Did you notice if the quality of a cartoon fluctuated when you were a kid?

I dont notice animation quality fluctuations in cartoons now (i only know they exist because other people say they do), so theres no way i noticed them when i was a kid.
 
There are only a couple of examples that I really noticed when I was a kid--

I remember being aware of how Chuck Jones' later cartoons looked different from the normal appearances of the Warner Bros characters, because he gave everybody those weird long eyelashes for no reason. I really didn't like that.

I also noticed how Kennedy cartoons gave the characters on Tiny Toon Adventures thick eyebrows, and thinking that it made them ugly. I also noticed the weird movements a bit. I especially remember wondering why Buster kept dancing around at the beginning of "Fields of Honey."
 
I guess I really started noticing it in Ducktales (I was 8) because the TMS-animated episodes were just so different looking from the one's animated by Wang.
 
Even back when i was about 9, i was very aware of how bad the animation was in the Land Before Time sequels in comparison to the original film (especially concering how the dinosaurs movements differed; in the sequels, they started to walk and move much more like humans than they did in the first film).
 
I've always been somewhat curiously obsessive, so I definetly noticed. First example that springs to mind is all the colouring errors on the original TMNT show. Multi studio shows like Tiny Toons also stuck out (Why do Buster and Babs look sketchy and squashy this week?).

Of course, it's not just cartoons pulling this. I remember an MMPR season 3 ep where the rangers specifically call for and use the Thunderzords...despite said Zords being lost to them being a key plot point for the season. Goes to show you how little some kid's shows respect their audience intelligence.
 
And it's even less with their reversion. I didn't need title cards saying who Goldar, Baboo, Squat, and Finster were to remember their names. Or all the horrific photoshop colours of it.

I was kindof like that bad in the day to a lesser degree. Personally for some reason I always thought a cartoon had some care or precision to it if there was a continuous use of shadows. Like the animators actually put a bit of effort to do such a thing that tends to happen in real life instead of just an animation cel placed on a background or something.
 
As a kid, I always noticed coloring errors and dialog errors (for example, if a character talks and somebody else's voice comes out of their mouth). Those sort of things are obvious even to novices. I believe I knew the difference between the Tiny Toons animation studios as a kid, too. I didn't pay attention to the credits, but I could tell certain episodes looked different from each other, and I gave them nicknames before I knew what their real studio names were (i.e. Kennedy was the "bouncy style").

It wasn't until late teen/college age when I really got into comparing and contrasting animation houses, directorial touches, and more readily noticing off-model moments.

And only a few years ago did I start to get interested in animator "breakdowns"; i.e. who animated what in a cartoon. I was -sort of- the same, although I could definitely tell some of the Road Runners weren't as high quality as others. But back then I had no idea about different directors or release dates. All I knew was, if it was in black & white, it was older.

It was really a shame that Looney Tunes on Nick insisted on running those Larriva RRs so much, though.
 
Can't mark a specific date but... I know that I was fully aware as a child the differences in animation in episodes from earlier to later.

Oddly enough, the only Klasky Csupo show I liked as a kid was Rugrats... and it was probably because it was always on. But I know that in general I really didn't care for the style too much... at least the way it was done in Aaah! Real Monsters.

Small mistakes though are something I've noticed in recent years. I always find them when everyone else doesn't.
 
Yes. Animation quality has always been a big thing for me when watching cartoons. I grew up watching shows like The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Disney movies like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, so I had a pretty high standard of what a cartoon should look like and could tell if a show looked bad.

I was a big Sonic fan as a kid (well I guess I still am :p) I remember seeing commercials for Sonic SatAM and was happy that Sonic was finally getting a cartoon and also excited because the animation in the preview looked pretty darn cool.

Then I saw Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog one day while flipping through the channels and said 'What is this!? This is nothing like the commercial! It looks awful!' (I didn't realize at the time that there were two Sonic cartoons) I hated AoSTH because it didn't have the high quality animation that SatAM had. A big thing that bothered me on the show was the way the sky was drawn, which I remember saying 'looked like puke' and wondered how is it so hard for the animators to just draw a plain bluer sky with a few white clouds? I still stand by that statement. Though, being the devoted Sonic fan I was, still watched everyday after school. I really liked AoSTH, I just HATED the animation.

I hated the Kennedy episodes of Tiny Toons, and wondered why the show went back and forth between looking easy on the eyes to absolutely awful.

Dexter's Lab and The Powerpuff Girls were great shows, but I thought the animation on said programs was horrific and looked like something a 2nd grader would draw. Thankfully, the animation on PPG improved after the movie came out. Same cannot be said for Dexter.

Though I did notice that the intro to 'Dial M for Monkey' boasted a higher quality animation than the series itself. The color scheme was better (Shading was used for once) There was a bit more detail put into the background and there were some lighting effects used when he was shown preforming experiments on Monkey.

I also hated anime as a kid because they never finished the outline on the character's eyes. They would only be halfway outlined and that irritated me a lot.



Wha--WHAT. The 97 episodes were a gigantic step backward in terms of animation quality. In years 91-93 the series had some great animation and suddenly it all went to crap when the show got revived in '97. I hated hated HATED the animation in those episodes.
 
Yeah, but also find that the animation in SATAM is way too overhyped, I actually find that to be bad in and of itself. I also find that the bad animation in AoSTH actually adds to the value to the show's stupidity and unintentional humor. But I will agree about the sky.

True, in fact, all of Warner Bros. animated shows were like that.

Um... that's the style of the show. Its supposed to be like that.

I have no problem with that myself.

Yes, I agree entirely.

Anyway, to back up my Transformers argument on the first page, I have compiled a list of Akom's multiple animation errors (from season 3):

http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/4/49/FFOD4_mass_mistakes.JPG
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/1/10/Bigmagnus_tinyconst.jpg
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/a/a9/Hotspot_defensor.jpg
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/9/92/CarnageMiniBlaster.jpg
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/b/b0/DeceptiBrawn1.jpg
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/6/60/Decepticons_w_galvatron.jpg
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/9/91/Bigrumle.jpg
http://tfwiki.net/w2/images2/6/63/Combaticons_bruticus.jpg

And they are considered the worst animation company because of both this and their work on Batman: The Animated Series.

Mod note- Changed links to text due to TFWiki's noted bandwidth issues. Please host images on your own webspace or post text links.
 
I know for sure I could tell differences in style in old theatrical shorts, expecially Tom and Jerry. In some of them, Tom appeared to be lighter and rounder, while in others he had darker fur and looked much more fierce.

In TV cartoons, I wasn't really aware of huge differences, but I did often notice the coloring errors and such.
 
When it did came to theatrical shorts, I always wonder why Bugs, Daffy, Tom, and the rest of the theatrical shorts cartoons looked different, at the time I didn't know about the different directors and timeframes in which they were created. I think I might have noticed some of the Tiny Toons episodes having thicker outlines, but I mostly thought about that as starting out rough. I was also aware of how different Season 1 The Simpsons were as far as the art goes, didn't focus on the characterizations at that time. Also coloring errors and voice errors, were something I would notice right off the bat though, especially when a character was talking and they would switch between two different colors.
 
I noticed this in Rugrats, during the Dill series. I loved the animation in the older episodes, than Dill came rolling around and the animation got worse. SpongeBob is another one, the earyler seasons were decent, than past the movie it went down. I don't know, the animaton just changed some how. Any one else see it besides me?
 
I noticed this ALL the TIME. And I thought it was because they were using a different animator (singular) for each episode. I hadn't heard of outsourcing yet.

It was most obvious on Tiny Toons. Disney was a little better at it, but the difference between Japan and Australia was still pretty blatant.

Fox Kids was best at disguising it. No episode of The Tick or Bobby's World looks different from any others.
 
That's because it was the same animation studio (Akom and Wang respectively) doing the entire series, and quite possibly they used the same team for each episode.
 
I've noticed animation mistakes and dips in quality my whole life; it's nothing I try to do. Even as a kid, I would point and say things like, "Hey, so-and-so is speaking with such-and-such's voice!" or "He's the wrong color!" or "Why do the drawings look so crappy in this episode?".

I also notice how different directors and their teams render the same characters, and often the differences are profound.

I used to think I was just being too nitpicky, but I'm glad to read that I'm not the only one who does that.
 
Yeah, i first started noticing it when i saw season 1 simpsons eps in syndication and reruns and noticed how different the designs were as opposed to seasons 2 and up. Ditto for Beavis and Butthead (and personally i think the more amateurish style of the first two seasons fit the show better, but i understand why they went for a more mainstream art style).
 
I remember noticing when the animation on Muppet Babies got really crummy. I didn't really care for the show much anyway, but I really didn't like it after that and stopped watching.
 
I voted "I still can't tell!"

As a kid I was able to tell apart the difference in the way the characters were drawn between the old episodes of Dexter's Lab and the new ones.

But animation, I don't know. Nowadays I can tell the differences between the character styles still (like between the old and newepisodes of King of The Hill, Family Guy, etc.)

But I've just never been a good judge of animation. I guess I get so sucked into enjoying it that I don't even notice if the animation is lacking. Obviously if it was really bad I would notice.
 
As a kid I never really paid attention to animation quality but I did pickup on it somewhat when watching Looney Tunes shorts, particularly the Chuck Jones shorts. The designs and animation he used just stood out to me the most; no slight against the other WB directors though. Of course as I got older I picked up more on it especially with Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, ASOTH, Ducktales, Goof Troop and other shows. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if studios went back to outsourcing to different animation companies like they did in the 80's and 90's - gives things more variety.BTW, if you want a good example of bad animation, go watch The Adventures of Super Bros. 3; animation gaffes left and right in that one.
 
Back
Top