What exactly is it that makes Japanese animation look so much better then western animation?

what exactly is it that makes Japanese animation look so much better then western animation?

There are subtle things, I've noticed in western animation alot of the times background characters are fully animated/moving while in most Japanese animations background characters tend to be simple silhouettes or at the most usally non moving stills

It also seems like Japenese animation tends to freeze frames for quite a bit longer then western style but that dosn't equate to overall quality. I understand that most western animations now a days are done in flash or shitty 3d renders but that dosn't explain how even in the 90s when hand drawn animation was still around Japanese animation looked so much better.

Is it an example of Muh Asian efficacy or are they using techniques that im not noticing?

Mostly just a combination of
a) Intense workload
and
b) Almost fifty years of trade tradition and experience buildup

Not with this weeb argument again.

The girls are cuter.

Some of us can't spend all day posting on this board. I've been here since 2015 and i'm still called a newfag.

Western animation is way more focused on having "full" 24 frames per second, and that usually (ie. outside Disney productions) means sacrificing detail. Everything being aimed at kids didn't help it either, and as expected, they evemtiaööy realized it and now everything is cheap 3DPD or shitty flash stuff.

Japanese animation worked on low budgets since the beginning so they developed a way to convey movement with the minimum practical amount of frames, and over time they have become so good at it that it looks good on average and ridiculous when executed with the same kind of budget as huge western projects (eg. Akira).

wavemotioncannon.com/2016/01/08/why-over-sixty-years-of-animation-history-still-remains-obscure/

Lurk 2 more years before posting again.

I'm a wage slave, i lurk 2 hours per day

>2015
That's definitely newfag tier.

And you still started posting before lurking 2 years, but what can you expect from somebody that types like a retard.

Japan have decades worth of animation templates they can learn from and re-use it.
Just compare it with Castlevania netflix people praise the animation, but to me it's still stiff, jittery and awkward animations.
Disney was still superior though, shame they gave up 2D animation.

>why is western animation so terrible?

Why so rude?

>I've been here since 2015 and i'm still called a newfag.
Because you are.

They draw tits, asses and pantsus, nuff said.

Oldfags and originalfags are cancer too.

>I've been here since 2015

Fuck off back to wherever shithole you came from then, because you are indeed, new. 2015 was barely a few years ago

you have to say that.

LOL NEWFAG

This. Remember, they were the ones who came up with all those Reddit-tier memes.

crazy to think people think you need to earn your place to talk on an anonymous image board

This shit has always been dumb. It takes maybe a week of casual lurking at most to figure out enough of the culture to post without embarrassing yourself.

They're only considered bad memes now because normalfags use them.
The meme stops being cool and funny when that happens. It isn't bad before then.

Completely untrue. I've been here since 2014 and I discover new things or memes about Sup Forums culture every month or two.

Yeah but it's all stuff that you don't need to know at all. It's not like you're floundering around correcting people on saying "you're waifu" instead of your like a clueless newfag. At least I hope you aren't

>Reddit-tier memes
They only became Reddit-tier because Reddit took them and they started spreading to normalfags. The same shit is still happening.

Pepe started here too and now every normalfag and their mother knows about it.

I think the biggest factor is the depth and breadth of Japanese content which receive objectively good animation.

While we have plenty of niche cartoons in the West, monetization is a bitch (unlike in Japan), so the vast (or moreso than Japan) numerical majority of Western animated works these days are:
1. A passion project which will stop being produced once the passion is gone
2. Made by one or a handful of people so,
3. Are short and subpar in nature

You might say that there are tons of examples of similarly subpar content in Japan, and there is, but this is not even close to the content that could pass on TV. Westerners, however, are accustomed to accepting only a notch up in quality for the lowest common denominator on television, and are floored if there is actual detailed, flowing, high-frame non-3DCG animation.

I think the allowance of lower standard stems from the lack of a none-network animation market to compete with the standards of networks, while the Japanese had this in the form of OVAs (think pre-80s Japanese animation to post 80s, after the introduction of OVAs). In this regard, we are only a level above the Chinese animation industry (not to be confused with the 3D industry), in that Western and Chinese animator entrepreneurs have to market their works online, killing their profit through ad-based revenue instead of direct purchases of content, while having to contend with mass piracy when they do the latter. The Japanese OVA. creators, along with the small micro-studios that emerged from OVAs, had a route to go through in order to receive a more secure profit, even if they had to pander like Youtube and Patreon animators do today.

TL;DR The creators, credentials, and creativity are there, the compensation is not.

OP, what you're describing is textbook 'limited animation'. It is indeed a time-saving technique used to great effect in Japan, but it's not the reason their cartoons look so much better.

The reason their cartoons look better is that they fucking know how to draw. In Japan, manga is a respected art form that people of all ages enjoy. One in four books sold is a comic book, and they read a shitload of books. They learn and train traditional draftsmanship in schools and on the Internet. They can draw good.
Talented artists exist in the West, of course. What doesn't exist are entire animation studios full of dozens of them. Japan has that.

I honestly think we need to give some props to the incredible backgrounds that are more common in anime than not. You just know that there is some poor souls in the studios that have slaved away for years of their lives to draw really pretty and detailed backdrops for the characters to move within. I'm watching Flying Witch for the first time right now and I'm really sucked into the country town itself, it really feels like I'm there with the characters.

>muh reddit

The characters are designed to be sexually attractive, instead of just being caricatures.

They spend a lot longer on the drawings. The average animator in Japan completes 15 drawings per day, equating to about $45 per day ($3 per drawing).
Western shows tend to have less complicated character designs that allow for more movement but things look less fancy.

A lot of people seem to forget that animators are actual regular people that need to build up their skills over time. It only makes sense that nippon with its larger tv animation industry would have a larger and more robust talent pool from the past decades

This is less related to what OP is talking about, but while we're comparing the two, I believe the scope of animation is too limited in the west. Very rarely do you see a show try to take itself seriously, like Eva, for the sake of example.

The zeitgeist for modern western animation is basically this: "It's a comedy with the primary goal of making you chuckle, but every 5th-20th episode they sprinkle in a bit of story development / lore to string along the viewer, so that more seasons get ordered by the production companies."

They aren't interested in a 26 episode self contained story, or an experimental leap into something that may fail. They're interested in a bloated mass of fermenting fandom. Self-propelling culture engines centered around monolithic single-shows; rather than the equivalent anime culture engine, which is more comfortable being a shotgun blast of anything and everything (which in my opinion makes it more interesting).

Anime is guilty of this in its own ways, but I think it has more wiggle room at the very least. We can still see shows like Kino no Tabi coming out at the same time as Umaru season 2 (without speaking to the quality of either). That kind of disparity is never seen in the west. Instead it's something like [quirky kids comedy with the capacity to entertain adults] vs [edgy adult comedy that kids still watch anyway].

In the east, Animation is for anything you want to try. In the west, Animation is only supposed to make you laugh. And none of this touches on western cinematic animation, in which everyone only attempts to redo what Pixar already wrote the book on.

>tripshit meme

What actually comes to mind with a show that started out that way and then did actually turn into a story driven series was Reboot. The first season or so was episode, and more about gags and the such. Suddenly, it becomes story driven in the later seasons, and has a completely different tone.

It's pretty interesting how that company actually wanted to do overarching stories, but I guess it took them a while to get there.

And then it got hit by the unfortunate Western unending cliffhanger, never to return.

is this when you first discovered Sup Forums, first started lurking, or posting regularly?

Just generally giving a fuck.
Western animators are content with using Flash and adopting Flash-compatible artstyles as an "artistic choice".
It wasn't always like this, but it's the directly result of Western animation being relegated to kids' show and, besides a few notable exceptions, very little else.

The site is divided into exactly three groups: originalfags (2003-2004), oldfags (pre-2007) and newfags (2007 onwards). All the user categories after "newfag" are just meaningless variations constructed by idiots who came around way too late in the game.

Probably because in ancient Japan pervert men got dickblocked early on and needed fap material to vent stress and started drawing manga since before WW1.

It's also worth noting that the two most recent critically acclaimed non-comedic adult-cartoons (Samurai Jack season 5 and Castlevania) were heavily inspired by anime and eastern media in general. The former of which is a revival of a kids cartoon aimed at the viewers that grew up watching the original run, and the latter was in development hell for a decade.

This is too well-articulated to not be a pasta.

They know how to draw cute girls.

And of course, the golden child of the whole western-animation discussion, Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is over a decade old at this point.

>ie. outside Disney productions
Disney sacrificed shading without any remorse all the time.

It's not, I'm just a faggot.

Yeah that's true. It's also great that the nips seems to have a cloud fetish.

>Avatar
>adult cartoon

Doesn't count. Likewise none of the DCAU or other mature childrens shows like Spectacular Spiderman or Transformers Prime count either since they're still aimed at kids.

Western animation is such an incredibly small pond that it isn't that hard to analyze thoughtfully. You're talking about less than ten new series a year.

I wasn't saying it was necessarily an adult cartoon, it's just often brought up when talking about how western cartoons rarely take themselves seriously.

Flash makes things a whole lot easier for moving backgrounds but it's harder to do more stylized movements or hyper detailed backgrounds that anime is known for.

This. In the West the dominant philosophy is that everyone is perfect in their own way, no matter how fat or deformed you are. If you think that a slim, pale girl with thick hair is beautiful then people assume that you've just been brainwashed by the fashion industry or Barbie toys. That's why you get Western cartoons like Steven Universe, and a ton of shows with animal characters so that the animators don't need to worry about catering to every possible race and body shape there is.

Meanwhile, nips just make anime that looks beautiful to them and the fans and don't give two fucks if some 400-pound Shaniqua doesn't feel "included".

>This is too well-articulated to not be a pasta.
That's 15-30 minutes of writing and revising if they are skilled at identifying and conveying their idea.

Too bad I'm not and wrote instead.

The pinnacle of animation -quality- capped out in the 1960s American cartoons. Everything after that era is a purely stylistic preference - and considering you're on the Japanese animation board, you probably prefer Japanese animation.

>t. Too young to have seen any old Warner Bros/Disney cartoons
You're deluded if you think western design is about 'inclusion'. Ugly characters exist in western animation because ugly people exist.

Ugly characters only ever exist in anime to look villainous so the attractive selfinsert MC and his eroge-fantasy harem of hot bitches can defy him

>eroge-fantasy harem of hot bitches
This is at least half the reason I watch anime

I find it stupid though that even with a budget, they still have the same stupid rushed deadlines to meet, resulting in inevitable QUALITY and a lack of consistency.

And barely any studio knows how to incorporate CGI with their hand drawn animation without it looking like shit.

I was talking about current cartoons, not old classics. Once in a while they still make decent-looking films like Frozen (even though even that is CGI crap).

I find it interesting that there are barely any fat characters in anime that matter to the plot, even the otaku trash ones.

The newfag test is believing there is one

Yeah, obviously. That's why it's so prevalent

That leads back to what I said before - a lot of anime is about fantasy and self-insert. No one wants to be, or be around, obese people. The fat characters that do exist are typically either joke characters, or decadent villains, keeping in line with the typical 'Hot MC, chill best bud and gaggle of whores' setup most anime have.

Thing is the old classics used to be for adults. They would play them in movie theatres as a little extra entertainment before the start of the movie proper. Modern Calarts cartoons are:
1. For kids
2. Made on the cheap

Kids like goofy animal characters. Its as simple as that

Is it wrong for the main character to have at the very least a fat friend that has a character and matters to the plot?

That's because, unlike what tumblrtards would want you to believe, no one gives a shit about fat people or diverse body types. Nips just draw things that look good to them which is how artists and creators should do things.

There are barely any fat characters in Japan to be fair

nips over generations of zero budget productions groomed key animators until they could pack frames with good shit in zero seconds for pennies

you're not going to find a single western animator who will approach that level of quality, speed, or cost

This is also frustrating because a lot of main characters look like bland shit. They don't stand out on their own unless they are drawn a specific distinct way.

Explains why there a lot of skinny characters and styles where people are like nine feet tall on average.

Recently? Sure. Overall? Kek, absolutely not. Western animation at its peak completely BTFO's japanese animation.

Well said, user. I've been thinking about this comparison a lot lately and you put it into words.

I think there's of course exceptions to this trend (and some of those exceptions have resulted in some of my favourite western cartoons) but this unfortunate situation is just how the western industry seems to work right now.

What particularly bothers me is how the thing that seems to define the "adult comedy" separate from the "kids' comedy" is that the former is usually just edgy to the point of being grotesque while the latter is not. Like western creators (or maybe it's just western businessmen) feel like you can't appeal to an adult audience without including adult subject matter. Shows that appeal to all ages fall almost exclusively into the category of kids' shows that also appeal to adults, rather than adults' shows that are also kid-friendly. On the other hand these kinds of shows are very common in anime, an obvious recent example being Kemono Friends, which is aimed squarely at adults despite its content.

More vibrant comics culture which allows them to draw from a larger pool of artists and evolve interesting styles and talents faster. American comics are published too slow and by too few companies. Barriers to entry are lower and demand for comics is higher. You can publish sparsely drawn 4koma weekly comics on black and white newsprint instead of the hyper-realistic full coloured superhero comics with detailed backgrounds that are standard here in america.

This more vibrant comics culture naturally translates into a more vibrant animation culture.

I'm currently pleased and happy with the modern western cartoon shows. More interested in them than the current crop of seasonal anime shows, most of which are just adaptations of manga series that I already read and thus don't need to really follow.

Anime uses paintings as a background. While cartoons use a consistent artstyle on both the characters and the bg.

It's a similar effect to dof in games. Just look at skyrim screenshots. The ones with it look more aesthetic than the ones with out.

One thing western cartoon fans don't realize is the usual usage of a "street fighter stage". The characters appear on screen and move from left to right. They can even move upstairs or outdoors and most of the time it is animated in this left or right motion. I'd say the most noticeable difference between the japanese and the west is that the japanese attempt to use many camera angles, where western cartoons go for really basic frames. This applies to shit for kids as well as shows aimed for older teens/adults. I've mentioned this to some of my faggot-ass Regular Show and whatever other bullshit friends, and it's like they had never even thought of it before.

That's more or less the norm in Eastern countries. I've heard a lot of people call the Japanese (among other East Asians) "hive-minded". I am not entirely sure about the extent of it, but being very different is not really encouraged.
Even if fat people aren't mocked outright (more often than not, they are), they still feel some kind of "pressure" to lose their weight and become "normal".
Slightly overweight people aren't really going to be mocked all that much, but if your BMI is above 29, you will be (Yes, I know BMI isn't a good measure of whether you're fat or not, but it works as an example).

Pretty much.

>Korea has that.
And it's pretty much irrelevant because burger cartoons are done there too. The real difference is in style. Murrica went 3D CGI in a big way, and their 2d animation suffered for it.

Protip: newfag isn't based on how long you've been here. We're all newfags here. We must be, or we wouldn't care enough to post this shit.

>Western animation at its peak completely BTFO's japanese animation.
Only in this particular style of animation, that was used by disney, where everything is constantly changes its parts proportions, dunno how it's called. They have absolutely nothing to show on realistic animation.

>tfw been here since 2005

its because youre comparing modern anime of all genres meant to appeal to all ages to modern cartoons that are mostly shitty comedies that are meant to appeal to children and people who act like children

Because you've literally never watched one. Weebs aren't watching shows, they're watching subtitles with the show in their periphery. If you actually watched the show, you'd be able to pick out all the times they save money far more than the couple of times they spend it, and the magic would be broken.

Weebs completely miss every talking head scene.

>quality background art
>artstyle is optimized for cute
>fan service
>artists aren't trying to reinvent the wheel and use what works
>realism over abstraction

Korean studios handle the animation, but the directors, designers, and storyboard artists are still by and large American. That makes a huge difference; good animation can only do so much for subpar designs.

30 FPS vs 60 FPS

Nippon realized that in a non-interactive medium they don't need to care about muh frames and went for a greater amount of detail per keyframe instead, which has far better results overall. Western animators went for MOAR FRAMES which make their animations butter smooth but often look really poor when on a budget.

Look at this shit. Why is everyone a single flat color? And this is MOVIE quality, a level of budget where we expect to be able to count all the grains of sand on a beach when it is an animated movie made by Japan.

This. Someone post those cartoon season charts. They're in the style of an anime season chart but they're for a whole year and used to bait Sup Forums

Japan's obesity rate is 1% or something.

I thought it's 2-3 series per year

>been here since 2005

Please end me.

I see your point, but to be entirely fair you're also less likely to see QUALITY frames in Western animation, while even high budget anime has one or two. I don't mean awkward in-between movement frames (those have to be 'ugly' to make movement look smooth), I mean certain key frames that just look weird or out of proportion.

Yeah, sure take an animated film from over 20 years ago for your argument.
There was only one anime movie in 1995 that was better looking than Pocohontas, and that movie was fucking Ghost in the Shell.

Western animation: It's meant to be silly
Japanese animation: It's meant to be sexy

fat people are repulsive. if you have full control over the universe you create it makes sense to leave them out

How many new animated series/movies does the west get a year? How many are aimed at a discerning audience? How many include subject matter that actually requires good animation?

Compare that to the hundreds of works that come out in Japan in a year, almost all of which are aimed at an adult audience who is actively interested in animation as a medium, and many of which are action heavy rather than just simple comedy. Animation just isn't relevant in the west, by sheer numbers alone they will have less well animated series, and they have very little reason to focus on it.

>Been here since 2009
>Still called a newfag
Guess I must be genuinely retarded

you will remain a newfag as long as you worry about being a newfag

Last good number I know of is 3.5%, which is about a tenth of the American rate.

I don't know, I don't really care about western animation. However, the expressions in western media in general are not as satisfying to watch. Plus, a lot of it tends to be over animated, and move just for the sake of keeping the attention span of ADHD people.

>film
Consider even their OVA series like 0083 and M. Plus. Could anyone honestly say that those look worse? I used a film as a reference because that's usually the where the highest standard of animation will be presented, but the whole of the industry should be considered so that there aren't any gaps.

>sheer quantity of it
>emotion exaggeration, makes for good comedy