Why do modern cartoons always fall short of the heights of American animation?

Why do modern cartoons always fall short of the heights of American animation?

Serious question.

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>hurrr why do thing with lower budget look worse than thing with high budget?????

Why is there a lower budget though?
Why did all of the production get outsourced to Korea?
Why did all of the market get outsourced to China?
Why isn't anyone fucking challenging any of it?

This isn't about budget it's about aesthetics.

>Why is there a lower budget though?

Because animation is viewed as a medium meant primarily for children's entertainment. Unless an animated movie can be a goddamned money machine ["MOICHANDISING!" - Spaceballs, the mid-post quote], it ain't getting shit for funding.

I just watched this for the first time last weekend. Wowe every time Aurora moved it was like liquid

>why do movies have bigger budgets than television shows? i just dont understand

You fucking retard, do you think it just draws itself? Protip: animation costs money.

>Cartoons will never reach that level again

Why does it hurt so much?

youtube.com/watch?v=TXbHShUnwxY

Even Hanna-Barberashit looked about as nice as modern cartoons, and it probably took way more labor. Shouldn't less labor make for higher quality?

And that's just the worst of the worst, ignoring actually decent animation like Johnny Quest and other Saturday morning cartoons

The sleeping beauty live action cost hundreds to millions to make. They have the money for those cartoons.

>Hanna-Barberashit looked about as nice as modern cartoons

You do realize that Hanna-Barbera cartoons were low-rent garbage, right? They began the era of "cheap because it's for kids and kids don't care about quality" TV animation.

>Shouldn't less labor make for higher quality?

What are you smoking and whose pole can I smoke it from?

Less money does not equal higher quality. Ever notice how big budget live action movies look better than live action television shows? Here's the secret: the movie has a bigger budget.

They do, yes. The question, then, is this: Will that investment yield suitable returns?

Are you seriously telling me that spending a few hundered million dollars on 5 episodes (about the length of a movie) of a television show is a good business plan?

They do spend it on cartoons. The difference is that today they make 3d cartoons.

>You do realize that Hanna-Barbera cartoons were low-rent garbage, right?
That was literally my point and it still looks about as nice as Steven Universe and better than modern PPG.
>>Shouldn't less labor make for higher quality?
Less labor as in technology makes production easier and therefore should make formerly-difficult high quality more attainable.

Counterpoint: that animation looks lifelessly rotoscoped and awkward, with the owl floating in the air and the characters dancing through a static background with an uninteresting visual angle.

youtube.com/watch?v=93lrosBEW-Q

Modern big budget animation has way more detail and life to it and looks much better.

hannah-barbera looks like shit and most cartoons today look better than it, any other opinion is delusional nostalgiafagging.

And no, there was no magic technology invented that made it easier to draw things.

>Less labor as in technology makes production easier and therefore should make formerly-difficult high quality more attainable.

Except no. Cartoons are made on the cheap because they have to fill time on a TV network. They need to be made quick. A network will normally not wait for years for a season of a cartoon to be made. (The exception is [adult swim], mainly because they know Venture Bros. and R&M are worth that wait.) That means a show has to churn out episodes, and that means people who make those shows cannot afford to make a single entire episode of a show, let alone an entire season or the show as a whole, look as good as an animated feature film.

Even if "Steven Universe" had the budget of a Pixar film, it would still not look as good because CN does not want to wait six years for an individual season of the show. Less labor means shit when the reality of television production - animated or otherwise - comes crashing down.

Do you know how much fucking work and unpaid overtime went into making those damn things?

There was one chick who literally made a specific dye for cels BY HERSELF and then added every blush effect to every cel BY HERSELF.

You can see the difference between production advertisements and the actual film.

I have watched Hanna-Barbara cartoons since I was a child and I can say that you are dumb as fuck.

>the owl floating in the air
Are you retarded?

*I meant to write Beauty and the Beast. Just in case

If you think that the HB cartoons look as good as SU then you're an idiot who can't tell the difference between a screenshot and animation.

The budget for Sleeping Beauty was $6 million. Adjusted for inflation that's about $50 million today.

Almost all modern Disney/Pixar films have a budget of $100 million+. So modern animated films have a way fucking bigger budget.

Modern theatrically-released animated films are also near-exclusively 3D, which can help account for that gap in budget.

Time is money.

In a theatrical setting the average animator is expected to do about four seconds a week, which averages out to one shot. There are long shots, complicated shots, and other issues, but that's the usual number I've been quoted. It was what the number was many decades ago and it hasn't changed that much even in a CG environment.

In a TV setting, the average quota is like thirty seconds a week. But that rule is way less hard and fast. You hear about larger and smaller quotas all the time and since tv people often get paid by the frame or by the shot, which means it's in the animators best interest to get everything out the door as quickly as possible while having the director and producers still approve it.

In a Video Game setting the numbers are even more extreme. At Naughty Dog I've heard animators need to do about five minutes a week. Obviously at that point you need to start using motion capture or REALLY cutting corners, or both.

A theatrical animator, and animation team, just plain has more time to actually think about what they're doing. They can afford to take a few hours and fuck around and figure out the best way to do something. A TV animator has no such luxury. It gets even worse in the modern era of slashed budgets, outsourcing, and a lot of other things that essentially trade between time, skill, and money, which is always in the equation, since a theatrical animator is generally considered to be a league above a tv animator in terms of skill and respect anyway(this is why even attempting "theatrical style" animation will usually mean putting together a team of animators from that background, like when Family Guy did their Disney skit or for some commercials that basically reassemble whole ex Disney teams, which is mostly possible because Disney fired all of their old 2D masters over the years anyway, most of them either moved on to other companies or are teaching now).

>So modern animated films have a way fucking bigger budget.
They are also viewed by more people, the population back then was lesser. the average population had less money to watch movies, and currently Disney earns a lot more overseas.

Big budget animated shows are a dream but it is shitty that so many shows seem to base their designs off chewed bubblegum. I guess that's Cali Arts and no one seems to study animation anywhere else so we get this endless line of chewing gum characters making fart noises and saying "shit" a lot.

I can't tell if you're seriously comparing theatrical releases (films and shorts) with TV which has always been worse and always had a lower budget.

Comparable things today are Frozen and Zootopia or Pixar films, but since they're 3D cgi, theh are so different, and it's really hard to compare them

In 2D you hire a guy to design the characters, a storyboard guy for the broad strokes, a layout guy for backgrounds, an animator and an inbetweener for the actual animation of the shot, and then and ink and a paint guy(or girl, particularly in those two cases historically). Then a compositing guy to tape it all together in front of the camera.

In 3D, you need the designer and storyboarder, but also a layout guy for previs. But then you need specific modelers for the background on top of that, and another one or two for the set. Then you have the animator to animate the fucking thing. Then you need the lighting guy to light the shot as if it were a physical set. Then you need a rendering and compositing guy using an entire server farm to do the next part. Not to mention you need specialists JUST to simulate cloth and hair during or after the process, since Disney keeps an entire laboratory of guys who's job it is to code for that shit and design new programs and plugins(Renderman and Xgen both being developed by Disney and then allowed to filter out), meaning the hair and cloth simulations on every single CG movie is more or less exponentially complicated, which makes the act of rendering out that cloth and hair even more exponentially complicated. Then you need an entirely different set of specialists for smokes, fluids, fire, and other simulations. Then on top of that every single one of those people needs a multi thousand dollar computer setup that hooks into therender farm that also consists of multi thousand dollar computers.

Modern disney is an intricate, insane machine that grinds up hours and money and lives to spit out products that are so complex every second of footage takes at least about thirty or forty people weeks of man hours to produce.

I told you Sup Forums would fall for it. This board is so fucking sad.

>They are also viewed by more people, the population back then was lesser.

Population numbers had shit to do with it.

Going to the movies was cheaper back then, so the "normies" of the day could go see them far more often. Film was initially considered for "the masses" in comparison to for-the-elites stage plays and such. "Vulgar" would be an appropriate descriptor, going by the dated meaning of "characteristic of or belonging to ordinary people".

Less competition for the attention of the masses existed back then, too. People in the age of "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" did not have to choose between movies and cable TV, vidyagaems, mobile phones, the goddamn Internet, and every other luxury item in the world.

...

It probably took as much money and time to make this 15-second clip as it would have to make a single episode of Steven Universe.

>why can't all low budget shows made by smaller studios who don't have fucking j.baxter in their arsenal look pretty like muh favourite movies

Most of the movie was rotoscoped over live actors so that might have something to do with it.

Old Disney movies used a lot of live-action reference, but actually tracing over them was not common. They were mostly a guide for the animators, especially in terms of acting.

You migrated here? I didn't reverse it tho.