Eglamore posted:

Yeah, Hannah Barberra cartoons sucked, but you have to remember that they were WORLDS better than what they were replacing. I'm talking 1960 "Synchro-vox" which was basically the old Conan O'Brien Arnold Schwarzenegger bit but an entire cartoon. It was basically animation, without animating anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTQI_XjoSSY

The Hannah Barberra cartoons were some of the first cartoons made for TV specifically, and the quality was super low because they had no budget. Specifically, every Hannah Barberra character had a necktie or a collar or a shirt, so they could use different frames for the head and body. It's garbage, but it's all animated at least. It's also why 1980's animation is so stilted, and why early anime is all robots...it's easier and faster to draw cheaply.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

I rewatched Death Note (or rather, the good early part where L is alive) recently and I had forgotten how like half the show is practically static shots. The camera flying around and the ott orchestral music create a sense of action that the animation doesn’t.

There’s so much internal monologuing that you often don’t even see characters’ lips moving.

Samuringa posted:

There's a dialogue scene in Evangelion where two characters are in an elevator, with their backs turned to us

Barry Foster posted:

Gaunab posted:

There was this weird action movie trend in the 90s where they'd have the main actor play twins. It added nothing to the story and seemed to be there so they could do wacky twin hijinks. Maybe Sister Sister influenced a lot of people. Sad that Steven Segal didn't do one because you know he doesn't have the range to play two people and he wouldn't want to play the wimpy twin.

The Bloop posted:

The preview image of that youtube link is an enormous scrotum photo so not only did I click on it but I'm now fired and also dead

Gaunab posted:

There was this weird action movie trend in the 90s where they'd have the main actor play twins. It added nothing to the story and seemed to be there so they could do wacky twin hijinks. Maybe Sister Sister influenced a lot of people. Sad that Steven Segal didn't do one because you know he doesn't have the range to play two people and he wouldn't want to play the wimpy twin.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

There were two versions of the concept that I’m sad never happened. One was a movie where Harrison Ford is an aging secret agent and evil spies wake up a frozen clone of him made when he was in his prime and they have to fight. The young Harrison Ford would have been voiced by Ford and made out of archival footage from Star Wars and American Graffiti. I guess the technology wasn’t good enough by Ford’s expiration date.

purple death ray posted:

See this is good. You want them to spend their money animating the giant robot eating an angel's heart, not two people talking.

The Bloop posted:

My recollection is that every other episode is a robo battle and the others are still pictures of angsty people and/or PenPen

The Bloop posted:

My recollection is that every other episode is a robo battle and the others are still pictures of angsty people and/or PenPen

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

It’s worth mentioning that synchro-vox was invented by an animator with a deaf child because he wanted cartoons that they could watch together (the kid could read the lips on the human mouth). It surely entered production because it was cheap, though.

Barry Foster posted:

I mean, pretty much anything. Taking 80s/90s anime - I haven't watched much of it beyond the most obvious examples, but they all tend to do similar things. What immediately comes to mind is stuff like Ghost in the Shell, Batle Angel Alita, and very notably Akira. I remember rewatching an episode of Cowboy Bebop on Netflix recently while high, and zoning out on the foreground action (as one does). I noticed that the background cities were floating platforms because the episode was set in the upper atmosphere of Venus. The colouring and drawing had an appropriately hazy feel to it too. Maybe this was blatantly obvious to more observant viewers, but it blew my mind.

Even something like Ulysses 31 had some mad poo poo going on in the background, IIRC. It stands out against Transformers and the like, which - in hindsight - was mostly just 'desert mesas on a blue sky'

Araenna posted:

Inuyasha had a lot of good backgrounds. They'd do a fair amount of long shots of backgrounds, especially near the beginning, to save money. The ones of the past were especially pretty. They also used them to help establish and reinforce the difference between the Edo era and modern Tokyo. Always felt like it was one of the shows that used cost-cutting like that to their advantage really well. Honestly, Inuyasha could be really pretty in general.

Bogus Adventure posted:

I got sucked into Inuyasha when Toonami started airing it at night, and 100% agree. It's very pretty when it wants to be, but good grief that show starts to drag. I never could finish it.

purple death ray posted:

It's a Rumiko Takahashi joint, they're legally obligated to have several hundred episodes each

Bogus Adventure posted:

I got sucked into Inuyasha when Toonami started airing it at night, and 100% agree. It's very pretty when it wants to be, but good grief that show starts to drag. I never could finish it.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

The other was a Rambo sequel in space where he has to fight an evil clone made to be a mind-controlled ultimate soldier. Sly plays both parts and wins in the end by talking him down and explaining that they made him into a killer too, but he learned to become his own person. I guess that one didn’t get made because it’s loving bonkers and has no reason to be in space.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

That's because it literally was a D&D campaign adaptation, iirc.

Barry Foster posted:

I had no idea that that synchro-vox thing had ever been used for anything other than intentional shonkiness

BattleMaster posted:

It's the fate of any anime that has to drag things out while waiting for the manga artist to put out the next chapter. I really adored Inuyasha but I think I'd only rewatch it if it were edited for pacing now that it's finished.

ryonguy posted:

God I wish this had been filmed. gently caress it, what's Sly doing now anyways?

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

The other was a Rambo sequel in space where he has to fight an evil clone made to be a mind-controlled ultimate soldier. Sly plays both parts and wins in the end by talking him down and explaining that they made him into a killer too, but he learned to become his own person. I guess that one didn’t get made because it’s loving bonkers and has no reason to be in space.

Barry Foster posted:

Actually, I say 'anime or anime-inflected' but now that I think about it the golden age Tex Avery stuff had really cool and often surrealistic background art as well.

grittyreboot posted:

Speaking of cheap animation, do you guys remember when Marvel and DC tried to push motion comics? Basically they would take their published comics and add voice actors with a minimum amount of editing. During action scenes they would have characters just slide around in the panels.

I could only find fan made versions on YouTube, but this is essentially what the big publishers were trying to sell to people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S6_Tu5XYcs

ToxicSlurpee posted:

One of the worst things that happened to animation was when people decided that cartoons were for kids. The original stuff from the golden age of animation was intended for general audiences and like was said was theatrical. It was also a much bigger deal when it started; this is where you get people like Tex Avery that just kind of had huge budgets and the freedom to do basically whatever they wanted. Avery himself did a lot of pioneering stuff as he was like "it's just drawings so you can do absolutely anything in a cartoon." Obviously there were people trying to figure out how to do it cheaper as animation is expensive. The 1960's was when things really went to poo poo partly because of lower budgets but partly because cartoons were increasingly targeted toward children. One of the reasons for that was because the attitude was that children are stupid and will watch basically anything so long as characters say funny things and there are bright colors. This is where the Saturday morning cartoon thing came along; you had a race to the bottom to produce cartoons as cheaply as possible. This is why there are a trillion Hannah-Barbara cartoons that all have basically the same style. It was meant to be as simple as possible with some pretty specific innovations to make cartoons quickly and cheaply.

Then that all coalesced into the 1980's cartoons we all know that were just toy commercials. The return on investment on a lovely cartoon that existed solely to push plastic on kids was massive. Masters of the Universe was like a billion dollar franchise in the 80's. The animators were told to trace whenever possible and actively avoid drawing anything new and holy crap does it show. Of course if you're like 5 you probably won't notice and the cartoons will be amusing. I think this is where a lot of the nostalgia comes from; the shows are fun to watch if you have a single digit in your age and the toys are fun to play with so of course people are going to look back on it fondly. Scooby Doo in particular is one of the most popular shows like ever but the quality of animation is terrible.

CharlestheHammer posted:

Evangelion is famous in that the last half of the show ran out of money so they had to do what they could with the very little cash they had on hand. It’s a good show but no one praises it for the animation as they just didn’t have the budget for it.

John Murdoch posted:

I can see why it annoyed people but the last episode being the characters having an introspective psychological breakdown while the world basically comes to an end just off-screen was kinda rad.

CharlestheHammer posted:

Evangelion is famous in that the last half of the show ran out of money so they had to do what they could with the very little cash they had on hand. It’s a good show but no one praises it for the animation as they just didn’t have the budget for it.

Scaramouche posted:

The first cartoon I can remember thinking "hey that's pretty cheap and lazy" is the original spider Man cartoon when they used the exact same backgrounds and certain animations for dementia 5 lifted frame for frame from rocket Robin hood (or the reverse, my memory is hazy).