What constitutes as bad animation to you?

Watching that Hammerman clip, I thought of another one: Wonky designs. Now that in and of itself doesn't automatically equal bad animation, but in my experience I've found that the two often go hand in hand. It's rare that you'll have wonky designs but beautiful animation.
 
I don't agree with the undetailed designs, but will definitely agree about the rest.

I mean, it makes Dingo Pictures look good.
 
Stiff characters, wonky movements, lack of movement, consistent animation errors, etc. Actually, it's kind of hard to think of what constitutes as "bad animation". It's kind of just something that I know it when I see it.

Though I do want to say that just because a show has bad animation doesn't mean the cartoon itself is bad. This is usually the case, but then you have cartoons like Rocky & Bullwinkle, whose animation might as well be still images, but it's one of the greatest cartoons of all-time.
 
The 1967-70 Spider-man cartoon was known to reuse lots of the same footage as well as reusing some plotline during the psychedelic seasons 2 and 3 supervised by Ralph Bakshi. For example "Swing City" plotline and footage was recycled into "Up from Nowhere" and "Specialist and Slaves" who also re-used parts from "To cage a Spider". And the ice on the cake was reusing footage from the cartoon Rocket Robin Hood episode "Dementia Five" to recyle it in "Revolt in the Fifth Dimension".
 
Here's what I think makes technically good animation, so bad animation would be the opposite of these:

1.. Strong timing

2. Strong poses

3. Solid drawing for hand-drawn (there's nothing more annoying then looking at floaty/mushy looking drawings)

4. Fluid movement

Those are the bare bones. Then I ask myself:

1. Do the characters move in a specific way or do all the characters kind of move the same?

2. Do all the characters have the same, even, timing or do the characters have their own, specific timing?

3. Do all of the characters have their own unique poses or are all the poses the same for each character?



Or the lack of an experienced production team. I have a theory that this was the problem when a lot of the early outsourcing to Asia was going on... it's that none of the Asian studios really had any experienced classically animators who knew how to make strong poses, etc.
 
A few bad animation examples for me:

- too much early 70s Hanna-Barbera, particularly some episodes of "The Roman Holidays", "The Flintstone Comedy Show", and "The New Scooby-Doo Movies". Thicker-and-sketchier-than-usual looking outlines, too much jerky animation in some scenes, etc. One episode of the Flintstones Comedy Show stands out in my mind, where they switched Fred and Barney's hair color in one scene!

- Problem Solverz: E*gad*, that's got to be the most hideous looking animation on TV ever. I've seen Geocities pages from the 90s / MySpace pages that didn't look *that* bad (and that's pretty bad). Even the commercials make my eyes wince...
 
The only animation I really think is bad is limited animation. Not limited as in not fluid, but literally limiting animation. It's only bad if you can't tell your story.
 
One of my bad animation pet peeves is simply how characters walk. We've all seen cartoons where a character is walking or running, but they're not moving at the speed they should be going based on the steps they take. Their feet seem to slide on the ground like they're doing the moonwalk.

This is often combined with the recycling of the same five frames of animation for every walking/running scene (Scooby-Doo, I'm looking at you). Almost all 80s cartoons are guilty of this.
 
Ever notice how Seth MacFarlane's characters nowadays just stand around talking while moving their arms and bending their hips like robots? That's not animated; that's ANIMATRONIC.

Consider this excerpt from his "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy", in which all but the moving parts have been blacked out.
 
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