One worry of mine is that it won’t make a comeback before the masters who worked at Disney, WB, Cartoon Network, etc all pass away and all of that knowledge and expertise will be lost.
Personally I'm really sad this kind of technique never caught on more in Western films, Treasure Planet was panned at the time but I think it's actually a bit of an overlooked classic. The art style works really well, take Long John Silver for example whose body is traditionally animated but his cybernetic limbs are CGI - this looked fantastic in 2002 so imagine what could be done now.
There is a rich pipeline of mangas (comics) to anime (2D animation) that is alive and well there.
The U.S. is obsessed with massive studio efforts that all resolve to the exact same character design and animation style (people want the familiar!) But there is a ton of innovation (including AI and 3D usage) as well as a system to support skill handoff that exists outside of Hollywood.
It’s just unfortunate that its American counterpart is so much weaker. You still see a handful of titles getting released, but it’s nothing to what we were producing back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
American animation also had a distinctive style to it and it’s sad to lose that.
For feature length productions it's pretty much only series special movies for the big hit shows or Makoto Shinkai.
Industry figures over there have been publicly gloom and doom about the state of the industry for years.
Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too.
With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
Sazae-san used cels for the openings and endings up until 2013.
Kind of a tangent, but I had a bunch of friends finishing their animation programs at SVA in the early 2000s and they had to do everything traditionally and they all made a huge push to "#Save2D". I personally spent several months helping most of them scan their thesis projects for free.
Despite a lot of willingness the studio support just wasn't there and even with all of them established in their careers now there's just no hope of doing anything that way. I kinda felt bad that they were trained in and judged against a process that's basically dead. Not to say they didn't learn anything but a tremendous amount of their time and money was effectively wasted.
And then so many of them spent their first few years working in industry heavily exploited by the local studios, including years of unpaid work in most cases.
Nowadays with hand drawn stuff you're mostly seeing keyframe work being done and the computer doing all of the heavy lifting with inbetweening with maybe some tweaking here and there by junior animators.
The tools are good enough now where it doesn't even look like shitty Flash animation anymore.
Also don't know what you're trying to show me with this 10 minute video. There's maybe 15 seconds of animation work being done this whole video? I see storyboarding and background painting and audio work but this shows shockingly little animation process...(and what I can see clearly is someone drawing keys...)
I'll admit, though, that while I know and have talked to some people in the animation industry it is not my area of expertise, so I could be completely off base with my observations.
My absolute favorite for japanese animation (and criminally underrated!) is Redline (2009)-- huge recommendation.
The thing about all that extra funding is that most of it goes to the committee, not to the studios and animators working on it. And because the total manpower of the industry is so limited, that means that an excessive number of projects crowds out the labour that it becomes much harder to try out risky, experimental new things as one might have a decade ago. As the director of Code Geass stated; It would be literally impossible to air Code;Geass today. And the industry does suffer for it, because while there may have been many mega hits, they all largely lack lasting impressionns and fail to reach the legends of the past.
Animation rigging, squeezing and bouncing every part of the character to convince the viewer it's alive, but all it's doing is calling computer routines to wobble each part, instead of actually animating the damn character. Everything is shortcuts now.
Recently, I started re-watching Dexter's lab. It's great. No CGI at all, no computer-assisted calarts. Trying to watch anything modern from the same creator, everything is just unbearable to look at. Everything looks like disjointed parts, and screams low-effort. All the flash animators of the 2000s grew up, and they're now running things. And everything just looks like wobbly flash.
There's some shows that did this modern animation style well though. But not many.
So I come to the same conclusion, repetitive low-effort stuff repels people.
That’s really it. The medium is just a medium and not why people show up.
Anyone who says this method or that method are superior are missing the point. Humans connect with characters and stories, not with meshes or acetate sheets. Oral, written, photographed, painted, sung, performed, filmed, drawn, animated - all these are in service to the message being communicated.
The technique might get immediate attention, but substance is what makes a classic.
I sort of disagree with this.
Sometimes the medium is the message. Or part of the message. Like how LAIKA studios could have made Coraline or Kubo fully in CGI, or live action, but instead chose puppets (for the most part). It matters that these are puppets and not CGI, anime-style drawings or live action people. It matters to them and it matters to me.
Not saying story doesn't matter, but in movies it's sometimes overrated. You can have a gorgeous movie with barely any plot, and it can be engaging.
"CalArts" as a pejorative really has lost any meaning, if it ever had one beyond "animation I don't like". The creator of Dexter's Lab literally went to CalArts and made the first iteration of it as one of his projects while he was there.
The joke doesn’t make any sense on cable TV though, because there’s no real reason for stuff on TV to have ever sucked in that way.
Compare to stuff like Harvey Birdman or Sealab 2021, they make a lot more sense because they were parodying the medium they existed in.
Especially as investors fund Llm shops generating art instead of artists drawing art.
But I would agree that Adult Swim is an anomaly.
Not a single recent new show in sight.
There’s plenty of good American animation too, though. Disney movies were always top class, as were most of the Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry among other TV animation. Donald Bluth movies also come to mind.
THE BALANCE!