By Tyler Elcock
Ever since I was younger I have always found animation fascinating from the way that old cartoons smear to the incredible adaptations of anime we get today. But what really is animation? How is it produced? Well firstly animation is more often than not completely hand drawn and drawn in frames. The more the frames per second of an action, the more fluid the animation is going to look when put on screen. This is just the first stage of animation because after that comes the more arguably hard part is the style and color. Does the animation have thicker black lines or are the characters more fine lined/detailed? On top of the style, animators will have to add color. The color will be based on different scenes and settings of where characters are placed in animation to really make characters pop. Below are a couple of examples on how animation can change drastically.
In this clip you can see that this animation has a lot of inspiration from looney tunes, the ways the eyes pop out of the sockets and even the sound effects. Now this next clip is just two episodes later and is made by a different animator for the show.
These two clips while being within a short time period of each other have very drastically different styles. The biggest thing about animation with this much budget is the amount of time that goes into making these incredible scenes. I believe both of these scenes took around 7 to 9 months to make, which is an impressive feat when it comes to the show dropping a new episode every week. All animation should be looked at as works of art and in my opinion as high quality as the high budget movies we get today in theaters but just as much if/not more effort goes into projects like this and I feel like it isn’t appreciated enough because some “aren’t in English” or it wasn’t made in America.
Now the best places to find ratings for animation? There are a few places I check a lot. Those would be IMDB, Crunchyroll, and MyAnimeList(which also has an app). I typically tend to lean more towards Crunchyroll and MAL because they are much more community driven reviews which I find better than hearing about it from critics. Especially nowadays a lot of people have become more into the animation aspect because budgets for animation studios are a lot higher now than they were back then. You could easily connect this claim to something like disney as well, from black and white with no voice acting, to the absolute media monster disney is now with movies like toy story and cars. Animation is one of those things I love looking into because it will constantly evolve and there will always be a new show with a weird quirky style that will pique a lot of interest. So next time you are watching animation of any sort just keep a lookout for changes/consistencies in animation or what makes a certain show unique.
P.S. Please watch One Piece
Comments