The trademark of Roobarb and Custard's animation style is the excessive use of line boil, which gives the illusion of constant motion. The artists and animators embrace this aesthetic, incorporating it into the character and environmental designs. The line boil gives the animation a sort of kinetic energy which is reflected by the characters, particularly the character of Roobarb. Roobarb's animation is more exaggerated than Custard's, though both characters appear to be animated at 12fps, played back at 24fps, but animated on twos.
What makes Roobarb and Custard stand out from other British children's cartoons made in the 1970sis the way it couples the storybook narration with fluent and continuously in motion animation. Look at most other British children's animations at the time and you'd be hard pressed to find a show with more frames of animation per second, with most shows at the time opting for stop motion, cut out or a more limited approach to animation akin to something like Jackanory, where narrators simply speak over storybook pages.
The Metal Gear Series earned it's reputation as one of the most polarising in gaming for it's emphasis on storytelling. Best described as the twisted love-child of anime, Tom Clancy and every anti-war film ever made, while the story may not be for everyone and while personally I rejoice in MGS's balance of sheer lunacy, god-awful writing yet genuinely inspired characters and philosophical themes, there is simply no denying director Hideo Kojima's unique directorial flair. Nowhere is this more apparent in the opening to 2014's MGSV: Ground Zeroes, which for my money is one of the most cleverly directed cutscene sequences in all of gaming.
The scene is roughly 10 minutes long and comprises of a single long tracking shot following the antagonist through the game stage. Kojima, a notorious cinephile, has stated in interviews that the camerawork in MGSV was inspired by directors such as Alfonso Cuaron and the film Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov, and that influence is showcased clearly here. Using one continuously long tracking shot makes sense in the context of a video game as video games are all about world building and immersion. If the camera doesn't cut away to another shot or a loading screen, the player is more likely to be in tune and immersed in the world of the game.
With the camera being operated inside a virtual world, this allows for camera movements and direction which would be impossible or at least very difficult to achieve in live action, for example, when the camera pans out from the helicopter to Snake as he ascends the cliff or the way the camera focuses in on the XOF patches as they align with the FOX patch on Snake's arm. This is video game cinematography that makes use of the medium to great effect. What's most impressive is the context of this shot in relation to the game itself. The objective of the mission is to extract a prisoner from his cell, which is shown at the beginning of the cutscene and take him to the helicopter pad, which the camera tracks the antagonist back to. The direction of the scene is subtlely and simultaneously pushing the player in the direction of the objective while also effectively world building.
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.
Brody Dalle's 'Meet the Foetus' music video is a stunning blend of Eastern and Western influences. Aesthetically the video strides the line between a manga-esque aesthetic and more western methods of contemporary illustration. Like much Japanese anime, movements are animated on what appear to be threes or fours, resulting in a lower frame-rate for character motions. This does however allow for the animators to create more detailed character designs with detailed shadowing and cell shading as well as linework. This may also have been a way for the animators to pay homage to their more Eastern influences, as much Japanese animators, due to budget and time constraints will work on threes and fours, resulting in a lower frame rate.
Viewing the video I also appreciated the way in which certain actions correlated with music cues and the rhythm of the song. For example, at the beginning when Brody Dalle's character is walking, her feet step to the beat of the drums, something that the animators would have had to have exhaustively planned ahead of time. Another example of this would be the baby banging on the walls of the uterus to the drum beat.
While I do like the animation overall, particularly the stylistic choices and overall aesthetic, from an animation perspective I noticed a few things which could have been executed a little better. Some of the movements seem jerkier than others due to the inconsistent frame rate as a result of animating on twos, meaning some scenes, particularly frame-my-frame camera movements seem more like animatics than the finished product.
Seth Macfarlane is a divisive figure in the animation industry. The man is often the subject of some fairly well justified scorn within the animation community for his simplistic and some would say lifeless lazy approach to animation. Animation is an expensive, time consuming and risky venture no matter the scale of the project. Not every show can be Ren and Stimpy and Macfarlane is no John Kricfalusi, but Family Guy's animation style just strikes me as boring, with no respect for the fundamental principles of Animation.
Characters, while they do maintain their volume and on-model, rarely signal any gestures beyond holding out the palm of their hand while Macfarlane exclaims 'what the hell' in the same three or four voices. There is no easing in and out of actions and as a result motions seem too fast, which while sometimes played for comic effect gets old after about five minutes. This is done with no overlapping action or follow through, no anticipation or squash and stretch, which may have given it some credibility in physical humour, leading to stiff, animatronic-like motion.
From a distance, facial expressions are almost unrecognisable, often constituting a circle with a line through the middle. Without any other expressive features like eyebrows to communicate emotion or more than one mouth shape, characters come across as robotic leading to a lot of the supporting cast becoming hard to differentiate.
Another thing Family Guy and other Seth Macfarlane shows suffer from is in staging. 90% of the time in any given episode I will guarantee characters will be standing in a long shot, against a static background, in profile, resembling the staging of an old multi-camera sitcom. While this may work for the sort of comedy Family Guy is going for, it is limiting in a medium in which staging options are literally limitless and not restrained by the limitations of live action. Other shows, such as South Park and The Simpsons have a more diverse visual language and as a result are more visually striking and memorable. As an animated show, without even getting in to it's style of writing, Family Guy (as with all other Seth Macfarlane shows) is lifeless, forgettable and boring.
All is not lost however. Over the past few years Adult Swim has been producing a number of successful and critically acclaimed animated shows which allow the creators more room to experiment, one of which is the anarchic Rick And Morty, the love-child of Dan Harmon (writer of Community) and Justin Roiland (creator of Doc and Mharti).
Rick and Morty shares a lot in common with Macfarlane's output in terms of art style, but where Family Guy is lackluster, Rick and Morty puts the effort in. Rick and Morty demonstrates a knowledge of the visual language through its animation and in particular, staging. Unlike Family Guy, Rick and Morty uses the medium to enhance it's comedy and utilises the fundamental principles of animation. Characters move with a weight to them, with a variety of poses and physical gestures to compliment the voice performances. Character designs are also imaginative and vary from simple human characters to more monstrous, alien figures. Generally, Rick and Morty has more in common with classic animated sitcoms such as The Simpsons and Futurama, making imaginative use of the medium while still retaining a relatively simple and (in terms of workflow) manageable aesthetic.
Facial animation is one of the most crucial elements of any sort of animation. Faces often define characters and facial expression is what communicates what a character is thinking or feeling at any one time. Good facial animation is surprisingly rare in the video game industry, with characters either coming across as bug-eyed or treading too close to the uncanny valley. Some games decide to forgo facial animation entirely by hiding their characters behind space helmets or setting the game in first person, but a game with good facial animation can have as much impact on the player as any television drama or film.
Silent Hill 2, released in 2001, was in my opinion one of the first games to do facial animation right. Character designer Sato Takayoshi based the primary cast of characters on their performers and refrained from using facial capture in order to achieve more naturalistic facial movement. Sato's approach was more akin to traditional animation, posing in front of mirrors and manually keying facial movemeny. Footage of the performers was used for reference but only reference. This allowed the team to craft personal and unique performances based off personal drawings and sketches while also retaining a structure to build off. His reasoning for doing this, Sato claims, was because the facial motion capture technology of the time only took the position of the skin on the face and not the muscle structure, which Sato claims is key to a more naturalistic performance.
Fast forward just over a decade and Naughty Dog is using the same technique for the performances in the critically acclaimed The Last Of Us. Naughty Dog are the masters of performance capture in video games, but even then The Last Of Us is something special. Like Team Silent, Naughty Dog refrains from using facial motion capture in it's cutscenes, instead opting for a combination of motion capture for bodily movements and manual keying for character's performances. Naughty Dogs reasoning for adopting this technique is in order to extenuate certain aspects of a performance, as even in 2013, motion capture technology still sometimes treads towards the uncanny valley. The result is a stylised form of animation with a slick attention to detail that steers clear of uncanny valley territory, while also feeling uniquely naturalistic and fluent. Muscles on the face contract and stretch making them feel very much real and grounded.
Like in Silent Hill 2, Joel and Ellie retain certain elements of their performers appearances, while also remaining unique and memorable designs in and of themselves, something that could not have been achieved had the designers opted to use just motion capture. Joel and Ellie have unique facial structures retain aspects of their performers but are separate from them, making them feel more like real people. The Last of Us received a lot of critical acclaim when it released back in 2013, and part of that was thanks to the believable performances of Joel and Ellie. But I feel that just is much praise is due for the animators who brought those two characters to life and were so integral to the drama of the game. The Last Of Us is as close to a critically acclaimed 10-part HBO drama video games have and as technology improves, so to will the ability to craft thoughtful and introspective performances.
Few British animators can boast the instantly recognisable aesthetic of Oliver Postgate. Over 20 years, he and Peter Firmin, the other half of his two-man production company Smallfilms, produced some of the most beloved and remembered children's programmes of the 70s and 80s, from Ivor the Engine to Bagpuss.
The defining element of the Smallfilms aesthetic is the sound and the hand-crafted feel of everything in the world. Their animations maintained this aesthetic as a sort of defining philosophy across all of their animations, whether cut-out, stop motion or puppetry. Postgate has described his work as 'surrealist but logical' which certainly holds true. Characters and worlds are imaginatively designed and at times surreal in their features, but follow a certain logic that keeps them grounded in their own universe as to be easily accessible to all ages. This is thanks partially to Postgate's warm and inviting opening narration, which to this day defines a lot of children's programming in the 70s and 80s.
On the surface no stock sound effects were used in the production of Smallfilms shorts, instead Postgate and Firmin created the soundtracks and soundscapes themselves. The result is a patient, dreamy and innocent soundscape to much of their work, which is part of what makes it so timeless and fondly remembered. Characters have unique and defining sounds that punctuate their actions, which makes them stand apart from their contemporaries.
David Firth, the internet's answer to David Lynch, is a misunderstood genius. Unfairly dismissed as a shock artist, Firth's work often delves into psychoanalysis, surrealist imagery and satire. His most well known web series by a large margin is Salad Fingers, a series of short five to ten minute cartoons depicting a strange asexual character called Salad Fingers and his/her life in a sort of apocalyptic wasteland/ freudian dreamscape. The themes and ideas presented are suggestive and abstract rather than surface level, which is why a lot of the surface level symbolism and imagery is dismissed as 'random'.
The creator brings up the question of Salad Fingers' gender throughout the series at numerous points, and this asexuality is reflected in the design of the character. Salad Fingers' character design has no distinct gender features and is never addressed to by any of the other characters, hence the gender is unclear. Salad Fingers' voice is equally ambigious.
The overall aesthetic of the world, consisting of ruined buildings, flat plains and washed out colours suggests an apocalyptic event took place shaping Salad Fingers' world. This apocalyptic feel is reinforced by the oppressive soundscape, which mostly consists of low pitch synth and Boards of Canada. All these design elements form together to create Salad Finger's nightmare of a world, the art-style reminiscent of several artists from Francis Bacon to Salvador Dali. Environments are textured and detailed, the linework expressive and bold, which lends to this aesthetic.
The production process for an episode of South Park is unique in the animation industry. The average episode takes a mere 6 days to produce, from initial idea to final edit. This quick turnaround can be attributed to the style of animation which resembles that of cut-out animation techniques, but is produced digitally using Maya which is normally associated with 3D animation. Maya allows the animators to retain the cheap, homemade cut-out look, while taking a fraction of the time to produce. The original pilot and the short film 'The Spirit Of Christmas' from which the premise and main cast of South Park derived, was produced by Parker and Stone using construction paper and stop motion techniques, a labour intensive process that would not have been feasible once the series was officially picked up by Comedy Central.
The most obvious and apparent influence is the work of Terry Gilliam on Monty Python's Flying Circus, but South Park takes these techniques and employs them on a larger scale, staging scenes with hundreds of characters and blends these with 3D modelling to create this anarchic, yet hand-crafted aesthetic. The animation itself is extremely limited. Characters do not have traditional walk cycles, instead moving around on Tweens, made of pre-made assets which are created digitally and assembled in Maya.
Bjork is no stranger to animated music videos. Over the course of her career she has collaborated with animators on numerous projects, but it's her 1995 collaboration with John Kricfalusi that is of particular note. Kricfalusi's trademark aesthetic is on full display here. One of the defining principles of Kricfalusi's work has been his restraint in remaining on model in his animation, very much subscribing to the dogma of squash and stretch, but taking it to new extremes where the characters change shape and volume drastically.
The video makes use of live action also, compositing Bjork into an animated world. This provides a nice contrast to the exaggerated proportions, overlapping action and appealing designs of Kricfalusi's animation, highlighting the ways in which it breaks conventional laws of motion to create a surreal and almost dreamlike aesthetic.
Kricfalusi clearly has a passion for animation, and this is evident in the way his work basks in the glory of the 12 fundamental principles. If you were to go through the video frame by frame you could pick out at least one example of each of Ollie Johnson and Frank Thomas's fundamental principles of animation. Seemingly, not a single frame is the same, which gives the characters an air of life which is rare in today's climate of digital 2D animation, an aesthetic closer to the classics of Disney than more contemporary animated shows, particularly in the comedy genre.
'When I came to disney, one of my first impressions about being here was that there was drawing everywhere. There's a deep legacy of it being in the final product, right up there on the screen that goes back to the very beginning. There's something about that hand of the artist that I really admired so much.'
- John Kahrs, Director of Paperman
According to John Kahrs, the director of the Academy Award winning short film 'Paperman' computer Animation is going through a sort of golden age. 3D animation has proliferated to the point it is the go-to aesthetic for animated feature films, leaving little room for experimentation. Walt Disney Animation Studio's Paperman aimed to break that trend, employing a 3D vector/raster-based animation system to create 3D models whose movements, design and character were heavily informed by more traditional 2D animation techniques, the type upon which Disney built a reputation.
John Kahrs' aim with Paperman was to 'bring the drawing back' to animation, which was accomplished by tracing stylised 3D models. Animators would apply brush strokes to particular key frames and the computer would automatically generate the in-betweens. A more detailed explanation of the process can be found here...
The result is a visually striking, sombre eulogy to the days of 2D hand-drawn frame by frame animation, viewed through the lens of the latest, most cutting edge computer animation techniques and world class animators. Paperman simultaneously pays homage to the days of classic Disney while also pushing the medium forward.
Trip-Hop populariser's Portishead are no strangers to weird and experimental music videos. Together with fellow Trip-Hop artists Massive Attack, they are responsible for some of the most groundbreaking and unconventional music videos of the the late 90s. Here, they prove yet again their ability to marry their unique brand of hypnotic electronica and equally engrossing and hypnotic visuals with the video for their 2008 single 'The Rip'.
In the video we dive into the sketchbook of a surrealist cartoonist, in a 4 minute video consisting of one long and impressively uninterrupted tracking shot worthy of Alfonso Cuaron, which seeps into every corner of this densely packed world, with the camera in constant roving motion. From the first couple of seconds the video synch perfectly with the instrumentals of the song. The Rabbit in the opening times the arch of it's hops to the instrumentation and as the melody evolves from twangy guitar strings to electronic swells, the camera shifts in orientation to reflect this change.
Aesthetically, the video resembles a person flipping through a sketchbook in many ways, with it's low frame rate and crudely drawn crayon illustrations. Despite the low frame rate, the video manages to turn what would otherwise be a detriment into a part of it's aesthetic, complimenting the rhythm of the music to hypnotic effect.
