Identify: The Flash Animation Aesthetic

Growing up in the 2000s, I was exposed to a lot of cartoons on the internet. The pre-Youtube era of the internet was a breeding ground for crudely drawn, excessively violent and explicit content that was easily accessible to young me. At the time these short animated 'flash toons' blew my mind, and to this day are one of the main reasons I decided to pursue a career in animation. Looking back, alot of them do not hold up. The animation is lazy, the drawing is terrible, the jokes are awful and it comes across as shocking for the sake of it. It was like if edgy 14 year old boys ruled the internet. But there is a certain aesthetic that these animations had. A hand-made feel that I personally find very nostalgic.

The End Of Ze World is probably the best example I can think of to illustrate what I mean by the Flash Animation aesthetic. Obviously, the animation is terrible and the humour only really appeals to 8 year old me who'd never heard curse words before and found racist accents hilarious, (I'm not proud) but there is a craftsmanship on display, no matter how crude. Lines are rough, the drawings look like they were produced in MS paint, tweening is obvious and overused and you can tell it was made by one person, but the it is uniquely this person's work, the animation equivalent of drawings scribbled on a bathroom wall.

Another series of Flash Animations that defined what I would deem the Flash Aesthetic is Homestarrunner and the dearly missed character of Strong Bad. Strong Bad Email was a weekly show back in the early 2000s comprising mostly of characters assembled from pre-made assets and moved using tweens. The result is a style akin to something like South Park, which is appropropriate, as both have a similar workflow in relation to production, turning around episodes in less than a week. There is still a simplistic charm to Strong Bad; audio compression in Flash leads to low quality audio, which lends to the cheap and amateurish aesthetic, backgrounds are simple and movements are limited to canned walk cycles amongst others. The lip synching is non-existent when Strong Bad is sitting reading emails off his computer screen, which I can only assume was down to the animators being too lazy (or under strict deadlines) and even when there is lip synching, it is simply a tween of a mouth opening and closing, if the character has a mouth at all which many do not.