Fingers

D

dusty b

New member
Pardon me for asking such a stupid question, but how come so many animated programs refuse to give their human characters five fingers? Is it really that much more difficult and / or expensive for them to do? It?s a minor annoyance at best but I?ve always found it somewhat odd when human characters are missing one of their digits. I was thinking about ?The Replacements? when I made this thread, as the characters had four fingers in the first season but had five fingers in the second season when the designs were improved upon.

So, is there any legitimate reason many cartoons use four instead of five?
 
It's also cheaper. You get more pencil mileage with one less finger to animate. And it's just easiler to animate 4 fingers than it is to animate 5 because (yes) hands are very difficult to draw, let alone animate.
 
I think when Adult Swim started airing their black and white cards, they had some trivia that each episode of Futurama would have been several hundred thousand dollars more expensive if each character was animated with five fingers. Take that as you will.
 
The full quota of fingers can make the hand look a trifle distorted:

WallaceGromit.jpeg
 
Yup. That's because real fingers are much, much thinner than cartoon fingers, and I don't have to tell you that drawing realitic hands with proper protortions and the correct number of fingers is much, much more difficult than four-fingered cartoon hands.
 
I would say it depends on the art style. Deformed/bulgy art like Fairly Odd Parents would make hands seem too "crowded" if there were more than four. While a more slender/realistic style could do it easilly.
 
As previously stated, it's just one less finger to animate, which is also why many cartoon humans also have only 4 (in some cases, even as few as 3) toes on each foot. E.g., Fred Flintstone, Dexter and the characters on Hey, Arnold!.
 
Fun cartoon trivia: all the human characters in The Simpsons have four fingers, but any time he appears, be it a vision or a dream or a fantasy sequence or whatever, God has five. Take that as you will.
 
Someone from the golden age of cartoons (I THINK it was Walt Disney, but I may be wrong) stated that they animated hands with four fingers because it is indeed easier. And it IS.

Besides, you don't really pay attention to hands unless they're part of the joke. There were jokes in Dexter's Lab and Powerpuff Girls that featured close-ups of hands, and they were drawn with five fingers for that sole scene.
 
You'd think that they would take the time to animate all 5 fingers, but when I'm drawing, it actually does take a while to perfect a hand. The first 4 fingers are easy but it is a lot harder to draw a thumb on a hand than you would think.
 
Five fingers worked fine on Danny Phantom, so I don't see what the big deal is. And I'm no artist but I've never found it difficult to draw hands. :confused: Sure, a realistic hand must be difficult to draw (just like any part of the human body) but cartoon-ish fingers? I don't see the challenge.
 
Yeah, but aside from the backgrounds the Danny Crew wasn't brilliantly animated anyway. But then we all can't have sleek, expressive designs like Avatar. :sweat:
 
Super Mario World had somewhat sloppy animation (sometimes you can see the bottom of the cels, stray lines, color errors, etc.) yet they managed to always draw Mario and Luigi with four fingers and a thumb.
 
but did not danny phantom have five fingers*looks up at prev post*

he maybe the are not rich enough

*looks at eddies hand*

PhILLY pHIL:You got five fingers?*looks at own hand*...you are rich
 
I always noticed that as a kid that in any animated show or movie, there would be like four or three fingers. But it never really bothered me, curious yes, but never bothered. But I figured that it's mainly because it's easier to animate.
 
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