>152017512The problem is every CGI always target literal kids of kindergardens, you see why CGI male characters are muscular goblins or bipedal animals
>>152028007>By that logic, Clutch Cargo is superior to all digitally produced cartoons.
>>152027917>I don't know if you are familiar with modern anime but the only time digital anime looked good was in the early 00s.Ehh, disagree, there's digital anime coming out nowadays that looks leagues above a lot of the stuff from the early 2000s, especially some of those shows made by guys who thought they were being "innovative" by filling their show with tons of ugly-as-fuck CG backgrounds that make their shows look like a bunch of anime characters pasted over a bad-looking PS2 game (looking at you Witch Hunter Robin).
>>152028606>muh realism anime is lame
>>152016247shill me a tool that does really good rotoscoping
>>152027448>Waahhh boo hoo waahhh I'm lazy wahh boo hoo wah
>>152016938Imagine animate the whole thing just for this.
>>152029896wacom graphire
>>152028413Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal, bait bro?
>>152016247Because you pirate cartoons and YOU let cel animation die
>>152016247Retarded take. Digital animation can look 99% like hand drawn animation, but the problem is time and skill. Because its become alarmingly appearent that animation is almost impossible to capitalize, its also means modern artist simpley have no desire to hone the craft like the old masters did. We live in a world where its much more lucrative to be furry porn artist in latin america, than to create the next Fantasia.
>>152031676Digital animation can theoretically look like traditional animation, but it won't. It will all look like either Voltron 2016 or Steven Universe for the rest of time.
>>152031227Eh, I've seen better from him.
>>152031564I'm sorry...
>>152031564How about piece of shit companies not raise prices and expect everyone to accept their less than shit products?
>>152032568You WILL pay $25/mo for netflix and you WILL watch big mouth and 20 other cartoons that look exactly like big mouth and if you have the nerve to complain you WILL hear a rant about nostalgia bias
>>152017170He said animation, not a slide show of reused assets.
>>152016899they do?
>>152016247Has anyone tried cel-animation through 3D simulation? I'm thinking it might be one way to bring it back
>>152024178AI will be a normal part of the production process in a decade and people will think you're being an asshole when you say mean things about it similar to how people think you're an asshole now if you look down on digital art.Not that AI will replace artists entirely but it'll be a tool to streamline the process even more.I say this as someone who despises AI.
>>152033746This. AI as a *tool* is powerful an useful. AI is fucking amazing at doing stuff like filtering through research data and making connections and noticing patterns. We are unironically making leaps and bounds in biomed as a result because biomed data is too big for human brains to parse easily but an AI can handle it fine. But the idea of AI replacing human workers or being some kind of magical content generation machine? Thats a fucking scam. Its slop powered by mass plagarism, only illegal because its a crime so new and brazen that we don't have laws that cover this specific kind of theft yet. They are selling a lie, and know its a lie, and it won't even be theoretically possible for it to become the truth without a fundamental technological leap that they have been promising us was 6 months away for 3 years now, and shows no signs of being any more possible now than it did then.
>>152020364This. In theory you could get a bunch of "professionals" together with the right equipment and they could try and do it, but it would be the equivalent of a half-assed civil war re-enactment. So much of the nuance and technique is developed simply from doing the work every day and having decades of experience at whatever studio you work in, and much of that was tossed aside over 20 years ago. The entire act of cel-animation is an art. Not just the drawing.>>152020731>When I look in CSP's eyedropper that's straight up a value and saturation of 100Your problem is that you're trying to judge real world lighting and color spectrums within the arbitrary values defined by some program and how it appears on a digital screen. Bright paint is bright paint.
>>152027443This. Is there any data comparing the average ballpark figures for different forms of animation (traditional 2D, digital 2D, 2D vector puppet, CG animated, stop motion, clay animated)? That would be one way to confirm if digital is cheaper than traditional.
>>152022895>relatively low skill floor>>152023506>Its not the medium's fault that american cartoons decided to be intentionally childish and ugly over time. Nobody MAKES shows like Smiling Friends and Adventure Time look like something you'd find in 6th grader's notebook. They did that by choice.>>152023807>It's mostly that the childish styles are cheap. It's a medium designed for maximum art reuse.This could explain why the 2010's and 2020's were flooded with so many shows with that cheap, overly simplified look but without any of the charm that simplistic shows from the 90's and 2000's had (e.g. PPG, Rugrats, Invader Zim, Hey Arnold, Dexter's Lab, Samurai Jack, Billy & Mandy, Fairly OddParents). Despite new talent entering the animation industry in the 2010's, it's weird seeing several recent animators practically phoning it in out of the gate by doubling down on the same cheap, lazy, oversimplistic art style that made some shows from that era indistinguishable from one another. Granted, pic related were mostly pilots (The Fancies became The Fungies), but goddamn why the hell do they basically look the same despite being from different animators?On a side note, a similar "let's get it done cheap" argument could be made about some shows the 2000's. That decade saw a surge in cheap, 2D puppet-rigged shows from Canada including shows that were once traditional/digital 2D (Johnny Test, Arthur, Cyberchase). Some of those shows were plagued with stiff/clunky animation, robotic walk cycles, weird head/body wobbling, and asymmetric character models (think Kratos' tattoos always being on specific sides of his body) that were lazily mirror-flipped to save time from making proper left/right character models.
>>152033889You got me curious, so I averaged the budgets for every 2D WDAS film from 1937-2011. Adjusted for inflation, the average budget comes out to 93 million per feature. A few interesting notes:Every film before Black Cauldron (44 mil./132 mil. adj.) had an adjusted budget under 50 mil. Exceptions are:>Pinocchio (2.6 mil./60 mil. adj.)>Sleeping Beauty (6 mil./66 mil. adj.)Every film after Little Mermaid (40 mil./118 mil. adj.) regularly had an adjusted budget of over 100 mil. Exceptions are:>Beauty and the Beast (25 mil./59 mil. adj.)>Aladdin (28 mil./65 mil. adj.)>The Lion King (45 mil./98 mil. adj.)>Brother Bear (46 mil./81 mil. adj.)>Winnie the Pooh (2011) (30 mil./43 mil. adj.)The films with the lowest and highest budgets are:>Dumbo (.95 mil./20 mil. adj.)>Treasure Planet (140 mil./253 mil. adj.)If the thread's still alive, I'll try doing this for other US animation studios, That way I can make something that resembles an average.
>>152034909I misread my graph. Treasure Planet's adjusted budget is 252 million. Tarzan (130 mil./253 mil. adj.) is the most expensive WDAS film.
The Rescuers Down Under was one of the first all-digital films and it looked fine, most normies wouldn't even notice a difference. The people in charge of making decisions and the artists are just bad.
>>152035079To be fair, both of those were experimenting with entirely new technology.
>>152016247too expensive
>>152016899you are allowed to be snow white when no one can compete with you, you couldn't do that in today's market.
>>152032585They raise the prices because people ARE still paying dipshit.Same reason people buy the new copy&pasted sports game every year at full price.
>>152034909Here's a 2-for-1. Adjusted for inflation, the average 2D DWA film cost about 137 million. They all cost over 100 million to make.>El Dorado is the most expensive (95 mil./179 mil. adj.)>Sinbad is the cheapest (60 mil./106 mil. adj.)I also looked over Don Bluth's films. The average adjusted budget is 58 million per film. A few notes:The only two films over 100 mil. heavily skew the average.>Anastasia (53 mil./107 mil. adj.)>Titan AE (75 mil./141 mil. adj.)The Bluth Ireland films average 60 mil. budgets. There's no recorded budget for Troll in Central Park, but I'd assume its budget equaled the other films.>Thumbelina (28 mil./61 mil. adj.)>Pebble and the Penguin (28 mil./60 mil. adj.)The films with the lowest and highest budgets are:>Secret of NIMH (6.5 mil./22 mil. adj.)>Titan AE (75 mil./141 mil. adj.)>>152035201That's true! R&D factors heavy into the production budgets of some of these films. It's why to this day, Tangled is still the most expensive CG film ever made.
>>152035491Another 2-for-1. Amblimation's (including Curious George) average adjusted budget is 57.5 million. Each film was more expensive than the last.>Fievel Goes West is the cheapest (16.5 mil./39 mil. adj.)>Curious George is the most expensive (50 mil./80 mil. adj.)WB's average 2D budget (including Cats Don't Dance) is 119 million. This doesn't include adjacent films like Mask of the Phantasm, Pagemaster, or The PPG Movie. Some notes:The hybrid films are all over 100 million.>Space Jam (80 mil./165 mil. adj.)>Osmosis Jones (70 mil./128 mil. adj.)>Looney Tunes: Back in Action (80 mil./141 mil. adj.)The only other film over 100 million is:>Iron Giant (70 mil./136 mil. adj.)The films with the lowest and highest budgets are:>Cats Don't Dance (32 mil./65 mil. adj.)>Space Jam (80 mil./165 mil. adj.)
>>152035837One final 3-for-1 for movies based on shows. These are for theatrical-only releases, so TV and streaming movies aren't included.Nickelodeon's average adjusted 2D budget (including Beavis and Butthead Do America) is 47 million. Some notes:The four Klasky-Csupo films all average around 48 million.>Rugrats Movie (24 mil./48 mil. adj.)>Rugrats in Paris (30 mil./56 mil. adj.)>Wild Thornberrys (25 mil./45 mil. adj.)>Rugrats Go Wild (25 mil./44 mil. adj.)Every Nick film is under 60 mil. Exceptions are:>Sponge Out of Water (74 mil./101 mil. adj.)The films with the lowest and highest budgets are:>Hey Arnold: The Movie (3 mil./5 mil. adj.)>Sponge Out of Water (74 mil./101 mil. adj.)CN/WBA's average adjusted 2D budget (including the Aqua Teen movie) is 10 million. Some notes:Both big DC releases cost 13 million.>Mask of the Phantasm (6 mil./13 mil. adjusted)>TTG To the Movies (10 mil./13 mil. adjusted)The films with the lowest and highest budgets are:>Clifford's Really Big Movie (70,000/120,000 adj.)>PPG Movie (11 mil./20 mil. adj.)Clifford's budget was apparently 70,000 dollars. Lower than Aqua Teen (750,000/1 mil. adj.), wtfDisney TVA's average adjusted 2D budget is 23 million.>Doug's First Movie is the cheapest (5 mil./10 mil. adj.)>Recess: School's Out is the most expensive (23 mil./42 mil. adj.)
>>152036392Averages of every studio:>Disney - 93 mil.>Dreamworks - 137 mil.>Amblimation - 57.5 mil.>Warner Bros. - 119 mil.>Don Bluth - 58 mil.>DTVA - 23 mil.>Nick/MTV - 47 mil.>CN/WBA - 10 mil.TOTAL - 68 million.There's a rough average of 2D animation budgets in America, although it's missing assorted work from other studios and directors like Hyperion, RichCrest, and Bakshi.
>>152036504Went back and recalculated this as a weighted average. It's actually 77 million USD.
>>152024061pretty impressive
>>152022299All of Disney films in the 90s were digital animation, most of their imitators still used cels, but really only Anime took advantage of cel animation for the rest of the decade, unfortunately the Pokemon Porygon Histerya caused affects to get neutered.
>>152023506Yeah but digital STILL CANNOT replicate the old light effects you saw in stuff like this.https://youtu.be/QUmvzxs62xw?si=GacKqqaUR7Yy0b-SMainly the light effects, or how about the auras in Saint Seiya? Huh?Now in digital ANIME AURAS LOOK LIKE SHIT, specially in shit like Dragonball Super, I don't even think the japanese even remember how to do those visual effects because they are so supersticiously stupid about piracy and preservation that they didn't documented their own shit.
>>152037382see>>152019747
>>152037319They were still animated on paper, just painted digitally.
>>152023669>Barely moving animation>That "voice acting"You're doing it Wrong!, you're doing wrong, Don't you know? Don't you know?
>>152037382That's called backlit animation, and yes you can mimic it in digital.
>>152020731Yellow is the brightest paint pigment. Even super saturated versions of the other colors don't look as bright as yellow. This is why every schoolbus is bright yellow, because it's the most noticable color and therefore it makes drivers aware of it faster than any other car.
>>152020364Yeah but "we don't know how" would still be a cop out.Not having the talent and not being aware of the technique existing are two different things.
>>152024061>Quick clean digital transitionsYuck, why couldn't they time the frame rate at 23.9fps at least and had a fade shade during transition (you know, when there is a slight change in colors and the brightest one is the last one to fade?https://youtu.be/CJ52j6P6gHw?si=oT5xUTM7YLo_yKbyThis is the only example I could find because the indians buttraped Google search now and YouTube's search engine is even worse.
>>152035186Welp, the original digital master might not looked as good because it was probably locked at 480i or something, and when they were printed on 35mm because back then there were no DCPs, it makes them look VERY blurry and weird compared to actual shot on film animation mastered on film and NOT on a video master like 98% of animated TV shows in America.
>>152035837How much you wanna bet that inflation is just sleazy CEOs and Exec. Prods. Just simply price fixing and packeting most of the money?
>>152036392Except as in was proven with movies in the last few years, the reason why budgets are inflated is literal money scamming lead by Chinese and SPECIALLY indians, hence why CGI looks like garbage yet millions are expend on God knows what, Godzilla Minus One only had 15-18 million USD and it's CGI look decent most of the time minus those goofy looking tanks and maybe 1 or 2 blurry shots.Makes you wonder how badly the indians are scamming people's money.
>>152019747Don't wanna click on it cause I bet they smeared and blurry the cool light effects because MUH POKEMON PORYGON SEIZURES.
>>152037466Then why NOBODY does it right?
>>152037759Now hold on, I know we hate the Indians as the new hot topic but we're not replacing them with the jews now.
>>152034400>but goddamn why the hell do they basically look the same despite being from different animators?It’s multiple things. It’s easy to draw for consistency. Execs want more of what sold or what looks like the brand. Original pitch art gets conformed. Storyboard animatics made in 4 weeks are used to direct and set the look now. It’s easy to teach artists to draw this way without great fundamentals but hard for artists with weak fundamentals to be flexible with the style. The shows themselves influence the artists. The look has been associated with TV cartoons to younger artists for long enough through school to be their whole frame of reference unless they specifically seek out more diverse influences. The system incentivizes more of what it thinks will make money and the artists condition themselves to make more of it.
>>152037786Ghosting and dimming in anime are due to Japanese regulations after the Pokemon seizures, watch the blu ray
>>152038215>They censor 4k blu-ray too Discotek's blu-ray of Tetsujin FX was literally just the old laserdisc murky transfers but they been censored too with safety blurs, and the Pokemon Porygon bullshit was just mass Histerya and Japs being subserviant and stupid.
>>152037759>Godzilla Minus One only had 15-18 million USD and it's CGI look decent most of the time minus those goofy looking tanks and maybe 1 or 2 blurry shots.Milky Subway was animated by literally *one guy* on a shoestring budget to expand his college homework into a show. Nobody else has any excuse to look worse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFsdOuj0FPo
>>152016247Far cheaper. But is there really much of a difference if the artists are talented?And would a comparison to anime be valid? Their industry I would think is thriving, don't know why western animation isn't really keeping up, is it because it's all child-oriented shows?
>>152038805Japan has a combination of factors in its favor:1: cost. Animators are prolific and cheap. Studios don't get paid much for an individual show, but they work on multiple shows a year and keep the lights on that way.2: Diversity of genres. Anime covers a lot of ground, from action to comedy to drama to horror and so on. Western animation is almost entirely poop jokes for children or poop jokes for adults where the characters say "fuck". 3: Strong indie pipeline. Western cartoons are executive driven and made for the studio. Anime are typically adaptations of independent works and made for the client. This helps lead to the diversity of genres seen above, in that the studios make stuff for different people that suit different tastes, whereas top-down executive decisionmaking means that every show is made to fit into the same box to appeal to the same corporate number crunchers. 4: The volume of anime and genres they make means that their talent base was not allowed to atrophy. The west didn't make enough cartoons to keep their animators employed or support new people entering the industry, so talent was lost and skills not passed on. Anime makes like 200 new shows a year, so much work that not only is skill transfer possible, its NECESSARY.
>>152038805Most animation is advertising. In Japan anime are greenlit to promote book and merchandise sales, and even theme songs are part of the product strategy. Disney and feature animation is similar but most cartoons are made to promote a streaming service or find the next big IP, they wait to invest anything until they get an instant mega hit and “discover” talent instead of developing it. Animation isn’t treated as a USA cultural product like anime is for Japan despite its history. Outsourcing labor hollowed out the floor of the industry so small outfits can only compete for boutique work on corporate projects.
>>152016247>nu-ben 10>thundercats roar>velmanice strawman examples retard
>>1520257161 Adobe license is cheaper than a brapillion pencils and paper per animator
I appreciate the old methodology, but I don't understand the desire to return to it. If you have even a slight interest in animation and illustration you could probably name hundreds of good things that are digital. Are you going to say that Spirited Away or The Lion King are not well-made because they don't use cels?
>>152037720>>152037759I don't know if you're retarded, ESL, or both. I used an inflation calculator to adjust the prices of animated films to 2025 USD pricing. Inflation calculators are not perfect, but they're more accurate than claiming "Snow White was made for 3 million, therefore you can make a film like Snow White for 3 million today!"I have zero idea where you got executive price-fixing from my estimates. I also have zero idea where you got China and India from my post, which is limited to films that extensively utilize CG animation. If you want to do the math yourself, feel free to research the budgets of any animated film. You'll probably learn a lot more that way than from mindless guesswork.
>>152039462I think most of the people who keep talking about how they wish to RETVRN do not actually know anything about animation.They're the animation equivalent of vibe coders, which is why you'll often see those same guys say that AI can totally be used to RETVRN to the old cel style.
>>152038626Then why CGI in American movies looked like shit despite the bigger budgets?
>>152039567>I don't get it therefore you're stupid!Literally this.
>>152016247>traditional is betterNot with today's animators it wont.
>>152016247>2. You will immediately cease and not continue to access the site if you are under the age of 18.
>>152037466no you cant.
>>152039681I understand what you're trying to say, I just don't understand what any of that has to do with what I just posted.None of the hand-drawn films in the data I used were outsourced to China or India. Plenty of the TV adaptations were outsourced to Korea, and many of the non-Disney originals were aided by various European countries (Ireland, France, the UK, Denmark). Outsourcing to China and India for feature animation services is a relatively recent practice. If you find any information proving me wrong, feel free to share it and do so.
>>152039978>None of the hand-drawn films in the data I used were outsourced to China or India.Bruh, he means the chinks and jeets pocketing money.
>>152016247who's gonna draw them lmao
>>152039958Have you tried doing it yourself? Break out a motion graphics program and fiddle with filters and layer blending options. It takes effort, but there are several ways to accomplish this (while being able to enhance or reduce any stylized imperfection) if you just pick up the tools and fucking try. Japanese animation is a poor metric for technical ingenuity and innovation in animation.
>>152039958not in a painting program but a virtual light and camera setup with proper color correction can get damn close
>>152039988I understand that, but that isn't applicable to every single animated film: only movies primarily outsourced to China and India. And even then films like Spirit Untamed and Dog Man (both handled by the British-Indian Jellyfish Pictures) were made at a fraction of the cost of films like Penguins of Madagascar and Home.If you want a real, non-bullshit answer, some animation budgets are as high as they are because of Hollywood accounting. DreamWorks was especially bad at this while Katzenberg was running the studio, that's why they kept reporting losses on every single film they made from 2012-2016. Endless amounts of money burned on R&D, celebrity cast-stuffing, and expensive dinners. Besides distribution, the only reason they survived as long as they did was because they wrote off an equal amount of unproduced features on their taxes.Other budgets are astronomically high because they do all their work in-house, not in the US. WDAS did this, Pixar still does this. Illumination budgets are so low because their business model is built around outsourcing everything to their French division (see Mikros Image and the outrageously low Paw Patrol and Captain Underpants films). Sony Animation outsources most of their films to Canada.Now if he's referring to the VFX industry as it applies to live-action films, then I'd understand. Deadlines are tight, deals are tighter, that checks out. But now we're back to square one: what the fuck does any of that have to do with what I was talking about earlier?
>>152028007clutch cargo has infinitely more sovl than any beanmouth shit
>>152016247>Why can't we bring back traditional animation?
>>152039462>>152039639Its a misdiagnosis of the actual want, which is generally a return to more anatomically detailed characters, a darker/more washed out pallet, a rejection of techniques like tweening, and a heavier focus on complex FX such as the aforementioned backlighting.And/Or a general return to Action Shows to which Batman the Animated Series is my best example of the idealized product.Basically they want the traditional symbols of Effort and Care to become the expectation again instead of a semi-rare treat.
>>152040371NTA, but that's a very solid assessment. Kudos anon
>>152040371>And/Or a general return to Action Shows to which Batman the Animated Series is my best example of the idealized product.You'd need to convince the audience that wants that to return to cartoons at this point.We're 15 years into the beanmouth reign, 95% of the people who were looking for action in their cartoons fucked off years ago.
>>152016938IndeedBit of a truism, but you don't blame bad art on the tools, you blame it on the artist(s).That being said, most digital productions were simply established to save money, not to take advantage of the benefits of digital animation, so the majority of products are, in fact, lower quality on average than past productions.
People don't even realize "digital animation" is still done by hand... the reason it's cheaper is because it's easier to revise and edit. With physical cells if you fuck up a frame you have to redraw the entire thing from scratch. If the director says "actually I wanted the scene to be more like this" you have to redraw hundreds, or THOUSANDS, of frames from scratch. With digital cels you can simply edit the cel, do some quick touch ups, then re-save it. Saves literally thousands of man-hours of work to fix mistakes and make revisions.And this is just the most basic stuff, digital animation has so many tools that traditional animators would've killed to have. The ability to quickly toggle between color pallets and overlays, the ability to save models as reusable assets which saves even more labor, and the ability to see instant playback of your frames without having to unpeg your cels and flip through them, then carefully realign them back on the peg board. Instead it's just a button.The main drawback is a skills mismatch. The people who know the new digital tools best typically don't have the training of a classically trained animator, they think of animation in the terms of their toolset. If the toolset doesn't lend itself to a particular technique, they probably don't know how to do it and it wouldn't occur to them to try. The classically trained animator has the experience and expertise in animation to try things outside the toolset, but they're hobbled by having to learn an entirely new way of doing something they spent a large part of their life becoming an expert in. The sheer difficulty of that aside, there's also a huge morale issue, of whether they'd even want to try.
>>152040603They still make action cartoons. Unfortunately the likes of Invincible and Batman: Caped Crusader look terrible, especially compared to the best action cartoons of the 90s through the early 10s.
I'm more curious why there aren't tools that can effortlessly recreate the paint n' ink look. We have things like TVPaint that can masterfully recreate a watercolor look. We have SFX filters that can make things look like Van Gough paintings. But we can't make digital clean-up look more gritty like traditional?
>>152041330I think Japan has been working on it, cause I've seen more and more anime aping stuff from the 80s or earlier.
It's wild that digital animation somehow managed to look better over 15 years ago than now. Invader ZIM back in 2001 looked infinitely better than the Netflix movie, despite both being digital.
>>152041645Lost knowledge. It doesn't come back. Animation might as well go full 3D.
>>152041729skillz
>>152024178Y'know, I didn't think about until now, but did anyone show Chris any A.I. of his creations? And did he start to believe the dimensional merge was happening right before his eyes? I never really watched him enough to see how cognizant he is of things because I know he catches onto some stuff and he isn't as impressionable/naive as back then.
>>152040603>>152041299Adding on, Invincible is super popular despite its animation in part because of decent writing and on the other hand by filling a niche in western animation that is underserved.Honestly people still want action shows but the budgets just are not there to make them good off subscriber retainment and add revenue alone.And the toy markets dead, so while not wanting to go full East vs West, the sooner western companies figure out how to do the anime merch model, the sooner we can see a resurgence in long form action cartoons.
>>152040029You, of course
>>152041975exactly, the harsh reality is that the subscription model just doesnt pay out the same as the TV ad placement and toy models that industry has relied on for decades.
>>152016247James Baxter said the animators trained in Traditional Animation are mostly all gone now. No one knows how to do it any more.
>>152043354This. Streaming is a complete dead end propped up by investor money. When those musical chairs stop, Netflix will implode.
>>152043359This is actually a lie. Plenty of people know how to animate traditionally, they just don't get jobs in the industry because the industry hires based on nepotism not skill.
>>152043359This is extremely tragic and also scary, when he is gone, what's left? CalArts freaks like your Alex Hirsch's and Rebecca Sugars and your Korean animators who are either rigged pupped model animation which are also money laundry schemes to pocket small fortunes, or bad imitation of japanese animation?That is really bleak and dystopian, and the only ones who could still animate, and even so, not as good as in the past, is Japan.
