I hate nearly all of modern animation. Yes, that includes everything from the shores of my homeland (USA) to every country in between and including that J-shaped island that birthed nearly every trope found on TV Tropes. I realize that a blanket statement like ‘most animation fucking sucks’ is exactly what I tell people bored enough to come here to not do, but I’m sticking by it.

While finishing out Adventure Time which, yes, I know, that’s really stupid of me to do since the show hasn’t been worth the digital pixels it’s made of for seasons now, I was reminded of this sentiment. The final episode opens on a brand new sequence featuring two new characters and plenty of new fly-by locales. Let me stop here and say that this is, by far, the best way to end the series. Instead of focusing on the main cast that the audience has come to love, all shows should end with by time-skipping ahead to where nothing is recognizable, only to force the new blood to inevitably find the mystical flashback device that sends us back to the shit we care about. Seriously, I love when writers effectively waste my time with stuff that serves better to round out a show and instead force it on me in the opening sequence, leaving me questioning where the dots even begin to fucking connect and driving me to weigh my interest in whether or not I want to continue to watch or go do something else.

The new introduction song is also awful, stilted, and sounds like the team went with the first take they got. I get that the show’s entire gimmick, at least in regards to humor, was ‘oh, wow, this is weird and janky and three degrees off center, how funny’, but that only works if it’s baked into the design. Perhaps the song was, but to me, it gives off the air of ‘whatever, this shit’s over, so I’m going back to bed after this’.

Having now been effectively completely removed from the experience, all the tiny irritations that one needs to be able to put aside to attempt to enjoy the show came crawling back, the first being the reminder of how Adventure Time is classified as animation, and yet almost nobody moves around. I don’t get how, in the era of inexpensive drawing tablets and literal years of content available that you can peruse to teach yourself how to become an artist and an animator, it is accepted that much animation across the globe is characters standing (or sitting) around one locale, and the only movement comes from mouth flaps or the inevitable hard jump cut to a new background. The word ‘animation’ comes from the term ‘animate’, which means ‘to move’. If it’s not moving, it’s not animation, or rather, it shouldn’t be. I guess our standards have gotten so low that as long as it’s made by someone who calls himself/herself an artist, then it’s animation by default. Sweet.

The next irritant was how rushed and nonsensical the dialogue felt. Why are Bubblegum and Gumbald about to have a war? Is it really over the stupid lake that was only used once in the entire show? Are you telling me two candy cities can’t co-exist, and that people over eight centuries old are too immature to hash something out? Why is Bubblegum so intolerant of this when we’ve had to put up with fucking Lemongrab for multiple seasons, and who has been demonstrably worse, and yet now has little to no issue with his creator? Are these people that we’ve spent nearly three hundred episodes with really this fucking retarded that they’d throw peace out after dealing with The Lich and the results of elemental imbalance over a stupid goddamn lake? What is this story?

I threw in the towel when I remembered that not only was I going to have to deal with all of the above, but on top of that, I wasn’t going to see a hard edge for a whole sixty minutes. To expound, I don’t know when it happened, but much of animated works these days are filled with curves. I don’t mean curves like tits and ass, I mean curves like nobody knows how to create a fucking vertex anymore. Maybe it’s the mathematician in me, or maybe it’s some lingering nostalgia that I can’t let go for some reason, but the soft and rounded everything of modern animation bothers me on a fundamental level. It’s also an ironic peeve of mine considering that, as an engineer and lover of all things math and science, I should be celebrating this move to smoothness since curves are fluid motion, and fluid motion is, generally speaking, the most optimum kind of motion, therefore meaning that soft, curved art is the most fluidly made art, and thus is the most efficient way of doing something; and yet, the more round ends I see, the more pissed off I get.

This was driven home all the more when I saw the new teaser poster for Thundercats Roar.

Ugh.

Nothing about this poster appeals to me. Liono’s sword looks so small and ineffective that I’d have a hard time believing it would be useful in any scenario outside of cutting butter. Snarf looks fucking awful; nothing implies that he’s supposed to be the C-3P0 of the group and be a total worrywart that occasionally dispenses useful information and has moments of non-sniveling bravery, giving him deeper character outside of ‘comic relief’. This was Snarf:

Nothing has to be said about what Snarf is because we glean it just from how he’s drawn. In Roar, he looks like a fucking salamander, and I guarantee that the new versions of the Thundercats will dispense a stupid amount of exposition (or a narrator will, because that’s all the rage these days) of what Snarf’s new character is. Yeah, that’s great writing; tell me everything like I’m back in Psych 101 and being lectured at while sitting in the back row of the auditorium. Don’t show me any of it and expect I engage with the medium I’m participating in via ocular information transmission to divine everything. Don’t think, just consume. Unreal.

Also, why does everyone have hair that looks like it was made by the one sad balloon clown you find at every Six Flags? Why is Cheetara so unbelievably ugly? Speaking of the sex appeal, where in the fuck is it in general? The men look like they’re dads in their 50s, and the aforementioned Cheetara is flat as a board? Are you fucking kidding me? Mumm-ra doesn’t cut any sort of imposing figure; he looks as flaccid as a villain as the fucking Ice King was.

This is how you do a villain.

If Roar Mumm-ra saw classic Mumm-ra, the former would shit his pants back to Plun-darr. A punch clock villain doesn’t have to look like a punch clock worker. Lastly, enough with the fucking CalArts bean-mouth and rounded canines. You fuckers borrowed that from cliché anime girls to try and make your characters cute, and you fucked it up. It only works in Japan because the Japanese culture has an obsession with youth, and having a snaggletooth is a clear indicator that someone is young, as proper adults would’ve done something about that shit since it looks stupidly unprofessional and ugly.

Of course, some fool from nowhere important had to comment on this abomination of draftsmanship, which meant I couldn’t just grump my way out of this short tunnel of hatred like normal and, instead, got more riled up over essentially nothing. I guess the benefit of this is that instead of an ineffectual ending to this piece where I try to be funny, it instead goes on for the length of a dissertation and I get too pissed to keep going, because the longer I think about how stupid this all is, the more likely I am to have an aneurysm; par for the course, I guess.

Starting with a bang, I see.

Yes, Jesse, the animation does matter. First, stills aren’t animation, they’re stills. They happen to be part of modern animation efforts because modern animators are under-paid, over-worked, and thus have no time to put towards being passionate about what they’re working on. That leads to shitty practices like using stills and shaking cameras as a cheap means to imitate movement rather than doing the painstaking process of proper redraws and repositions by frame to create actual animation. Second, of course animation is important to an animation. It’s the name of the product.

Ha.

You can feel the mad before the article even starts.

You, uh, ever think there’s a reason why?

Cartoon Network, as well as other cartoon-focused television networks, annoys people like me that grew up on 80s, 90s and early 2000s cartoons because the network hasn’t done anything remarkable since then. Nobody likes to talk about the stint from the mid-2000s where they kept putting up live-action garbage, removed the Toonami block, and only spent Adult Swim time airing Bleach/Naruto filler, old Family Guy episodes, and Inuyasha re-runs. The only good thing was when it came time for the inevitable FLCL, Big-O and Cowboy Bebop re-runs, which were great because of the source material. Then, when they finally pulled their heads from their asses, the best they could come up with was Regular Show, Adventure Time, Uncle Grandpa, Gumball, and everything we have now. None of these would be a problem on their own, because they all certainly have their own charms and can work despite their little niggles, but together? All they do is exacerbate how similar they look, how similar they’re structured, how all they do is focused on ‘LOL SO RANDOM’ style humor that tries to one-up itself via being more awkward to the point that it crosses over into objectively unfunny territory. I’m tired of trying to tune in and just seeing noodle-limbed monstrosities yelling and running around, like having what is correctly defined as a tantrum is good television. No, that’s shit that babies and toddlers do because they can’t express themselves via other means. Come up with something better. Until Cartoon Network decides to make and sponsor animations that are defined by their style and substance and not who makes them behind-the-scenes, myself and others will be rightfully peeved.

Holy shit, a reasonable take. Hot damn.

Even though I’m going to rip this guy apart, I completely agree with what Jesse says here. Granted, he doesn’t explain it as clearly as it probably can be, so I’ll do the clean-up for him. Any medium, including shows aimed for young children who are easily susceptible to anything and everything, should focus on being high quality and engaging. It should not be a shameless and obvious means to generate loads of cash by tapping into/overtly pushing its audience to mindless consumption. The content doesn’t have to dispense messages or morals every minute, and it really doesn’t even have to be intelligent or ‘intellectual’, whatever that means. It just shouldn’t be fucking garbage because we’re better than that.

Purple-painted garbage is still garbage.

Roar isn’t the low point, because we’ve already been there for years; the low point was Steven Universe. As for this being the ‘darkest timeline’, it feels really stupid that I have to point out that the phrase is an obvious, tongue-in-cheek joke, but I guess I have to since Mr. Labs took the phrase seriously. Even so, I would argue that we are in one of the darker timelines, provided multi-verse theory is correct, because there is some timeline where the fuck-shit that will be this reboot was immediately dumped in the trash upon being pitched, and Victor Courtright learned from that and went on to make good media and not walking, talking ovals. Side note: having just watched the Roar behind-the-scenes video, I am beyond disappointed that a very obvious weeabo is the head of an animation studio, but that they picked one with a fucking half-ass man-bun-top-knot. Warner Brothers, the last thing you want is someone who clearly wants to be Japanese doing your animation, because you’re going to get someone who can’t fucking draw themselves out of a paper box that also can’t stop infusing their shit with Japanese culture, especially when it doesn’t make sense to. Seriously, the song that Victor believes has that same 80s energy that the original Thundercats theme had is awful; it’s like what would happen if you put an album by The Pillows through an autotuning-dubstepping machine. I hate everything about this show and it’s not even to air yet.

Uh, what?

Jesse, the reason why Hanna-Barbera cartoons featured minimal animation was because animating on cels was time-intensive and expensive. Limited animation was necessary to even get these shows on the air with a high-enough quality in a quick enough time. Shit, that’s why Scooby-Doo is a Monster-of-the-Week show. Such a decision allows the artists to flex their muscles with backgrounds and antagonist designs, along with various in-between frames and goofy reactions. Not only that, but these were cartoons from the 70s, when animation had just entered what could be called its ‘golden age’. It was new, so it’s naturally not going to be that good, especially considering that the leader of the time, Disney, was busy stomping people left and right via movies and not television shows. They had the money and man-power and, most importantly, the time to craft their work. You don’t that kind of time when you’re putting out a weekly product.

As for modern shows like Steven Universe, people don’t just take shots at them because Rebecca Sugar and her team are too afraid to draw anything other than smooth bean shapes that look like every other show out there, they also take shots at them because the material is garbage. Modern Western cartoons are rote, trite, and boring. They all focus on tweens that are have no motivations and live in weird, fantastical settings that don’t adhere to any set rules. Crazy shit happens all the time, and the audience is supposed to accept it because of the ‘Wouldn’t it be Cool’ principle, which is the principle where a writer can write whatever because it’s neato. Fuck proper story integration and explanations, let’s just have the Gems fighting each other because civil war is cool, and then let’s hint at reasons why this is four years later, only to never bring it up again! We’re so good at what we do! It’s okay to like bad things. It’s not okay to hand-wave away the flaws because you like something, which is what Jesse is doing here. Also, since I couldn’t find a way to organically stuff it in, Gravity Falls is not good. It’s only getting praised because the Disney Channel was so terrible for so many years that long-time fans are eating it up because it is one half-step above what they’ve been used to, so it looks like a fucking masterpiece by comparison. Just because you have stupid puzzles at the end of each episode that turn the watching experience into a fucking homework assignment doesn’t mean you’re ‘the best cartoon ever’. If anything, it solidifies the show’s mediocrity because it would’ve been forgotten without the extra post-show assignments. Dipper is also a tool and putting Mabel in six-thousand different sweaters is does not supplement a paint-by-the-numbers story.

These cartoons are doing American cartoons a disservice.

Playing with gender norms is not what Steven Universe does, and even if it did, these are not important lessons outside of ‘sometimes people are different, the end’. A giant 3D pyramid monster is barely an eldritch abomination, and the whole ‘shit from another world is invading’ has been done to fucking death; I don’t want to see it done poorly by people who can’t draw. I can’t comment on Star vs. the Forces of Evil because I’ve never seen it, and part of that is because it didn’t visually appeal to me. It didn’t help that when I was reading into it, most of the stuff the writer wanted to do was to make nearly every character heavily influenced by anime and make it a focal point in their lives, which just weirds me out as most of the people I know who make stuff like anime their entire life’s focus are really damaged and messed-up people. That isn’t to say these are bad folks, just that there’s a price that comes from being deeply involved with subject matter that is still very niche, and that these creators seem to gloss over this kind of stuff because it didn’t happen to them, so it must not happen at all. That, and the whole ‘high school super power princess’ is, like I’ve said a million times so far, done to death. You seeing it for the first time doesn’t make it brand new.

Those shows aren’t repetitive and hackneyed.

Disenchantment, while visually similar to Futurama and The Simpsons, focuses on completely different setting, story, and tells its jokes and sets its punchlines up based on those differences. Gravity Falls, Adventure Time, Stephen Universe, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil all focus on the main characters being five degrees off center, and the world being wacky, zany, and weird. There are plenty of times where the characters spaz out or do shit because why not? There is a lot of yelling in all of these shows for no discernible reason. More to the point of the art style, Groening’s art team draws the stuff similarly, but the characters are all given specific color palettes, outfits, mannerisms, and designs that individualize them. Dipper Pines is ‘kid who wears hat’. Stephen is ‘kid who is fat’. Finn is ‘kid who has sword’. Star vs. is ‘kid who has staff’. All these shows feature the main protagonists in dealing with oddities day in and day out. All the adults in these shows are really fucking dumb. All of the protagonists are all about the same age, and, as I’ve said already, they’re all kids. Wow, these show are so individual and just coincidentally focus on similar topics and themes with characters that share nearly identical styles despite being all made by different people. It sure is comparable to the work of a multi-decade veteran who wrote the objectively best animated Western comedy show that has never been topped and then went on to spearhead other shows where the only real through-line is his personal art style.

That’s why nobody is bitching about Disenchantment and why people aren’t giving the aforementioned CN/Disney lineup the same ‘pass’, as you defined it, Jesse. It’s because it makes sense for Disenchantment to look like Futurama, which looked like The Simpsons, whereas the same cannot be said for the CN/Disney lineup because it’s all made by different teams. They should be inherently different, feel inherently different, and look, generally speaking, inherently different, but they don’t. They feel like they were cranked off some assembly line, kind of like how nearly every A-1 Pictures show looks like every other A-1 Pictures show. It’s Same Face Syndrome, and it gives the works and its followers this cult-like sentiment, where anyone who doesn’t agree is this ‘outsider’ that must be purged.

Why?

Seriously though, why? It absolutely holds a ton of weight, whether you personally believe so or not, because the CalArts joke pokes fun at what I just went into detail about. It’s not hard to grasp or understand that artists will be influenced by other artists they like, and this whole wave of rounded-off drawings and character designs has been kicking around since the mid-2000s, because it’s the US’s direct response to finding out about Japanese anime chibi design and merging it with properly proportioned character designs that are seen in traditional anime. It’s also very easy to understand that if Cartoon Network  and Disney wanted to rebrand themselves after years of being decidedly mediocre, so they went with a totally new image, and the image they chose was Western animation that was heavily infused by Japanese chibi-style art. Neat.

Where you lose me is the push to make all these shows tell extremely similar stories, with similar-aged characters, in similar settings with similar themes and ideas, and then pretend that these are all somehow both ground-breaking innovations and individual products when they all scream ‘made in Flash with the brush tool and from a template from Character Design 101’. It’s even sadder because from the outset, each of the shows has the potential to forge its own path, and yet they all just converge, almost like everyone in these studios is friends with everyone else, and they just share ideas over lunch. It wouldn’t even bother me so much if this was the case and these different teams admitted it, but they’re all acting like they’re not only creating something original, but something that they consider high quality, if not some kind of magnum opus. Really?

Only to a point?

The problem with rebooting a show like Teen Titans, which is a plot-driven narrative, into the haphazard mess that is Teen Titans Go! is that it requires a hard sell that these characters that were once part of an on-rails story are also these new characters that are now one-liner machines. TTG! had a better chance of making that work than most shows because there were plenty of single episodes, side moments, and sub-plots that focused on humor. It also helped that the writers for the Teen Titans show wrote fleshed-out characters that weren’t just serious all the time like the old Superfriends cartoons of yesteryear. That way, the obvious flanderizations that TTG! leans into weren’t too far off from the originals. They were, however, still over-the-top flanderizations, which is why people were initially pissed because the hard sell leaned too hard. As the show has continued, the comedy focus has allowed it to go wild with different animation styles, villains, episode ideas, and give TTG! its own feel that’s truly separate from Teen Titans. Is it better or worse? I don’t fucking know, but it’s not the same, and that’s what matters; feel free to hate it, because I certainly think much of it is sub-par, LOL RANDOM humor, but I’m also nearly two decades older than its target audience.

Thundercats, on the other hand, was an 80s action romp that borrowed heavily from its era. It was written to feature great moving set pieces with He-Man-styled anthropomorphic cat people swingings swords, driving tanks, and kick some old mummy’s ass every week. Sure, it has zingers and a couple of downtime episodes, but it’s never has explicit moments where you’re supposed to guffaw for a good bit. Again, turning plot driven material into episodic comedy requires a hard sell, and that sell becomes even harder if the material you’re apeing from never had many jokes to begin with. It’d be like if someone made a comedy show of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yeah, you could do it, but why would you? The whole point of the series is the pathos and drama and how unforgiving the journey really is, thus necessitating the formation of bonds with others to be able to survive it. That doesn’t really bode well for punchlines. I’m sure there are some, but can you write enough to appease an audience that expects you to not only be somewhat faithful to the source material, but good enough of a comedian to be able to turn them onto your new take? At that point, why not just go make a knock-off show with new characters in a similar setting so you aren’t hamstrung, and that’s why a lot of people, I’m assuming, don’t like this move. This creative team could’ve made up some shit on their own, but they took a known and beloved franchise instead. Such a move puts a heavy burden on everyone, and if this thing doesn’t come off firing on all cylinders from the first second, then it’s a guaranteed flop and waste of time and money for everyone involved, and we know that even before this thing airs, it’s fighting an uphill battle since the lead director is using low-tier J-Pop as the opening theme, trying to sell it as ‘having the same energy as the original’. Come on.

Mate, are you high?

Teen Titans Go! isn’t even comparable to Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends because the latter is a plot-driven show. The whole conceit of the show is that Mac has to give up Bloo, but doesn’t want to, so he works a deal with Madame Foster, hence whey he shows up at the mansion nearly every day. The hijinks have to do with Bloo being a mischievous bastard that constantly stirs the pot, naturally putting him in the position to cause a lot of havoc; that was his character, so it makes sense that Bloo and Mac spend most of their time running around. Plus, and here’s the kicker, Mac is eight years old. All the characters from all the above mentioned shows are anywhere from thirteen to eighteen and older, meaning they’re all high school age. You shouldn’t be a tantruming weirdo that constantly gets conned into doing shit day in and day out and never seeming to learn from your lessons because you’re old enough to fucking retain that information and use it to make better decisions. These characters should know better, and yet Mac, at eight, displays a deeper knowledge of just about every subject known to man better than any of the recent crop of ‘top tier cartoons’. Seriously, if you compare Stephen to Mac, Stephen looks like an absolute doofus, almost to the point of being so stupid that he might be autistic.

And?

Jesse, I understand this must be hard to grasp because on nearly every point you’ve tried to make in this article, you’ve swung and missed badly, but if something looks like crap and sounds like crap, it’s crap. Kids and teens may not have the same amount of experience that simply comes from living like adults have, but it’s not like they’re dumb enough to not have tastes or preferences. Perhaps the lack of reference point will help sell the show, but no matter how you slice it, it looks, sounds, and feels generic, and in an era when you can find much better stuff online in a few seconds, I can’t say I feel confident that this will hold the attention of the target audience for very long, if at all.

Fair point.

Having watched the 2011 series, I can agree fully with the sentiment that it was a solid show that nobody watched. However, the reason nobody watched it was because the demographic was clearly for teenagers and just about nobody else. There was good fight scenes, solid animation in general, nice character moments, but plenty of ideas that fell flat, and situations that would only appeal to teenagers, who live in a constant state of doubt, paranoia, emotions, and angst. The original show had a much broader appeal because it was just ‘Cat people fight mummy with swords, sticks, tanks, and magic’. The target demographic was, without question, people in their late teens to early twenties, but it resonated with everyone because of the broadness, and then it resonated again when we got character building which was mostly done without a pointless love triangle, or a love betrayal arc. Plus, every character in the original had flaws, which is why they worked most often as a team and anytime someone went off on their own, they got rightly demolished. In the 2011 reboot, Lion-O is portrayed as the ultimate good dude, Cheetara is the hot-headed sex bomb, and everyone else kind of doesn’t matter.  I know this all sounds like I don’t like the show, because I do, I just think a lot of it fell flat because it tried to inject emotional stakes and drama for no real reason other than that shit is ‘deep’ and ‘dark’ and those things are what teens love. Not that it isn’t true, but like I said, kids and teens aren’t stupid and aren’t going to buy into ham-fisted nonsense for no reason.

Whew boy.

Violet Evergarden is as pretty as it is because it needs a reason to hand-wave away why the animation team constantly used the fucking field of vision gradient setting; good lord, was that shit annoying. As for the anime business in Japan versus the cartoon business in the US, the average work in Japan is far more detailed and polished than the average cartoon in the US. This is because Japanese students and workers are part of a system that incentivizes being masterful at your chosen craft and constant improvement so that you have something to be proud about. In the US, convenience is favored over everything else, meaning that if it’s really hard to get to, fuck it, it’s not worth achieving. This polar opposite has led to the current animation style we have now, which features the soft, round designs that I can’t stand because they’re a lot fucking easier to draw than using vertices, edges, and hard angles properly. The pastel and overly bright, washed out color schemas are a result of background animators falling by the wayside thanks to businesses like Adobe and Sony making it piss-easy to create wallpaper art, robbing background artists and animators of their job and leading to every schlub being able to put together backdrops, with the only issue being that they’re bland, so the colors are chosen to work well with the character color palettes. Those, in turn, are based around what works best for self-inserts, and since most modern artists feature ridiculous hairstyles and colors over here in the States (because how else are you going to be an individual with your own feelings if you don’t dye your hair like everyone else), since most of the projects are pet projects of the people who create them, and are too attached to them.

In short, yes, Japan’s art at its worst is objectively better than the US’s art, and it’s because Japan, at it’s worst, gives much more of a shit about the work they churn out than the US does. You don’t need a faux-expert like Sevakis to see this, you just need to actually watch enough of the medium you’re commenting on, but this requires you to not be a total moron.

So?

Digging into Gravity Falls, because Jesse mentions it a ton, shows me that each episode was released an average rate of one show per two weeks. This begs the question: did the staff not do any preliminary work and have packages of episodes to release, as is the case with animated media in general that gets syndicated on television, or did they fuck off until two weeks and cram it all in? Where is the evidence that points to shows only being able to be constructed on a weekly basis, because from what I’ve read, watched, and grasped about the industry, work is done well ahead of time, and then episode packages are released well after they’re ordered, and only rarely do edits get made in interstitial time between weekly airings. As far as I know, South Park is the only series that works on a weekly schedule, but they also only put out thirteen or so episodes a year, and they air them at the end of the year, so they have plenty of time to mull over ideas before they even start. Hell, they might have even changed that because that’s a nutty work schedule, though it is conducive for a show all about political commentary, and that requires immediately relevant information to work.

None of this excuses shoddy, low quality work, though, and that’s been my entire point, Jesse. Animation is age-old at this point, and while I do think these people need to get more pay because doing it properly is grueling, it’s well-established that the industry is tough, and that people who fuck off and do poor work will end up on their ass outside the front door, and rightfully so. I don’t get why Japanese animation studios, who have to deal with the same shit except if they suck, they’re guaranteed to never find work again because of how they run their society, aren’t getting this pass that Jesse is handing to American studios. If the work is too hard, these people should quit and find something else. Hell, start your own web animation on YouTube. That stuff is super popular and, if it’s good, you can just Patreon your way into a better life, and it’s a lot easier than dealing with the overhead that comes with typical syndication. Plus, you can work to your own schedule and don’t have to be rushed into anything. The only downside is that if you don’t keep a good regimen, you’ll suffer mightily, kind of like how I have a shitty regimen of posting and, as such, this place suffer because of my malaise and incompetence. The difference, though, is that I’m perfectly capable of accepting this and working to become better, and I don’t think the average US cartoonist is capable of the same thing.

Apples to oranges here, mate.

Again, why are you giving a pass to American animation, especially when you’ve said you don’t really know that much about how this shit works? The issue in question is the quality of the work, and yes, One Piece as an anime has muddy in-betweens. That isn’t the fault of Oda, it’s Toei Animation’s fault, and it’s an issue they’ve had in recent years because all of their old staff is gone, and their new staff isn’t as good, so they just need to get in the trenches and get good, as is the gaming parlance. The One Piece manga is stunning, and it’s because Oda is fucking good at what he does. He doesn’t bitch, he doesn’t whine, he doesn’t cut corners, he doesn’t try to find shortcuts that sacrifice quality for expedience, he just fucking does it. Not only that, but in-betweens are supposed to be rougher than key frames by design. Yeah, the in-betweens from the Pain fight in Naruto Shippuden and lots of the work on Dragon Ball Super were total garbage, but pause a show at any point and you’re probably going to catch some awful ‘tween framing.

Even taking this into account, framing is objectively handled better by Japanese animators, and it’s objectively more complicated art that has to be keyed and ‘tweened. This means there’s less of a reason for American animators to get a pass because they have so much less shit to deal with than the average Japanese animator. These fuckers should be shitting all over studios like A-1 or Xebec or White Fox, kind of like they were from the invention of animation until about the 80s, when Japanese animation got so good and tackled so many crazy subjects that the US couldn’t keep up, especially since most of the great Japanese works focused on highly adult themes, and the US was busy being afraid of fucking board games. Anyways, even if there is a ‘method to the madness’, there isn’t a reason to give bad animators an out, especially when they have to do less work than the average animator across the globe.

Lot to unpack here.

Who cares if it’s ‘harmful’? What does that mean anyways? That’s the same shit I heard growing up when I would session games like Treasure MathStorm! or Gizmos and Gadgets! for hours, and my parents would tell me I need to stop gaming because it’s harmful and going ruin my life. A better argument would’ve been ‘Log off for a bit or you’ll damage your eyes and become lazy and get fat’ because that shit is tangible and understandable and makes perfect sense. Stuff like ‘harmful’ doesn’t mean anything without qualifiers, and it’s not even harmful because it’s an inanimate object. It just sits there and does nothing. Something has to perform an action that causes harm or invites danger to be considered harmful.

As for the animators, how do you know they’re ‘quality’? Why would quality animators use the same style that’s been reproduced for the last decade and most people are getting sick of? Why are they taking an old license instead of inventing their own? Why do their storyboards look exactly like the animation itself? Why should I have blind faith in something that is ticking all the boxes for ‘trainwreck’? Why should I have blind faith in something that doesn’t even exist, that I can’t see or touch? That’s like buying into a cult or a religion. And why do I have to shut my trap just because it’s not aimed at me? Dragon Ball wasn’t aimed at me when I started watching it, so I guess my adoration and praise should’ve been tabled because I wasn’t ‘the right demographic’.

And to round out: no. I will not quit with the whole CalArts thing because the CalArts style is clearly pervasive at a level that is detrimental. Learn to draw lines and not curves. Put some hard edges. Introduce some real sakuga moments. Stop infusing every goddamn think with the chibi aesthetic. Come up with your own ideas, settings, and characters. Stop making references to other media that you don’t get, or because you watched it as a kid and the only thing you need to do to get fans is to make the reference. Quit telling me how diverse your characters and staff are; I don’t care. I want you to not make fuck-shit and, instead, make good shit so I can give you what little money and time I have.

Most of all, stop being so fucking butthurt when people don’t like what your peddling, don’t agree with you or when you inevitably get canceled. Life is full of failure, and it’s your job to wade through that sea until you find the island of success that you want to be on.