Quote:
Originally Posted by hyl
You have taken most good American animation into account, but there lots of Western cartoons with mediocre or even plain awefull animation. I am not saying that anime has overall better art, but you seem to neglict all the horrible animated things that can be seen on the American television.
edit: while we are in the subject of animation : I don't think japanese animation is that bad at all. Especially compared to the things that I have seen from cartoons made in other countries like England, France, Germany, China, Italy
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I believe you're not as exposed as much to international animation as you think.
If you mention England and France, then you'll need to look at Aardman and Gobelins. Aardman is one of the best stop motion animation studios in the world, Gobelins is the best animation school in the world, literally under a hundred students are picked out from tens of thousands of portfolios every year and the graduates find immediate positions in the best animation studios.
And there's Wakfu, a French cartoon series commissioned to Gobelins by the MMORPG of the same name. This cartoon is setting the industry standard for animated series now.
And guess what, Gobelins thought just animating in 2D was too simple for them, they churn out weekly full episodes in
Flash. Yes the mediocre amateurish animating software that people use to make stuff float around on websites. Gobelins fully explores the potential of vector and tween graphic technologies producing an incredibly smooth and clean animation series. They also continuously challenge themselves to animate even more every new episode, one of the latest episodes had an entire stadium with every single spectator fully animated.
Here's a sample:
Also I do agree that sometimes Marvel goes too over the top with their muscles and poses, but the art direction and quality is still very high. Chinese Manhua are truly pieces of art though.
Alot of crazy cartoons like Spongebob and other Nickolodeon stuff actually have better animations than anime. Of course aesthetically people will think anime is more pretty, which is its graphical selling point, but anime applies very little of the principles of animation to its already low FPS. Alot of the craziness that goes on in those cartoons actually requires skillful animation to pull them off so they look convincingly crazy but not stupid and stale.
Principles like Squash and Stretch, Follow Through and Overlapping action are rarely executed in anime. But Gainax applies every single animation principle, they are the only animation studio that does that, which gives them their signature exaggerated dynamics and of course Gainax Bounce.