help with a school assignment

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Lou K

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For my art history course I aim to write a paper on how the late 80s and through the 90s were what could be considered a golden age of animation, but gradually the computer technology and other factors led it into a dark age. Most of it I've had floating in my head for some time and I know a lot of television series and movies to discuss, but for the sake of credibility I'd like to know if anyone has confirmation on the way a number of television animated series today are done. Most of it by looking at it I can assume, but to hear someone tell me with certainty would give me the confidence to either praise or denounce it.

So if anyone could offer me their insight on the process of animating any television animation from the past few years it would be greatly appreciated. (NOTE: I'm obviously not looking only for the good examples. I need to know about the crap shows, too.)
 
A couple things jump to my mind right away:

It would be good, I think, to specify the 80's and 90's as the golden age of animation ON TV, and you better have good examples to back that up. The golden age of animation in general would probably be in the 30's and 40's, with Disney and such.

If you're talking about animation in the 80's, it would be worth addressing the trend of most of the best remembered and most-watched shows of that decade came from toy lines, such as Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats, GI Joe, and so forth.
 
I'll have to also chime in that the 30's, 40's and 50's were the golden age-- though I think it might be worth it to touch on the 80's and 90's as the age for television based animation.

Sometimes when I have a hard time finding info, I check Wikipedia-- BUT, rather than reference the actual article, It usually includes references-- and I look into finding THOSE sources either online or in book form. I went to an animation school so our library was jam packed with books pertaining to the subject, but you might be able to find an online database for digital versions of articles and those texts. Ask the public library if they would have access to something like that-- if memory serves, one of em was called Wilson Web.

Edit: While we're at it-- I'll also suggest you narrow the focus to "golden age of TRADITIONAL animation" as computer technology is not a "dark age", it's just a different type of animation.
 
i think it's only a matter of opinion that it's a 'dark age' of animation because of computer animated features...if you claimed that then you'd have to include all of pixar's work-and they have produced alot of great films...it would be a dark age if we had no animated projects at all for some reason ever since 2000...the 2d animation is pretty damn scarce at the box office, but we've still got some really good stuff being produced for tv and dvd.
 
I don't really want to argue the title of the age. Silver Age, whatever. I know the 30s-50s are considered a golden age, but then I know that decreased frame-rates, cheap techniques, and the loss of Walt Disney hurt the industry artistically speaking. 80s-90s television was a revival, but Disney finally found it's footing again and made some incredible features too--it would be ignorant to ignore those and only focus on television. And if I'm going to write about a decline I feel I need to talk about movies anyway because I feel Pixar made a masterpiece with Toy Story but gradually computer animation became something that was just seen as more cost effective. Computer animation then leads to motion-capture which isn't really animation at all. Flash flooded the internet as a great tool for amateur animators but then it flooded television.

I'll be the first to admit a lot of that is opinionated and my whole argument is opinionated. Thank you for your thoughts, but I'm more interested in gathering some facts about more modern shows that I can use to back my opinions.
 
One important element of the late 80's/early 90's was the prospering of animation on cable (specifically Nick and MTV) which took a different path than network animation. I'd recommend looking up some history on Ren and Stimpy, Aeon Flux, and even Beavis & Butt-head.
 
I feel that where computer animation was introduced as something that was going to revolutionize the art of animation as a new medium, working alongside traditional animation to take it places it had never been before, it actually hurt the artistry of the industry. CGI became a gimmick basically, where very little traditional animation was being produced for film and mediocre CG has been flooding it. Even television animation has become more computerized simply because it's cheaper and easier. So, despite good Pixar films and maybe two or three from others, I feel like new technology has severely hurt the industry artistically and I'd go so far as to call it a dark age. I feel like very little has been produced lately to the caliber of say ten years ago.
 
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