EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Morgan Williams: In today's podcast, I want to talk about animation style, different styles of animation. I want to make it really clear right off the bat that we're now, for this conversation I'm going to be using the term animation in a really narrow sense, not in the broad sense of meaning the whole industry or the whole world. When I say animation style I don't mean like the style of a whole genre or a whole film, or a series or anything like that. I'm talking really specifically about animation, the movement itself, the motion, and the performances of the characters. We're going to be talking about visual style or design style as well because this conversation is essentially about how connected those two things are, but I want to focus on movement style. I think most of us who have any interest in character animation or have just watched some cartoons and animated commercials and seen different styles, I think you can call up in your mind a range of visual styles fairly quickly.

You may not necessarily have thought all that much about the way different styles of animation move, the different styles of motion, the different styles of animation. They're truly nearly as varied as the visual styles that are out there. All of us character animators essentially learn very similar principles and basics in terms of how to make characters move to a greater or lesser degree, but the way that is interpreted by all of these individual artists is buried as those individual artists. Everyone has a very personal and definite style to the way they move things, and the more you study animation the more you see that. Then there's bigger broader styles, the style of a studio or the style of a genre, those kinds of styles, bigger styles, sit like umbrellas over the top. Even within those you're going to find very individual interpretations by individual animators.

One of the examples we're going to have on the PDF for today is a really cool example of the early version of The Simpsons that was animated by Klasky Csupo and the more modern version of The Simpsons. I think Klasky only did the first season or maybe the first two seasons, and they did the original shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show that created The Simpsons, that gave birth to The Simpsons. Their title sequence, which is basically the same storyboard, it's almost exactly the same sequence as the modern sequence that was created by Film Roman, who has basically done the animation or produced the animation for The Simpsons ever since those early seasons with Klasky Csupo. Seeing those side by side, which that link will show you, you can see right away a tremendous difference in the interpretation of the movement with the same storyboard, the same characters, the same essential color palette, and drawing style, although Klasky's drawing style and Film Roman's drawing style they did shift a little. 

It's essentially the same look but if you see how different the motion is, that's really what we're going to be talking about here, is how the stuff moves, what the movement style is. Then we're going to link it back to how that connects to its visual style. Now as I said, the different styles are as varied as there are different animators, genres, projects, films, and illustration styles and all the rest. If you really wanted to try to lay out some kind of graph of the different styles of 2D character animation, and we're going to be focusing by the way pretty specifically on 2D character here, that's what this class is about. I'm going to narrow our focus down to that with just a few nods to other forms, but within that 2D world you'd probably have to make some kind of extremely complex Venn diagram to try to really get a grasp of all of the different styles, influences, and ways that things have been designed and animated over the years.

In the old days when I was starting in the industry and beginning my time in the industry, when it was still predominantly dominated by hand-drawn animation, there was a general scale that was talked about in the business and it was full animation versus limited animation, full to limited. Now some kind of a linear scale like this full to limited and some kind of linear path obviously doesn't come close to addressing all of the different ranges of styles and different types of animation. Those terms grew primarily out of hand-drawn animation and so we're focused on a little bit more of a narrow area of the field to a greater or lesser degree, and full versus limited or full to limited was really something that was talked about primarily in television and film production.

This doesn't really take into account independent film, art film, commercial film, which tends to be more influenced by art, but I think it would be good to talk about it because you still hear the terms thrown around. I still hear them now and then. It also at least gives us a place to start. At least this gives us a starting place to think about the different ways to animate things. Another really important thing to remember here is that today's technology has made this concept quite a bit more muddy than it already was, and it was already a pretty muddy concept, and technology has definitely muddied the waters even more. We can talk about that as we go along, but let's just get our basic terms in order here and where those terms derived from. I think it'll at least help us start to think about these different approaches to making characters move.

Full animation. Full animation is the easiest way to say, "This is Disney," classic Disney 2D character animation. Indeed they really set the gold standard for this. There's certainly been many imitators and people who have taken what Disney learned, and even pushed it further in some cases, but they certainly were pioneers in this particular character animation, full hand-drawn character animation, the classic, classic stuff. What we're talking about there, if we wanted to try to break it down a little bit and be a little more technical about it, we're talking about in a lot of cases a high rate of drawings per second. I'm not talking about frame rate, back then it was all 24 frames a second, I'm talking about how many drawings were flipping past your eye at 24 frames a second. At "full animation" you're usually looking at between 10 and 24 drawings per second generally speaking. Most of the time, the majority of the work that was being done at that time would have been shot on twos, was the terminology they would call it, animating on twos.

What that meant was that you would shoot two frames for each drawing, thus at 24 frames a second you were actually animating at 12 frames a second, 12 drawings per second. It was discovered really early on, in particular by the animators in Hollywood and those early golden years, was that 12 frames a second to most audiences looked completely fluid enough to pass basically. Really an audience couldn't really see that it was a little bit more stuttery than the full 24, and because it literally cut their work in half, from the animators, to the tweeners, to the cleanup artists, to the ink and paint artists, it was a massive time and money saver. Now, what Disney tended to do was mix 12 and 24, and they would also occasionally hold frames for a little bit longer, that's where you get the 10 from. Truthfully, it was more like 12 to 24 most of the time. Most of the time it was around 12 to 24 frames a second.

The animators would decide when to go to full 24 shooting on ones or animating on ones. They would decide when to go to ones based on the speed of the movement and generally in most cases, it was extremely fast movement that required that higher frame rate. High rate of drawing per second, a big part of what made full hand-drawn animation called full animation, it was just simply that issue. We should also say that when we're talking about drawings, we're talking about a full drawing of the full character usually, almost always. With that full animation style, it's almost always one complete drawing of the entire figure on a page. Maybe once in a while there would be some layering and they would break some layers apart, but generally it was a complete drawing of each character on each page. They used less cycling, reused, and repeated animation and full animation, although they used cycles and they did reuse animation.

You can actually find lots of funny little YouTube posts where people have strung together all the bits of Disney films that were copied from one film to another. That was certainly something they used as a time-saver. Generally for the most part, particularly with the lead performances of the lead characters, they were not doing a lot of cycling or reusing of animation. The motion in full animation is almost always very fluid. There's always lots of overlap, follow through, secondary action, and really a full-fledged finessing of the movement to give it as much life and energy as possible. Another really important aspect of that movement besides having all that fluidity and all that finessing, it was almost always very dimensional. The character design itself, particularly at Disney but I think in most cases with this "full animation", the design of the characters is extremely dimensional. The movement reflects that with very dimensional movement, foreshortening; lots of foreshortening, characters turning and rotating in space dimensionally. That's a huge, in my opinion, a huge factor that sets apart full from limited, so very, very important.

Often these films because the animation was so rich, the character and background design was so rich, oftentimes these films were more visually driven and more driven by the animation itself than they were by dialogue. Now that really flip-flops as we move into more limited animation. I think that's another really significant difference between the two. Now of course all of this gorgeous animation, beautiful drawing, finessing, and all this stuff, obviously takes a lot of time and was tremendously expensive. This idea of full animation, we're really talking about the platinum plan. You rarely saw this kind of animation outside of basically two spaces. One of those was feature films like Disney. The other was Saturday morning cereal commercials. Saturday morning cereal commercials still are incredibly well-funded and have almost always an extremely high level of animation quality. It was absolutely true, this was absolutely true particularly back in the classic years: the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s. You would see beautiful, beautiful high and full hand-drawn character animation in cereal commercials.

Aside from feature films and commercials, there were the amazing animated shorts that both Disney and Warners, Walter Lantz, a lot of studios created in the 40s and 50s, to MGM, I forgot about MGM who did Droopy and the original Tom and Jerry cartoons. Those shorts are also usually considered full animation. Warner Brothers' Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, the classic old "cartoons" that were produced as theatrical shorts. They were played before the feature film, this is before Saturday morning cartoons. Now Saturday morning cartoons locked in pretty much as soon as there was TV. They started figuring out kids were home up early on Saturday morning full of sugar from their cereal and you plop an old Woody Woodpecker cartoon in front of them, and they are good to go for seven minutes. You package together three seven-minute cartoons, boom, you've got a 22-minute cartoon show. They were recycling a lot of these animated shorts.

Now those were as I said generally also considered full animation, and I think that's fair. However, if you look closely, they were working with much tighter budgets than the feature film studios or even for the cereal commercials that came later. Those were a little bit later, but they certainly had less money than Disney. There were corners cut, corners cut in terms of illustration style, there wasn't as much shading, there was not as ... Animated shadows were less important or left out entirely. There were things done in terms of the visual style but they did also limit movement quite a bit. The drawing per second rate for those Warner Brothers cartoons stayed a little bit lower down the scale. They were doing probably more twos than ones most of the time. They also did some layering. They used holds and cycles quite a bit more often. You could definitely see if you look carefully that there's a very, very subtle step downward, a step towards more limited animation from Disney if we look at Disney as the gold standard.

We could call it a rich limited style or we could call it a slightly limited full style. I think we see in some higher-end series work like The Simpsons, although The Simpsons is probably a little more limited than Warner Brothers. The Simpsons is far less limited than your average Saturday morning cartoon. There's definitely a range and gray area here, and I just want to make that really clear, that we're not talking about a black and white situation. There's a big broad range between Disney and say The Powerpuff Girls. I think you can easily say that the, especially the classic Warner Brothers and other classic cartoons of the 40s and 50s, generally could be considered truly full animation by today's standards. Now that moves us to what limited animation is.

Limited animation, which sounds really bad but really isn't, grew out of essentially financial necessity originally, which was that there was a huge demand for animation on television, starting almost immediately. There was a huge demand for content and that demand for content grew very, very quickly even as the economy to a great degree was constricting as we moved from the 50s to the 60s into the 70s. The economy got tighter, but the demand for especially children's programming on television grew and grew, and children's advertising too we shouldn't forget about, advertising and programming. There was a pretty massive demand for 2D character animation in television production. Now they didn't have anywhere near the money that the movie studios had. The Warner Brothers shorts were made as part of a big studio production. They didn't have a huge budget but they were supported by the entire studio that they worked for. In television production, the studios were smaller, the producers were smaller, the budgets were tighter, the schedules were tighter, and they had to make their work more quickly and more economically.

Now, I want to say right off the bat, and we're going to talk about this more later but I'm going to say it right now, limited animation doesn't mean bad animation. Now, it can be bad, and there certainly is bad limited animation out there, there's plenty of it, but limited animation doesn't have to mean bad animation. It was merely a style that was, yes, economical, absolutely economical, but it was a style in its own right that had its own charms, and its own potentiality for entertainment value, entertainment that was drawn directly from the limited technique that was being used ostensibly to save money and time. Typical of artists and I think animators in particular, the animators weren't satisfied just to do less drawings. They were like, "Well, how can we not only make less drawings still look really good, but how can we actually make less drawings work for us and actually add to the entertainment and the humor?"

That was a really important part of this shift that was necessary again for television production, but it brought a new thinking to bear that I think has brought us to our more DIY modern age where technology allows us to do all of this much more on our own. This was about being able to do what Warner Brothers did with a third of the people and a third of the money, or what Disney did with a quarter of the money and a fraction of the people. What are we talking about when we talk about limited? Let's once again just define the term a little bit.

First off, we're talking about lower rates of drawings per second, and they would fluctuate quite a bit. Part of the reason why I can't estimate that really well is because of the other important feature of limited animation, was the use of layering. You didn't have a full drawing of the full figure on one piece of paper. You might have the body on one layer and arm on another layer, the head on another layer entirely and then the mouth and eyes on other layers of their own. You might have the whole character broken up into layers so that you could reuse more drawings more often and thus make less drawings. Drawing per second rates essentially start to break down because you can't really count it exactly well if you have a character just standing there flipping a coin. You have the body on one layer, the arm flipping the coin is on another and it's doing a cycle made up of 10 drawings, and you can run the thing for three seconds. Now, that kind of animation, again counting how many drawings per second, essentially becomes irrelevant.

They used this technique profusely and you can see it still to this day in modern examples of limited animation: the use of layering, the use of also cycles, lots of cycles, repeated movements, repeated animation. When I was growing up the classic really pretty bad limited animation was Scooby-Doo of the Scooby-Doo cartoons. You can google those and probably see some clips. They basically just re-ran the same animation week after week and simply put, different dialogue and different backgrounds behind the characters. It was pathetic. Even the backgrounds weren't all that different episode to episode, but there was classic shots of the Scooby characters walking that were used, and running, walking and running. Those walk and run cycles were used again and again and again and again to the point of absurdity. Even as kids we knew it was BS and that they were just doing it for cheap. That reusing of animation, the heavy use of cycles, the use of layering, was a really important influence on the style of motion. There were some, Scooby-Doo is a bad example, but there were so many great examples.

The original Flintstones cartoons in my opinion were beautifully done limited animation. The characters still feel completely alive is really, really nicely done. Now obviously the movement is less fluid, you're not going to get that really fluid motion. There's less overlap, follow through, and finessing. There's little moments of it but they tend to be a little isolated crisp little moments of overlap and follow through, or secondary action. I think even more significantly there's almost no or very, very limited dimensional movement, very little foreshortening. Rarely do characters turn more than just a quick jump from one three quarter to another, or from a front view to a three quarter. Classic limited animation of the time, The Flintstones is a great example. The characters were almost always designed at a three quarter pose, and that three quarter pose allowed them to address the camera, to look forward, to address another character without having to turn at all. That was planned that way. They didn't want to have to animate the characters actually turning in space. Instead they would just lean the head and blink the eyes and look the eyes one direction or the other.

There was a lot of that economizing in that work that was really important. That brings us right to that idea of the design of the characters, The Flintstones being a great example, the classic Flintstones. With very little possibility for dimensional movement because of the enormous time and expense it takes to draw all those complicated frames with the foreshortening and the changing shifting forms in space, very, very difficult animation to do quite frankly. Because that wasn't really an option, they tended to design characters, although there was also ... There was other influences on the character design I should say, but the move towards more limited animation definitely was a ... One of the factors in moving the drawing style to a style that was more flat, more graphic, much more graphic, the characters were designed to be flat. They were designed to be read in these flat, very stylized three quarter poses, unlike a modern Disney character. By modern I mean pretty much anything after Bambi, but even before Bambi the Disney characters always had dimension.

They always felt like they were rounded and they had form and volume and you could poke them and squish them, whereas the move towards more limited animation focused more on characters that were flatter, that were not trying to look really fully dimensional. They were stylized, sometimes dramatically stylized, and that was significant because it worked in conjunction with the more limited animation in a really appropriate way, which is something we'll get to here as we move along.

Another thing about limited animation was that it tends to be more about dialogue, which is another reason it was very appropriate for television production, because television does tend to be a little more dialogue-driven in general, but it certainly worked for that. It was more about characters talking rather than characters acting and doing things, because again the limitations of the craft it was much easier to have a character stand. You have again one drawing of the body and then you have a series of drawings of different mouth shapes, and you can just simply swap in the mouth shapes to make the character talk. It was very economical to have a character stand and talk. A lot of that limited animation drifted towards being much more dialogue-driven and much more about the vocal performances. I would argue maybe a little bit more about the design of the characters and the design of the environment rather than the movement of the characters and their movement through the environment. I think that's another significant difference that we can draw between "full" "limited animation".

Of course all of these things mean that limited animation was faster, cheaper, and it was more economical. You could make more of it more quickly. It also opened some really exciting creative possibilities in my opinion, and again, I think it's important to not think about limited being bad. Today of course, things are much more complicated. The technology has given us so many more options and there's so many more ways to approach animation that some of these kinds of ideas are definitely out of date now. I do think that there is still a way we can look at more modern work and still see a little bit of a range between this more full and more limited. Again admitting that this is an inadequate way of capturing all of the styles available, but again just as a place to start thinking about it and give us a jumping-off point.

These days technology lets us create a lot more blends and hybrids of styles. A big factor is that now because we're letting computers help us so much, frame rate is not as much of an issue now. Now there is still completely hand-drawn animation being done but there's so much assistance from software like Toon Boom and Photoshop that it's not nearly as painstaking as it was, although it's still pretty painstaking, but there's a lot of help. Frame rates in particular when you're dealing with rigged puppets and 2D or 3D, frame rate really doesn't matter at all because you're letting the computer do so much work on the inbetweening. Nowadays, a lower frame rate is considered a stylistic choice, "We want it to look like film," or, "We want it to look like old-fashioned stop motion or old-fashioned animation." It's now a stylistic choice rather than just simply the result of the process.

An example of this would be Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs that I worked on, the first Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs end credits. That end credits sequence was designed to be influenced in part by an old early 80s animated film called Twice Upon A Time, which is a very strange film. I can't tell you it's a very good film, but I can tell you it has a very unique animation style that blended, sort of cutout stop motion and collage with cel animation. It was very unique and it had a low frame rate feel. The characters popped and clunked around a little bit not in a fluid way. Phil and Chris, the directors of Cloudy, really loved the look of Twice Upon A Time and they liked the style of motion. We actually went in and added hold key frames into our animation on the characters to give it this herky-jerky style, even though the final piece was being done at 24 frames a second. It's again now seen as more of a stylistic choice rather than an economic necessity.

Despite that we can still see a clear difference today if we maybe take ... I think maybe we can take out the idea of how many drawings per second or whatever, I think those ideas are out the window now. I think we can still clearly see a difference between animation that is clearly more fluid, more finessed, has more overlap, follow through, more constant continuous motion, versus animation that uses more hold poses, more crisp quick action followed by holds, less fluid overlap and follow through, more "limited". We can still see that today and we can also see thanks to software like Toon Boom, Flash, and After Effects, we see that same layering idea that came out of limited hand-drawn animation. Now it's combined with a rigged puppetry more like stop motion or 3D animation. We're now combining the idea of I've got the torso on one layer and the arm on another layer.

We're blending that with the idea of actually having a poseable puppet, but it's definitely very connected to that same notion of saving time by only having to animate one arm rather than completely redraw or reanimate the entire figure frame after frame after frame. That concept is still there. I think we can still talk about this admittedly crude scale from full to limited. I think we can still see that. Now again, the real story would be a complex overlapping Venn diagram of different styles but again, this gives us some kind of a framework to start from.

Now, I said early on and I want to readdress this in a little more detail. When we're saying full animation got all this finessing and it's expensive and it takes all this time, and limited is cheaper and it's all about "cheating" and using "tricks" and so forth, it's easy to fall into the idea that full animation is good, and limited animation is bad. I think even as a kid I fell into that a little bit myself without realizing that the story is really much more complex and subtle than that. Full animation does not mean good animation, and limited animation does not necessarily or have to mean bad animation. It's a style. It's a different approach, it's a different technique, but it doesn't necessarily have to be bad. Now let's break this down a little bit.

The first thing I want to get right out of the way is frame rate. A lot of times when people talk about what if you got to do a man on the street type interview and you just pull some random person on the street and say, "Well, what makes animation good?" The word smooth will probably be one of the first words to come out of most people's mouths. "Well it should be smooth. It's got to be smooth. It needs to be smooth." Well, I would say that's actually a really narrow way to look at animation, because frame rate doesn't have anything to do with good animation. There is fantastic animation done at low frame rates and there is horrible animation done at high frame rates. The frame rate doesn't make the animation good, the animation makes the animation good. The examples I would give for low frame rate animation that are really amazing, first one would be Bill Plympton.

Now if you don't know Bill Plympton, he's 100% worth googling. He's a master animator. He was very, very famous in the late 80s and the early 90s, particularly for the work he did for MTV. He did a bunch of crazy really fun station IDs and interstitials for MTV that were really remarkable for their uniqueness and their amazing sense of humor, and for his incredible drawing and animation style. One of the things that bill does is that he does highly-rendered full color pencil drawings all hand-drawn, and they're all very, very rendered. He balances that high rendering out, which would make high frame rate animation nearly impossible, with using incredibly low frame rates, but it is absolutely 100% fantastic animation. It creates the illusion of life and if it is doing that, then it is good animation. That's my feeling about it. Bill's animation, he uses the principles, his characters come alive. It's rich, it's full, it's funny, and again it's not the frame rate that makes it that, so low frame rate is not a problem.

The other great example would be the better anime. There's good anime and bad anime just like there's good and bad of everything, but the higher quality anime makes fantastic use of low frame rates, beautiful use of low frame rates. In both cases, in both Bill's case and in the case of the anime, they all use the low frame rate actively in their style. They plan for that style, they animate for that style, and it's extremely effective, extremely effective. I would also argue on the flip side that full animation doesn't necessarily mean good. There is crappy full animation. If the animators are inexperienced or the production is short on money or schedule, and an attempt at full animation is made without the skill or without the money or without the budget, bad results can occur. I'll bring up a couple of examples, these may be a little bit blasphemous for some animators, but this is just my opinion.

I've always felt that as wonderful and fun a film as it is, a lot of the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is really poor. I would point in particular to the massively overly overlapped and follow throughed ears on Roger Rabbit himself. If you look at the movement of Roger Rabbit's ears, they move too much. They are distracting in my opinion and it's way too much overlap and follow through. Its overlap and follow through run amok. I would also say that some of the scenes of Jessica Rabbit are also pretty poorly animated. The proportions are really out of whack, her proportions change almost with every step. Some of the inbetweening looks pretty crude to my eye. I don't think that you can necessarily say ... Again, if you love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I do apologize. I think it's a great movie and it was a monumental achievement, and it did a lot for animation. I loved the film too, but I would quibble with the quality of some of the animation. I think some of it could have been better.

Talking about limited animation being well done, we've already talked about one example I think that's a great example, which is The Simpsons. Now again, you could maybe say The Simpsons is a little more full than standard limited, but they still use a tremendous amount of limited animation techniques. I would argue once again that it's well done because those characters live and breathe for us. If the characters live and breathe for us, then the animation is working. It's doing its job. Like we talked about with limited being more dialogue-driven, The Simpsons is definitely more dialogue driven than it is movement-driven. I think the limited animation is really appropriate in that context. Another example I could give, really anything from Saturday morning cartoons, because it's almost all limited to some degree now, but a great example would be SpongeBob. SpongeBob is really well done limited character animation. A lot of holds, a lot of cycles, a lot of dialogue-driven scenes with characters standing and talking, striking broad poses, and then moving quickly to another pose. The Simpsons is a great example of this.

Now another example of limited animation is what we're doing in this class, which is the 2D puppet approach. You also see this in Saturday morning fare like Teen Titans for example. Teen Titans uses a blend of drawn and puppet rigging, my guess is it's probably done in Tune Boom, although it might be done in Flash. That's a great example of limited in a cutout style, either a blend of sequential drawing and cutout or a completely straight cutout. We see this more and more as well and the flash style animation. The reboot of The Powerpuff Girls is another great example of that kind of cutout style, utilizing the similar techniques to the techniques we're using here. We have the same limitations in that there's not a lot of turning or rotating or dimensional movement. It tends to be more two dimensional motion and it tends to be more flat graphic characters. Limited is its own style and I think it's really important to get it out of your head that when people say limited animation they don't mean bad animation, they just mean well done animation that is economical and crisp.

I think what I would like to shift the conversation towards is not thinking so much about animation being good or bad, but thinking more about what animation is appropriate. ... Now, just like with full animation, limited animation can be bad too and there are certainly lots of examples of bad limited animation. Once again the big overarching idea here is that limited is really a style and it's a style that can be done well. Limited animation doesn't have to mean bad. It can mean very well done but limited. Full doesn't necessarily always mean good. It can sometimes be a complete failure or full animation can sometimes be inappropriate for the project. That brings us to my final point of all this rambling, which is that what we really want to start doing is thinking more about what style of animation is appropriate in getting away from good and bad, and focusing more on, "Hey, there's a lot of different styles of movement. What then is appropriate for my particular character in my particular project?" Let's look at that and break that down a little bit.

I think one of the really important factors is this idea of dimensional character design and how that affects movement. We've touched on this a little bit, I just want to dive in to it a little bit more deeply. We talked about how this is one of the ... One of the things about full animation, it's very common for full animation to have both very dimensional motion as well as very dimensional character design. That may be one of the things that sets it apart. More graphic flat characters, like for example The Powerpuff Girls, would feel weird if they were given the kind of motion that say a Disney character was given. It wouldn't feel appropriate because they were not meant to be dimensional. They weren't meant to turn in space fluidly. They were meant to be seen as graphic stylized designs. Instead they snap from one side to another rather than slowly rotate and turn, and there isn't a lot of foreshortening.

You don't tend to see for example The Powerpuff Girls from the ... You don't tend to look down at them to see the tops of their heads very often. You're almost always going to be seeing them in some standard three-quarter pose and the movement is going to reflect that. The movement is going to be more two dimensional and because it's a little less dimensional and a little more stylized, the characters are going to have a more stylized look and the movement is going to have a more stylized feeling, and it's going to feel better with those kinds of characters. For example you're going to snap to a pose very quickly and then maybe float on that pose a little bit, whereas in full animation you would fully animate into that pose, fully turn that guy around. He is literally going to pick up one foot, set it down and he's going to turn around, he's going to shift his weight, he's going to turn himself all the way around. A limited character is going to do a little anticipation, a little shwoop, quick swipe and boom, they're facing the other direction.

Snap and hold, snap and hold, it's a really common technique in a limited setting. That dimensional movement I think is something really important. You have to think about, is it appropriate? I would argue for example that squash and stretch are not meant to be dimensional. Dolly and Ollie are also not meant to be three dimensional. You're not really supposed to see Dolly's head from the side. I don't really know what Dolly's head would look like from the side but it probably wouldn't look as charming as she looks in her standard three-quarter pose. It would feel weird to try to animate her as a fully realized three dimensional figure because you would lose the charm of her design. The charm of her design to a certain degree lies in the two dimentiality, and therefore the motion needs to reflect that two dimentiality. If we have that more stylized movement matched with that stylized character, we now have appropriate animation. That's the kind of idea that I think we should be thinking about as we're looking at different styles of movement.

Now conversely, it would be pretty strange to take a Disney character, let's say a Lion King character, Simba, it would be pretty rough to take Simba and try to animate him as a cutout. If you tried to animate Simba as a cutout, it would feel too stiff and clunky for a character that is drawn that realistically. Because the character is drawn realistically, we want it to move realistically. Now, I think you could certainly find examples of exceptions to all of these "rules" I'm giving you, and I would stress that these aren't rules, it's just a ... It's definitely a guideline and a way to think about how you're matching your motion to your characters. A really great very specific example would be a character like the Adventure Time characters. All the characters on Adventure Time have curved elbows. They don't have actual crisp bends like they have bones in their arms. They have these curvy, rubber-hosey looking arms. They all look like they're made out of rubber.

Now, if you tried to pose those arms and move them realistically like you would move say Ariel from The Little Mermaid, it would look ridiculous because their arms look like hoses. Conversely, if you tried to trick Ariel's very realistically drawn arms that actually look as if they have bones and muscles in them, if you tried to bend those like rubber hoses, it would actually look creepy. It would probably look really yucky and disturbing. Again, how that character moves and is posed must be directly related to how it is designed and how it is drawn and rendered. Super, super important. Now the other area where I think we can talk about appropriateness is the use of limited style animation in humor. I think one of the things that I think you can see in a lot of examples, we talked about how those animators pioneering those limited techniques tried to take advantage of them. In many cases they were able to make things that were more entertaining out of the necessity of making them more economical.

One of the first examples I give technically belongs to the "full animation school", and that is the great Chuck Jones from Warner Brothers. He did pioneer what essentially was a limited technique, because even Warner Brothers started tightening up and pinching pennies as the years went by. Chuck developed a really marvelous and charming technique that you still see in use all the time today, that a lot of times is known as streak tweens. The best example of this is in the cartoon The Fabulous Dover Boys. The Fabulous Dover Boys, I think it was produced maybe in the early 50s or the late 40s, late 40s early 50s. The Fabulous Dover Boys made epic use of these streak tweens. Now, I will say it's not maybe the greatest Chuck Jones cartoon ever, but it is definitely the best example of the use of streak tweens because they were used so copiously throughout. You can see many, many, many examples. Well, what was this streak tween?

The idea was basically that you'd have a character in one pose, and then you'd have a very extreme other pose like maybe the eyes bugging out and the body jumping up into the air in a big giant take, or something crazy like that. It would be a big jump between two strong poses, and rather than smoothly inbetween from one pose to the other, instead the animators would draw these crazy, streaked, bent, smeared drawings. It looked like something out of Dali or something out of a nightmare. They would literally draw half of one character from one pose, the other half of the character from the other pose, and then just connect it all together in just a streak of lines and color.

The result was this fantastically snappy movement, and it had tremendous charm and was particularly funny when used for things like a take. It was providing additional humor. The animation style itself was adding to the humor of the moment. I think that's the significant thing about looking at limited animation is that you can make that style, that necessity for economics can be turned into an advantage if it's done in a smart way.

Another great example that really truly was limited were The Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons created by Jay Ward, the Jay Ward studio. I'm a big fan of The Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons partly because they did in my opinion such a terrific job of using limited animation and using limited animation to actually make the animation funnier. They were working on a budget, they were doing television production, they were working very fast. It was very dialogue-driven, it was very much humor-driven. They would do little funny things. One of my favorites was the pinwheel legs. The pinwheel legs were when they would have a character run across the screen, rather than do a proper run cycle, they would basically just draw a character with his arms outstretched forward and then they would just draw a pinwheel of legs, like six, four, six legs arranged in a little pinwheel, and they would just spin the pinwheel and the character would go bloop across the screen.

Now, is that "correct" classical animation with correct poses, weight, timing, and inbetweening? No, but is it funny? Hell yes, it's funny. It's hilarious. Again, it's like, "Hey, we need to save time, why not save time and also use that time saving to do something funny?" They weren't trying to fool anybody, they weren't trying to fool anybody into thinking the character was really running. As a kid you saw the pinwheel legs and you just laughed. It was just funny. I think this idea of taking that limited style in particular with humor, and using that limited style to service your humor, then you're getting the benefit of the time savings of doing that more limited animation, but you're also making your work funnier and improving the entertainment value without adding hours and hours on to your work life.

Now I think this brings up an interesting topic which is, South Park. I think we've all seen South Park. If you haven't seen it for some reason, you might want to google it quick and have a look. South Park arguably, easy to argue, actually has bad animation, is badly animated. The characters when they "walk", they don't even move their feet or legs, they literally just bounce back and forth as if they're a toy being held by a five-year-old going, "I'm walking now." It's incredibly crude. It's so crude. Now, this is in my opinion ... South Park I think is a perfect example of the concept of appropriate style. The drawing style of South Park is also incredibly crude. They began as little flash animations on the internet. The drawing style is obviously very, very crude and purposefully intentionally crude. The drawing style alone is where some of the humor comes from. It's funny that those characters look so awkward and crude partly because it makes them stand out in a world where most character design is very designed, very carefully designed.

There's something that was really refreshing about the South Park characters that had this raw funky non-professional quality. The other thing about South Park is the humor is incredibly crude. That's a hallmark of that show, that it's crude humor with crude drawings. Well guess what the appropriate animation style is then? Crude, a crude animation style fits and is appropriate within this environment. If you think for a minute about the kind of horrific gags and violence and other stuff that they've done on South Park, if you think for example just of a casual killing of Kenny on any given South Park episode, if you tried to do that in the animation style of something like The Simpsons, or worse yet something like Disney, so you were rendering the blood, the bones, and the flesh more realistically in a more fully animated way, it would probably be way too much for most audiences.

South Park is way too much for most audiences I guess already, but I think it would definitely harm the show if they had really fully-flashed out characters and more full animation that had too much realism. You almost with South Park want a little distance. The Simpsons are more dimensional as characters and their world visually and in terms of the motion and animation is more dimensional. We're allowed in closer because we're only going to get damaged so much by anything scary or dark that happens. Whereas in South Park, very scary, very dark things can happen and it comes across as funny because we're essentially looking at a cutout made by a 12-year-old. The other thing about it is is that South Park is meant to be funny. South Park is a funny show, and those horrible walks, those ridiculous non-walk cycles, they're funny. That's partly what makes that show funny.

Again the "bad animation", and again I'm going to ... Let's not even use that word. The appropriately crude, how about. Let's say the appropriately crude animation for South Park perfectly matches the crude humor and the crude drawing style, and indeed enhances the humor and supports the humor of the show. Now you might be saying, "Well if that's okay, well then why bother even learning how to do good animation?" Well, South Park is an unusual case. It's kind of an outlier I think you'd have to admit. South Park also has hidden quality. The artists who make that show, they know what they're doing. Sure, the characters are funny-looking and the animation is really goofy, but have you ever watched a South Park episode and not been able to follow what was happening? Have you ever seen a South Park episode where you couldn't clearly see the characters over the background or clearly understand the actions that they were making?

That show is very well-produced. The animation is crude but you can always understand it, you can always follow what's happening, and guess what? The characters are alive. The characters live and breathe and we believe in them. If we are achieving that as we've said, right from the beginning if the performance of your characters is convincing to your audience and you believe that Cartman is a real little dude, then the animators have done their job and that animation is entirely appropriate and correct for that project.

We've been talking about it all the way through but just to sum up, how do you decide? How do you decide what style is appropriate for your project? Well, obviously the big thing we're talking about here, and the first and foremost thing to my mind, is the art and design style. What does the character look like? Is the character meant to turn in space or is it meant to be seen flat? Is the character going to have bendy rubbery arms or is it going to have bones and have a sense of structure in an internal form? All of these things have to be thought about before you think about how you're going to make that character move. You also want to think about the storytelling style: what kind of a story are you trying to tell? What kind of a genre are you in? Is this horror? Is this humor? Is this for kids? Is this for adults? That storytelling style will also influence the animation style.

Then of course at the bottom of the list, but truthfully, probably, really at the top of the list, is budget and schedule. We can't get away from those things guys. They're always with us. They're the evil twins in the room that we don't want to look at but they're there all the time. In some cases, budget and schedule will win out over everything. However, you can always look at a tight budget and a tight schedule and you can say to yourself, "Hey, because we have a tight budget and a tight schedule, let's design some real simple characters. Let's design them up to be real stylized and flat. Then when we animate them, we can use some really nice crisp limited animation, and everyone will be happy. Characters will live and breathe and do what they need to do. We'll meet our budget, we'll get our work done by our deadline, and everyone's happy."

It's also an interesting way to think about how you're approaching movement. I think it's really fun to look at a new character design and think, "Well, what can we do with this? How can we make this character move in a truly unique way that reflects the style in which they're designed or the style in which they're rendered?" I think it's super cool when that blend is really strong. A really strong design style, mixed with a perfectly appropriate animation style that supports and works with that design style. Then you're looking at a project that's going to have a very, very solid feeling for the audience. It's going to bring them into this world, make them believe in that world, because it all feels connected.