New Animation VS Old Animation

[kei17]

However, in most cases, those drawings are automatically re-traced with computer software, so strictly speaking, what you see on TV is actually "computer generated".

Is this any different then old cel animation where the lines are re-traced by inkers, though?

In old cel animation, drawings are exactly "copied" onto cels. In digital animation, auto tracing software detects black lines and automatically "redraws" them. There's a great difference here. This is one of the reasons why today's animation is often considered "lifeless".

[Attitudefan]

Not to mention each stroke and colour that is filled in is different between every person. Each stroke is special to the artist where that is lost when brought to a digital medium where computers are able to correct and create lines almost on its own. For example, creating a straight line on a computer vs someone who hand draws one. The computer version will be perfect where the hand drawn one will not.

[Ashura]

Here. You guys might be interested in these videos.

http://www.celsys.co.jp/en/products/retas/movie.html

It's what a lot of Japanese studios use to animate things, and it helps explain the concept of what Kei is talking about. This particular one is the Retas Pro!/Celsys system.

Funny enough, if you like Manga Studio Pro or whatever it's called, it's by these guys.

[mAcChaos]

However, in most cases, those drawings are automatically re-traced with computer software, so strictly speaking, what you see on TV is actually "computer generated".

Is this any different then old cel animation where the lines are re-traced by inkers, though?

In old cel animation, drawings are exactly "copied" onto cels. In digital animation, auto tracing software detects black lines and automatically "redraws" them. There's a great difference here. This is one of the reasons why today's animation is often considered "lifeless".

That is pretty much exactly what I was getting at, plus the coloring.

[Turtle bits]

Old all the way for me. Much like how I love older disney movies or tv animation, its less clean and more "dirty" the artists talents shine through more with every frame, and it feels more alive. I've always felt that way actually. Newer animation lacks that charm, the technology makes it look "too perfect".

[GarrettCRW]

Redrawn/retraced animation will always look terrible because a) it's a copy of someone else's previous work, and b) done at with a comparatively lower budget by a comparatively less-skilled animator (or worse, a computer). Granted, it won't look as hideous nowadays as the awful hand-redrawn colorizations of some black and white Warner Bros. cartoons in the late '60s and early '70s under Fred Ladd's supervision or the ones that Ted Turner funded for certain Popeye cartoons in the late '80s after he purchased the old a.a.p. library, but those omitted frames from the source works and had absolutely no quality control whatsoever.

There seems to be a little confusion here on how cartoons are made with computers these days. Some cartoons are animated using Flash, which definitely looks super robotic and lifeless, in no small part because it's massively cheaper. Others have the paper drawings scanned in, eliminating the acetate cels and hand painting entirely. This second method loses a bit of its personality because imperfections are eliminated-xerography, despite being a mechanized process, does not reproduce an artist's work entirely, especially if a given cel is photographed multiple times (as is definitely the case with the multiple Filmation cels I personally own, and I've heard stories that Toei used acetate so poor for their Sunbow work that some of the cels would literally disintegrate after being photographed). The line work on older cartoons is often thicker as well, I've noticed, and not as precise, and the color selection is a bit too washed out for my tastes. But even with all of these issues with the way animation is done now, it all leads to one thing: fast and cheap rarely equals good.

[JulieYBM]

Imperfections still come through. Watch a weekly Toei cartoon series. The awfulness of the key animation isn't magically fixed by computer technology. I hate to keep falling back on the same excuse, but a lot of what's wrong has been the lack of variety in way of the animation supervisors working on modern Dragon Ball. Digitally scanning the keys and tweens has worked wonders for plenty of other franchises. Flash is also coming into its own as a tool with animators like BahiJD, Yamashita Shingo, Oda Gosei and Kutsuna Ken'ichi. Even animators who still draw on paper, like Tate Naoki, can do so-called 'unclean' animation still:



This to say nothing of 2011's Hagane no Renkinjutsushi: Milos no Sei-naru Hoshi, which is even rougher than most commercial animated works before the dawn of digital technology.

[GarrettCRW]

Sometimes a lack of cleanup can result in rougher looking animation. Xerography was a dirty word to many (including Walt Disney himself) in the '60s and '70s because it had a habit of picking up rougher edges in the animation that the ink and paint girls were trained to ignore when they traced the pencil art. This forced artists to painstakingly clean up any rough edges in their work, and now computers can easily do that, and with even finer precision than a human could do without destroying the animation.

[Attitudefan]

That's why I prefer the brush tool on Flash over the line tool even though I want the anime look when I do something. The Brush tool gives a very gritty look and can give my art my style where a clean line tool will lose that look.

[SingleFringe&Sparks]

I'm not an animator so I might sound uneducated on the elements but this is what my eyes see:

I prefer the older animations for a lot of reasons. TOei animation today looks a little too underdone for me, and gives off that cheap-look with the lack of detail and colour tones and tints used originally for skin and for hair. Everything today looks very clean but in a sense where the artwork looks over sanitized. You can see everything clearly but there usually is nothing to see when you do notice. Its easier to notice independant frames with certain angles that have poorly drawn scenes. When you can see every line to where it starts and finishes you see the simplicity a lot more. To me the new look is like a woman without make up where as the old school style was like a fully-plastered face. There was just more to look at then.

Then the issue for me is the art design, the digital imagry really shows with the excessively thin outlines used for the character models. I hate it, it makes the characters look cartoony and it makes them seem more 2 dimentional because of that flatness it gives off. Especially for DBZ, the grittier, rough look of DBZ at its best with the hand-drawn look made characters feel more 3 Dimentional, it made them look thicker and heavier. The gridder art to me looks closer to the identifiable artsyle Toriyama had as opposed to the smooth shininess pokemon's new art has.

It's because of animation like this that Kai gets the reputation of looking like something done in Paint.

I also really hate that very jarring new motion blur effect they added to the fast combo scenes, before it was a flurry of fists and feet. Now you cant see anything because each motion looks like an afterimage overlapping another one.

[Attitudefan]

What animation studios like to do today is filter the heck out of their footages so it doesn't look so 'clean'. They add lots of gradients that hide the lines and blur filters that give it a more organic look. If you watch anime from the early 2000s, you see that those filters are not present and the animation looks kind of empty and lifeless. Lots of people have that complaint about early digital anime. However, they learned from their mistakes and are able to hide the cleanliness of digital by filtering it to hell! See Steins;Gate for a good example. I do not hate the animation, lots of it looks great, but old animation has a nice charm and doesn't hide anything. Some of the best animation is from the 80's and 90's! Princess Monoke has some of the best animation I have ever seen

[SingleFringe&Sparks]

What animation studios like to do today is filter the heck out of their footages so it doesn't look so 'clean'. They add lots of gradients that hide the lines and blur filters that give it a more organic look. If you watch anime from the early 2000s, you see that those filters are not present and the animation looks kind of empty and lifeless. Lots of people have that complaint about early digital anime. However, they learned from their mistakes and are able to hide the cleanliness of digital by filtering it to hell! See Steins;Gate for a good example. I do not hate the animation, lots of it looks great, but old animation has a nice charm and doesn't hide anything. Some of the best animation is from the 80's and 90's! Princess Monoke has some of the best animation I have ever seen

Most higher-budget non-toei anime look really good in this age. Where as Toei's work seems to get worse as age goes by. I havent seen GOOD DBZ animation since Budokai 2's opening.

[bkev]

Has TOEi always been a budget company? The more I think about it, the more I associate them with cheaper-looking shows/stock footage/etc.

[JulieYBM]

Has TOEi always been a budget company? The more I think about it, the more I associate them with cheaper-looking shows/stock footage/etc.

Toei was originally known for their motion pictures. Dragon Ball managed to get away with 3,500 cels and received many talented key animators to regularly work on the series. Still, Toei is perhaps the least generous with their works. Even a long running series like Naruto Shipuuden and Bleach has talented animators and directors that surpass what we've seen in most modern Dragon Ball productions. Toei Animation isn't necessarily cheaper than other studios. Hell, they're the only studio I can think of that has a union for its animators. Toei is simply very strict about cel counts and the projects they undertake. Toei mostly produced long-running shows, which means it is unlikely anyone would ever want to purchase home videos for their shows. If there is little chance of making a lot of money off of home videos there is little reason to produce quality work. PreCure, which changes storylines and casts every year, is perhaps the one long-running Toei series to avoid this pitfall. Kyousougiga, a ten episode series that aired in Fall 2013, was also very well directed and animated. For one reason or another they have also driven off much of their talent over the years. How Toei let Hosoda Mamoru go I'll never understand.

Toei has many projects current in one form of production or another.

One Piece (fifty-ish episodes a year)
Toriko (to be replaced by Dragon Ball Kai, thus requiring less work for Toei)
PreCure (fifty-ish episodes a year)
Saint Seiya Omega (ending March 30 to be replaced by Abarenbou Rikishi!! Matsutarou)
Kindaichi Shōnen no Jikenbo R (beginning April)
Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers (beginning April)
Majin Bone (beginning April)

Toei also has many specials, films, and commercials to work on. The scheduling for Japanese television animation has become worse in the year due to poor planning n the part of producers. Many episodes will finish production hours before they premier, thus requiring revisions for the home video release. Hell, Shingeki no Kyojin actually missed a broadcast or two once. An episode of Dragon Ball Z used to be made using only one-to-six key animators. Now most episodes will use many more than that to make up for the lack of time to produce an episode. Multiple animation supervisors are also becoming a regular occurrence due to key animators creating sloppy work because they just want their money and leave it to the animation supervisor to fix the drawings.

Mix poor scheduling with bad key animators, bad character designs, and bad Chief Animation Supervisors and you have a recipe for whatever you want to call these current projects.

[Kid Buu]

They also have a new Sailor Moon coming out, unless it gets delayed......for the 3rd time.

[JulieYBM]

They also have a new Sailor Moon coming out, unless it gets delayed......for the 3rd time.

That won't begin being animated for at least three months so I didn't mention it, especially since we don't know if any of the current series will be over by then.

[DragonBalllKaiHD]

Is it possible to animate 20-minute worth of a Dragon Ball episode with 3,500 cels, though? 24 cels in total is equivalent to one second worth of footage. A episode of Dragon Ball only needed 28,800 cels of drawings to produce it.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding by your statement, JulieYBM.

[Kid Buu]

They also have a new Sailor Moon coming out, unless it gets delayed......for the 3rd time.

That won't begin being animated for at least three months so I didn't mention it, especially since we don't know if any of the current series will be over by then.

Is that just a rough estimate or has Toei actually said it wont be getting animated for at least three months?

[DarkPrince_92]

Is it possible to animate 20-minute worth of a Dragon Ball episode with 3,500 cels, though? 24 cels in total is equivalent to one second worth of footage. A episode of Dragon Ball only needed 28,800 cels of drawings to produce it.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding by your statement, JulieYBM.

They do loop a lot of the action, the mouth movements, there's a shit ton of stills, I could go on. It doesn't sound impossible.

[ErikB]

Additionally most TV traditional animation is done 'on 2's', which means that the drawings are held for 2 frames; effectively making the animation 12 frames per second.
It's generally unadvised to ever do animation on 3's (which makes it 8 frames per second) but it's also something that happens occasionally on a TV budget and schedule.