340,000,000: First Draft

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Animation in the Modern Age

How Flash Has Improved and Worsened an Art Form

Computer technology has transformed the way we produce and experience media, and animated content is no exception. Since 1996, Flash animation has revolutionized the way much of animation is produced for both the internet and television. But like any technology, Flash has changed things for both better and worse. While the software has allowed animators to produce content of high quality more quickly than before, it has also let content creators crank out exceptionally low-quality animation with unprecedented ease.

Flash animation has been one of the most widely expanding tools for internet and television animation in the past two decades. Currently one of the most popular tools for 2D computer animation, it is widely used due to its ability to create animation much more quickly and efficiently than traditional cell animation. Thus, it has become nearly ubiquitous for web-based animation, and is a decently popular medium for televised animation. However, Flash’s efficiency and ease of use has had two opposite effects: it allows animators to create detailed animation more quickly, producing high quality animation that can rival the output of traditional animation; but it also lets animators create cheap animation really quickly, resulting in mediocre animation that can become hard to watch if executed poorly.

Flash vs. Traditional Animation

The Flash authoring tool provides many features that make Flash animation more efficient than hand-drawn animation. Of these, the most prominent are vector graphics, recyclable animation, and automated tweening. Vector graphics are a method of storing and rendering images based on points, lines, and fills. This setup produces images with clean, sharp lines and flat shading, while taking up very little memory. Further, these lines and colors are very easy to edit, which means one can fine-tune the graphics easily. This makes drawings much easier to manipulate than hand-drawn work, where such fine-tuning would, at best, require copious erasing and re-drawing.

Another huge timesaver is recyclable animation. A sequence of images can be stored as a re-usable chunk of animation called a “symbol,” and used as many times as is needed. This method does exist in hand-drawn animation – watch any Hanna-Barbera cartoon – but it is especially powerful here, as these symbols can be replayed at arbitrary size and rotation, and duplicated indefinitely within a single shot.

Lastly, tweening is a process that smoothly interpolates graphics across a series of frames. This allows for smooth changes in position, scale, rotation, and a number of other properties. In traditional animation, such changes generally require redrawing each frame by hand. All of these features serve two purposes: they make animation very easy to create and manipulate, and make it very efficient to store on a computer – a three-minute cartoon can take up less than 600 kilobytes of space, while a decent-quality video file of the same length can take up 60 megabytes!

Bad Examples From the Web

Great timesavers they may be, heavy or unrefined use of these techniques can create less-than-pleasing results. This fact is visible in abundance in early internet cartoons, from a time when slow network speeds necessitated these shortcuts even more than production constraints. For our first example, let’s look at one of the very first internet cartoons¹, John Kricfalusi’s The Goddamn George Liquor Program². The graphics themselves are quite good, with smooth, nuanced linework and a style that translates easily from John K’s earlier hand-drawn cartoons. However, the animation itself is ridiculously limited and choppy – most looped actions consist of only two or three frames, and characters just snap from one drawing to another – a stark contrast to the relatively detailed graphic style.

Now for cartoons with a different set of problems, we could look at pretty much every cartoon ever posted on Newgrounds, but let’s just consider a few decently well-known ones. We’ll look at David Firth’s Burnt Face Man,³ the earliest episodes of Jon Mathers’ Neurotically Yours,⁴ and Shawn Vulliez’s video for Lemon Demon’s “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.”⁵ These cartoons all have the same issues: the line quality is chunky and jagged (courtesy of the smoothing algorithm on Flash’s “paintbrush” tool), and animation is quite limited, making heavy and obvious use of motion tweens for most character movement. While the animation is passable compared to John K’s early Flash work, the graphics are fairly hard to look at.

Burnt Face Man

The Goddamn George Liquor Program

Good Examples From the Web

On the other side, there are internet cartoons which make good work of Flash’s toolset. A prime example of animation that uses limited animation to an advantage is Matt and Mike Chapman’s Homestar Runner cartoon series.⁶ With the exception of the very earliest cartoons, the series uses clean, simple, flat graphics and fairly restrained animation, but in a way that produces an appealing result. The animation style uses the efficiency of Flash’s tools to their full advantage, without falling into the caveats that make other cartoons display them for the worse.

Then there are more modern internet cartoons that go in the opposite direction to make more complicated animation that either feels hand-drawn or is very smooth and nuanced. Such is the output of many modern internet animators such as Harry Partridge,⁷ Chris O’Neill and Zach Hadel,⁸ and Max Gilardi.⁹ All of these animators tend to use very smooth and full animation that looks miles better than older Newgrounds fare. This is likely in part due to the fact that faster internet speeds have made streaming video a viable platform, so animators don’t have to worry about file size constraints. As well, streaming video allows Flash animation to be composited in other programs where subtle video elements and shading effects can be added to enhance the look of the cartoon to beyond what one can achieve with pure vector graphics.

“Luigi’s Day Out” by Max Gilardi

Homestar Runner

Bad Examples From TV

Flash has also seen a moderate amount of use for television animation. You would expect that animation made by a professional studio using such an efficient program would generally come out really well. Often, yes, but unfortunately not always. Many Flash shows have surprisingly mediocre animation, for example Johnny Test,¹⁰ Eliot Kid,¹¹ and Home Movies.¹² These shows are mostly passable, but the animation is largely flat; consists of thick, bright colors; and uses motion tweening rather obviously for character movement, along with a decent amount of snapping between positions. The animation on these tends to be comparable with that of Homestar Runner – which was made by two people producing an average of three minutes of animation per week.

However, there are a few shows that are considerably worse. Instead of using Flash to make decent animation more efficiently, these shows use it to apparently keep budgets as low as humanly possible. For example, My Life Me¹³ and Pixel Pinkie¹⁴ have animation that’s closer to early Newgrounds fare. Characters tend to be very stiff, and when they do move it’s usually tweened in a very clunky manner. While the graphics are cleaner than amateur internet cartoons, the design styles tend to be pretty unappealing, too. When near-amateurs on the internet can make animation miles better than your studio-produced TV show, you know you have a serious problem.

Johnny Test

Good Examples From TV

Fortunately, there are shows that actually do push the envelope with Flash to create animation that can compete with traditionally drawn work. Shows like Motorcity¹⁵ and Metalocalypse¹⁶ (especially Season 3 onward) – both produced by Titmouse Animation – have animation that uses recycled drawings and tweening to a decent extent, but pulls them off in an appealing and detailed manner. In addition, the graphic design is quite well-done, with subtle colors, detailed backgrounds, and composited lighting effects adding up to a pleasing style. This is a stark improvement over the bright, flat palettes of the more mediocre shows I discussed earlier.

But not to be too hard on bright, flat colors, because our last show takes the complete opposite approach to good animation. Superjail!,¹⁷ animated by Studio Augenblick (Season 1) and later Titmouse (Seasons 2-4), goes for a hand-drawn feel, because it basically is hand-drawn. Nearly all character animation is redrawn frame-by-frame, making Flash more of an incidental medium for animation than an actual style. This hand-drawn animation is quite smooth and detailed, especially in during the show’s many over-the-top action sequences.

Metalocalypse