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Why does modern "serious" western animation tend to have such bland art styles? I'm not talking about stuff that's the equivalent of mediocre seasonal anime, even some of the most praised examples and "hidden gems" tend to play it safe purely visually speaking, pic related
>Adult Sci-Fi show inspired by the likes of Serial Experiment Lain, Ergo Proxy and Texhnolyze
>Has the blandest pseudo faux-anime/serious cartoon art style imaginable similar to Vox Machina or Invincible instead of looking anything like it's influences
Showing all 67 replies.
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you should have put the quotation marks around the word western. western animation hasn't existed since don bluth.
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>>7956561
It looks pretty similar to Western Saturday morning cartoons that were airing around the 90s (e.g. Batman The Animated Series). In that sense, it’s keeping with tradition.
Western animation has just never been that great outside of a select few films tbqh.
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no one tell op where the animation studios for western adult animation shows come from
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>>7956578
Obviously this is about art styles and not whether the hand that drew the art was literally white or yellow.
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>>7956561
I can tell from just the screenshot that show was written by, animated by and directed by women. So that's your answer. Next.
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>>7956581
This made me look up the show and it was in fact not touched by women in notable roles at all. However, most of the team aren't even anglo sax, they're all a mix of chinks and Koreans and Nepali
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>>7956583
The lead character designer was a Christie Tseng a woman, that's why all the characters have feminine character design and shape language and the entire story revolves around a girl and her mom.
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>>7956561
I'm guessing it's a problem similar to the calarts/beanmouth style. It's an easy to animate style, and a couple of popular shows probably had the style, so audience's MUST love it!
It's not even a particularly appealing art style.

>>7956577
>It looks pretty similar to Western Saturday morning cartoons that were airing around the 90s (e.g. Batman The Animated Series).
Oh please. No character looks as shit and half assed in any of Timm's work as both character's in OP's image. No doubt Timm's style influenced the current look, but that's not his fault, nor does that devalue his work.
>Western animation has just never been that great outside of a select few films tbqh.
At least wipe the japanese cum off your hands when typing this braindead tasteless shit.
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>>7956561

I like it. You're too young to remember Martin Mystery and Totally Spies but that used to be what we made fun of back in the day. I would have made fun of your OP pic when I was, like, maybe 21 but now I actually don't mind this style at all.
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>>7956580
its cheaper thats why. compare the rugrats pilot to the show for example
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6IPYrUdVces
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Avatar and Kora did unspeakable damage to western faux anime.
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>>7956592
>Avatar and Kora
No doubt they influenced this style, but there's something about the current iteration that feels so sterile and unappealing by comparison to what Avatar was doing.
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>>7956592
avatar was animated better than pantheon. i dont think the style is the issue, just the effort/money spent. the show was cancelled and dumped on streaming with no advertisement afaik.
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>>7956592
it started before then like another anon mentioned Totally Spies and also Xmen Evolution. Totally Spies is French but I assume Xmen E was Korean animated which seems to be a big reason we got this shit faux-anime style.

People used to trash the 90s cartoon style for being try-hard/edgy but it's way better than what we have now.
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>>7956590
>Martin Mystery and Totally Spies
Unironically more fun to look at character designs and coloring than Pantheon and other streaming services animated slop desu
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>>7956608
it's an acquired taste
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>>7956561
Drawn by woman
>>7956608
Drawn by man

How is it so easy to tell? It's as easy to see as when someone from the lgbt community draws. I don't think people realize just how much the content and culture they grow up around and consume affect their visual language. It's almost like an accent, the more ingrained within the culture or lack of exposure to other cultures, the thicker your accent.
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>>7956561
Based on what I've seen, these Western-led shows tend not to place much emphasis on designs with scalable levels of detail. This might partly be due to a reliance on reusing assets. Even "hand drawn" shows aren't really hand drawn in the classical sense. Everything is broken up into body parts, then swapped and combined as needed. When animation is done that way, you want everything to have the same LOD. Or you don't think about it at all.
This ties in with cinematography. For example, you don't see extreme close up shots where the character's eyelashes are drawn in a more defined way.
These designs lack visual sophistication, because these shows don't require it. Or maybe the shows are basic because the designers are incapable of anything more sophisticated. I'm not sure which one it is, but these things probably reinforce each other in a death spiral.
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>>7956608
>Drawn by woman
>Drawn by man
Neither looks like anime you stupid fuck.
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>>7956561
i dont know this show but it could be that it's rigged and not hand drawn, that effects the style too not just the animation. rigged stiff is always more stiff and soulless in style imo
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>>7956608
I think the person most responsible for the character style of Totally Spies, plus a bunch of other Marathon faux-anime, was this french-asian woman. I only know this because she died last year.
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>>7956640
there's no way the show is rigged animation that would be stupid
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>>7956594
Can’t draw
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>>7956616
This
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>>7956643
>le drawn by a man was infact drawn by a woman
Holy kek these genetically defected semenoids are embarrassing
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>>7956561
>>7956608
when does something look western and when does something look like "faux anime" if the art director still wants more realistic proportions in animation?
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Americanized anime future doesn't look so bad.
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>>7956608
Even when western fauxnime tries to do fun colours they still fail.
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>>7956677
draws like a man looks like a man, i bet she's chill af too, next
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>>7956586
>At least wipe the japanese cum off your hands when typing this braindead tasteless shit
He's right tho
Only the French have done non-movie animation that looks better than random dogshit seasonal anime
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>>7956605
I liked the 90s, liquid television was cool. Unfortunately the majority of western animating knowledge and talent for 2D has been dropped in favor of 3D and puppet rigging
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>>7956586
I mean, if you think these character drawings look amazing, I think you've just got rose colored nostalgia glasses on. It's fine if you're just personally partial to the style, but I don't think you can argue that it looks objectively much better than what you see in Netflix original shows today.
The backgrounds in BTAS in particular were really good though, I'll give it credit there.
>At least wipe the japanese cum off your hands
There's a reason individual manga series sell more than the entire Western comics industry combined lel. It's because anime is simply superior in terms of both art and storytelling.

>>7956594
>>7956596
Gonna be honest, even as a kid when Avatar was first airing I thought it looked cheap compared to anime. Guess I've just always been a weeb.
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>>7956605
>Xmen Evolution
X-Men Evolution was one the last major western cartoons to have actual japanese studios working on it with Mook and Madhouse working on it (which might also explain why the latter went on to make those marvel anime series around the late 200s)
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>>7956788
>It's fine if you're just personally partial to the style, but I don't think you can argue that it looks objectively much better than what you see in Netflix original shows today.
I don't know how to respond to someone who just flatly has a wrong opinion. If I have rose tinted glasses, you have glasses with shit smeared on the lenses.
Also, using a random pixelated in-between frame to prove your point feels disingenuous. You can make the most beautiful looking animation look like shit by just grabbing a bad still.

>There's a reason individual manga series sell more than the entire Western comics industry combined lel. It's because anime is simply superior in terms of both art and storytelling.
Sales don't mean much of anything. Are the most mainstream musical acts the best Musicians? Are blockbusters the best movies?
Superman was, up until recently, selling more than the entire Manga industry probably everywhere but in japan, did that mean the whole of the manga industry was shit by comparison until manga started outselling it? Of course not, I don't even like Capeshit much outside of Timm's animated adaptations.

You obviously have a bias, and think that your own taste is some indisputable fact.
All the great and lauded western animated shows, and you think all of them are shit, and only anime is good?... C'mon...
I get the feeling that you neither watching western animated shows, nor read western comics, if you think all of them are shit and there's nothing of value. Anime and manga is doing better financially and artistically that Western Animation and Comics, but that doesn't mean there isn't great stuff coming out of the west all the time for both of those mediums. Comics is more than just capeshit, etc.

>But you think BTAS is factually goo-
Yes. I don't give a fuck that it's contradictory to believe that one of the most critically acclaimed animated shows of all time, beloved just as much for its art as anything else, is a factually good show.
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>>7956697
Defined nose, defined lips(for the women), flat/no shadows. This is the western way Realism in animation.
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>>7956831
I'd add they're always thin lined, and usually quite angular/straight with their lines as well.
Though I'll disagree with it being an attempt at realism. Realistic proportions? Sure. Actually realistic? No more than Anime is, and we wouldn't say anime is realistic, now would we?
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>>7956561
They try to hard to copy anime but can't help themselves to insert their ugly fetish into the style, thus, failing pathetically. You can preach feminist cancer around all you want, by the truth is that beauty sells, and anime is literally the amalgamation and exaggeration of what men find appealing. Yes, the youthfulness too, as much as cucks try to deny it.
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stg weebs have a negative iq on this board
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>>7956831
There are also the less realistic styles associated with western animation like those from Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and later guys like Tom Rueger and John K. And a whole slew of other stuff that I don't feel like mentioning.

>>7956876
It's an anime focused website, there are naturally going to be more weebs here. Western animation has also been in a decline since the 2000s, we've lost a lot of our talent in 2D animation.
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>>7956561
It's mostly just anime, except the faces are modeled on westerners/non-japs.

Cinematography in western animation is absolute dogshit, though. Who the fuck frames a scene like this.
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>>7956643
Neat
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>>7956915
The only difference between this and anime is anime spams pitcher shots and the highly detailed backgrounds.
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>>7956915
Hm, I think I prefer the threadpic, the faces here look sort of off. I agree with you on the poses, it's bland. Lighting and colors are also bland. There are a decent amount of modern western artists with striking styles, so the only reason why adult animation here would look like that is to cut costs (the most likely answer).
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>>7956821
>Superman was, up until recently, selling more than the entire Manga industry probably everywhere but in japan,
ENTER
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>>7956821
In terms of pure animation quality, detail, smoothness, etc, I've simply never seen a non-movie western animation that matches to random shitty romcoms I've seen, nevermind actual high-quality anime. You can argue that old cartoons had great writing and storytelling, but they definitely never ever looked as good as anime regularly does.
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>>7956561
the life has been sucked out of everything
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pov0MKuyJfg&ra=m
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>>7956586
>>7956821
/co/pe & seethe
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I always wondered why the western industry doesn't do more comic adaptations like the Japanese industry does. Yeah we have invincible but it's pretty disappointing, especially the last few seasons. But I've heard we're getting a Transformers Skybound cartoon. I really like DWJ, I hope they adapt in his style.
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Dumbest thread on the board rn
This is neither artwork nor critique
>>>/co/

>>7956566
Log off Don, You didn't matter that much.
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>>7957035
He's not wrong. Western animation has died long ago
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>>7957066
He's not an artist either, nor are you. So take it back to /co/ntaiment
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>>7956831
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>>7956561
shows need to be animated by skillless slaves for rock bottom prices. Interesting angles or pacing is money and producers and studios HATE paying money. All cartoons are intended to sell merch or degrade society with degeneracy. They are never meant to be good.
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>>7956561
It's because American animation values the literal animation over art direction and beauty in still images, something that the Japanese prioritize on (mainly due to minmaxxing budgets and tradition).

Typically, Japanese anime tends not to feature consistent animation the way American cartoons do unless it's for big "sakuga" moments. If you've ever watched anime that tell a story about the process of making anime, they're all very frank about how budget-conscientious anime is.

example:
>characters talking? we hear it off-screen, they have their mouths covered, or we're exposed to an unorthodox shot (so we don't have to animate it)

Think about how much anime is reliant on characters suddenly moving from one keyframe to another. A lot of this was started by the first Astro Boy anime which was made on a small budget using creative workarounds and shortcuts to adapt the manga into a TV series.

We kinda had something going with the precedent set by Filmation, but a lot of people rejected it for looking cheap.

When I think of an American cartoon, I think of something like Edd, Ed, n' Eddy. Just look at how much animation is in a single episode. The characters just MOVE constantly. You could never see something with that much motion and energy in your typical anime unless it was a high-budget passion project.
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>>7957137
You can compare an American character to a Japanese character:

>American: simple and basic shapes, animated at 12-24 frames, frame-by-frame animation, flat lighting or no lighting
>Japanese: highly expressive, detailed, usually animated on three frames, limited animation, still frames, dynamic lighting
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>>7957137
I don't think you can really use Edd, Ed, n' Eddy as an example of western animation. Anything that comes out now is riffing on Avatar almost exclusively. It's very much just anime that's not good at being anime.

Apart from the Family Guy-likes and the universally ugly Adult Swim specials.
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>>7957143
The problem with post-ATLA/TLOK stuff is that it wants to LOOK like anime while not following the design/animation principles. Less frames, strong emphasis on key frames, detailed designs, dynamic lighting, dynamic shot compositions to cover up the lack of frames, etc.

Instead we get designs with an awkward amount of detailing that are expected to be animated more than your typical anime design, so things end up wonky and the lack of interesting lighting and shot compositions make things worse.

That's not even getting into the lack of cultural resonancy: most American cartoons are rooted in American culture and Christianity, so everyone walks and talks American and echoes American things. Japanese anime is rooted in Buddhism and Japanese culture.

So the recent American stuff is like some kind of skinwalker going "look, I look like anime" but they don't really and underneath the hood is still a cartoon.
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>>7956984
Sure, Europe is big into manga, but when did that happen, and when did it overtake superman? 80's? 90's? 00's? 10's?
Regardless, you're being pedantic, since it was besides the point, which was about sales =/= quality.

>>7956987
>In terms of pure animation quality, detail, smoothness, etc, I've simply never seen a non-movie western animation that matches to random shitty romcoms I've seen, nevermind actual high-quality anime.
>Smoothness
Then you just haven't watched much. Anime for a long time was parodied for it's choppiness and lack of production quality, and indeed the animation was noticeably choppier until around... mid-way through the 10's? Look at how enter the spiderverse and others are copying 'anime style animation' by making their animation choppier. Even now, I suspect that anime's animation is still choppier, but I just can't notice it anymore because I've gotten used to it.
Regardless, the original claim was:
>Western animation has just never been that great outside of a select few films tbqh.
Which ignores the looney tunes, Flecher cartoons, All of the original Disney shorts too, etc. etc.
I just think what was said is wrong.

I'm not saying western cartoons are better than Anime, or that Western cartoons output is so high quality that you can't compare it unfavourably to anime, I just think it's an obvious bias to claim that western cartoons were 'never good' bar a few films.
Like I said, it also just shows a complete lack of willingness to even try to engage with western cartoons just a little, since there's still great stuff coming out, even if it's not at the number of great stuff coming from anime.
To say there's no good western animation (bar a few film) just shows bias.

>>7957023
Oh is that a meme? Great retort my dude. You really pwned me.
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>>7957157
>Anime for a long time was parodied for it's choppiness and lack of production quality, and indeed the animation was noticeably choppier until around... mid-way through the 10's?
Not the anon you're replying to, but this argument is a pet peeve of mine.
It's disingenuous to compare animation frame rates of tv and OVAs to theatrical shorts and movies. The difference in budget, in the sense of both money and length of production, can be between tens to hundreds of times. On a drawing per dollar basis, even if we equalized pay, anime has a far better return.
Second, this might trigger some people, but actual western TV animation has *never* been good. Not for a lack of talent, but because feature length-style full animation has never been economically feasible on TV. US studios adopted limited animation very quickly. Limited animation has a specific meaning here - it's animating bodies in pieces, like a puppet. Everything is a reusable asset. So it's actually impossible to have a fair apples to apples comparison on frame rates, because western productions do not use full drawings. Anime still did.
The Japanese and American approaches to low frame rate, low budget animation is actually worth discussing. But basically the American approach was limited animation that served as the basis of modern rigged animation. The Japanese instead poured their energy into changing the way inbetweens are done. If I could make a video game analogy, western animation is like a game that runs at 60fps, but has fewer polygons and all effects turned off. Anime runs at 20, but on a high polygon count and has motion blur turned on.
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>>7957122
>Tumblr nose
This was true ten years ago. Artists don't draw like that anymore, the hip new thing right now is the Y2K style like picrel
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>>7957026
They probably won't. The industry is convinced that animation frames can never look as good as their comic counterparts. There are some standouts in DC animation, but otherwise it's just gonna be flatter with no black shading or surfacing. You could get DWJ's aesthetic in animated form if they were willing to stunt most of the animation. Something on par with RudeJackArt would work great aside from action scenes
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>>7956788
only culture war faggots care about sales.
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>>7959612
Sales aren’t everything, but there are at least SOME evidence regarding what resonates with people.
You can look at sales/popularity without just totally deferring to the mob and claiming that whatever is most popular is best.
Not sure why it’s so hard for people to look at this issue with nuance.
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>>7957157
Comics were never big in Europe.
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>>7956561
This is like the SEA version of King of the Hill's art style kek. SOVL
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>>7956643
She was a real one. Rest in peace.
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>>7959777
r u serious? Euro comics is a bigger industry than US comics. Europe also got into manga way before the anglosphere did

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