What constitutes as bad animation to you?

K

Kunmui

New member
For me when I think of bad animation, I define it as:
"Animation that is too broken for the style it it meant to represent."

Animation quality to me is art style and fluidity combined. A show has a certain art style that it must make come to life, and animation is meant to do it. If the animation is too jaggy and broken for its own style I find that to be bad animation.
For starters, there are people who comment that Hannah-Barbera is terrible animation. I only find this half true.
Most of their earliest stuff was very flat, the characters were flat to represent an entirely two-dimensional world and thus one is limited to how well the characters can actually move. Hannah Barbera artists were very keen to not make their drawings look like they should have been flowing. (Of course when they got to their action cartoons, yeesh.)
Then we get to Filmation, a company that really had jaggy animation to go with their style. Some of their characters seem like they should be moving squash and stretch. Take Fat Albert for starts. That's an example of bad animation in my eyes.

Of course, my opinion isn't the only one in the world, what do you chap/ettes have to say about animation? What's your definition?
 
H-B never struck me as particularly incompetent, instead rather stiff. This wound up not lending itself well to anything with more detailed character designs, and I don't think it helped their funny animals much either.

Though depending on who you talk to stiff animation might be bad animation. I consider "good" animation to be more fluid than what H-B did, myself.
 
Would coloring errors count, like how sometimes Batman's chest symbol would reverse colors on Superfriends? I consider that bad animation.
 
When you compare animation you really have to do so in comparison to the standards of the time they were being produced.

You can't expect cartoons from years past to implement the modern techniques but some old theatrical shorts have animation with a surprisingly amount of fluidity. Looney Tunes for instance. Those theatrical shorts are really impressive for their time in both animation and sound design (to say nothing of humor)

Generally what I consider to be bad animation all around is stiff movement, bad timing of that movement and overall lack of fluidity.

Coloring, size and other visual errors are also what I'd consider bad animation or at the very least, lazy animation.

I also consider off-model animation to be bad and unpleasant to look at. Such as the very fluid fight scenes in some episodes of Naruto. The characters are off-model blobs and more times than not I think it looks awful.

However despite what I just said about characters being off model. Good animation doesn't necessarily have good designs. The designs in The Problem Solverz are horrendous but it doesn't have bad animation. It's pretty fluid all things considered.

Good animation doesn't necessarily mean complex designs either. I think Regular Show has great animation but the designs are anything but complex.

Of course animation with both complex design and fluidity is what I find most impressive. Shows such as Young Justice has very detailed and fluid animation and I think it's some of the best animation on TV right now.

When you consider the kind of scene there are also other factors that cause bad animation. In a fight scene for instance if the choreography is choppy then it doesn't matter how fluid or on-model the animation is it's going to look bad. On the flip side a less fluid animated series that has good choreography can look better and work better than fight scenes that otherwise had great animation. That's why you can compare the fights in Cowboy Bebop to those just about any modern action show and find they come up short despite Bebop being over a decade old now.
 
You want to know what constitutes bad animation? Look up a little gem from the 1990's called 'Hammerman'. I dare you to make it through five minutes of stilted, half assed animation from MC Hammer's shortlived cartoon series, let alone an entire episode. It was insanely bad, even for a Dic produced series.
 
Two main things for me:

-Off-model drawings. Note I'm not referring to wild takes that are purposefully done for comedy. I mean just generally poor quality drawings, including when human anatomy is screwed up (i.e. drawing someone with six fingers). These are the kinds of drawings you often see redone for the DVDs. The ultimate example of off-model animation is the Yashigani episode of "Lost Universe".

-When characters don't retain the same proportions and shapes from frame to frame. Note I'm not talking about squash and stretch. I mean when a character is pretty obviously drawn differently during the in-betweens, creating a sloppy and mushy look when in motion. "Inconsistency" is the key word here.

To me, limited animation is not the same as badly-done animation, unless one or both of the categories above accompany it. A low budget shouldn't automatically mean it's badly-produced animation.

For example, I wouldn't classify Rocko's Modern Life as having bad animation: Its characters were consistently drawn (minus "Trash-o-Madness", of course), had good in-betweens, and were relatively free of animation errors. It not having as big a budget or full of animation as the theatrical cartoons of the '30s-50s doesn't mean the animation is badly done.

That said, one can certainly have a preference for full animation over limited animation, or vice versa. And given the choice, yeah, I'd rather watch something with some life to it, that isn't incredibly stiff. I'd consider that more a coloring error than bad animation, as it doesn't have anything to do with how the characters were drawn.
 
The thing that I would call bad animation if its badly animated, like the "flat" characters from Hanna-Barbara and flash animation done poorly. I bet none of you were able to sit through The Problem Solverz, that right there is badly animated. Also if it follows the same cliches on how terrible cartoons have been produced then I would consider it as a bad thing.

Also, restocking old footage and using the same script(meaning same story but different characters). You people who have seen any cartoon produced by Terrytoons and Filmation know what I'm talking about. In my own view, reusing the same footage does not get you anywhere. Unless if it was pulled off correctly(which in my case its rarely) then its not even good. Heck, Filmation was a complete cheapskate as much as Paul Terry was.


For actual good coloring for animation in TV sakes, I would say Symbionic titan and Regular show have good colors. Even I havent seen Young Justice or Brave and Bold those have good colors as well.
 
Well, that depends on a lot of aspects of animation, including how fluid it is, the characters, are they on model?, the coloring job, the movement, etc...:yawn:
 
Well, to me, when I think of bad/inconsistent animation, I think of the following shows/movies:

-Transformers: Generation 1
-Transformers Armada/Energon/Cybertron
-The Magic Voyage
-Avengers: United they Stand
-Bakugan
-Anything that Filmation, Video Binquio (I don't care about the spelling) or any other crappy studio produces
-Bionicle 2: Legends of Metru Nui
-Most Superhero shows from the 90's that outsourced to sub-par studios (i.e Akom or Dong Yang)
-Several episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures (and I'm sure Speedy Boris will agree that most of it comes from Kennedy, Encore, Freelance and several Wang and Akom episodes)
-A large amount of You're Under Arrest's First season
-Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (I know it's live action, but really it had a lot of CG that just kept going from good to unfinished, In fact, I was wondering if they were just going to show wireframes at one point).
-Dragonlance (nuff' said).

More or less, anything that is pretty much inconsistent, sub-standard or a waste of cels/Terabytes that I honestly can't ether enjoy the show or movie for it's poor animation quality (which for most of these I can, ala Transformers, Tiny Toons and YUA) or just plain suck (Avengers and those two animation studios I mentioned in their separate entry in the list above).

I don't mind limited animation as long as it's done right (as Hanna-Barbara can show most of the time). But like others have said, if it comes with bad design, inconsistent inbetweens and overall sub-par quality, then really, I then just hate it.
 
I really don't mind bad animation as long as he show is good. For example, shows like Girlstuff/Boystuff and Stickin' Around may be seen as bad animation but the quality of the shows themselves more than made up for it.
 
I actually love Wang's work on Tiny Toons, except for the first few in production order when all the characters had really thick outlines.

Akom could be hit or miss.

As for Kennedy and Encore, their weakness was their inconsistency between the animators. Some did a fine job, others were awful. Encore tended to have the most animation mistakes out of all the TTA studios, though. That said, it is interesting to point out when one animator's style ends and another's begins.
 
I've only ever been able to find the opening to that show, never even a clip from an episode itself. It's like the holy grail of terrible-looking shows I want to check out someday.
 
I'm basically in the same boat as you, although I think the animation in Phineas & Ferb is really weird. The only thing is that I don't watch that show.

The earliest Beavis and Butt-head episodes are a bit hard for me to look at because of their crude animation, but they do have their nostalgic value.
 
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