MarbleBlastZone 2022-03-28 04:07:00

your tweet gave me an uneasy feeling so im glad you expanded on it here.

i will agree that the sources of inspiration for mainstream animation is overdone. i am genuinely curious as to what would be a better example of a modern cartoon in your eyes. if there are none, fair enough.

i agree that animation does have the potential to be much better, and i think its a matter of a lot of things rather than “talent”, like the outsourcing for a lot of the animation work coming from hollywood. to me it comes off as pretty insulting to go after the skill of artists in the industry, especially with them being horrendously overworked in the workplace.

i think youre also definitely undermining the storytelling elements. both Adventure Time and Steven Universe broke new ground for its themes whether you like it or not. if anything, its not the animators compromising their stories but the higher ups capitalizing on potentially digestible elements. so blame it on them.

i would also love to see more interesting unique storytelling and types of animation present in the mainstream. however i do think these thoughts moreso than not come off as “cartoons are too soft these days i wish it was slapstick funnies like they used to”

i might be intepreting this as the wrong tone or feelings you have so lmk

jthrash 2022-03-28 09:57:18

@MarbleBlastZone A Tweet gave you an uneasy feeling? What a surprise. I’m still disappointed, but not surprised that people even attempt to have a serious discussion within Twitter’s character limit. Thank goodness I read this opinion here, first.

jthrash 2022-03-28 11:02:26

I agree that it is tough to argue that animation is capable of so much more when mainstream studios, especially Cartoon Network, insist on not only telling the same stories and hiring writers who don’t seem to even know much about the world outside of anime and video games, but hiring only a small fraction of those people and making them essentially draw in the same art style. It’s like trying to argue that video games are art and then pointing to Overwatch and Call of Duty as examples of “diverse” art knowing fully well that the higher-ups at Activision are still struggling with the concept of keeping it in their pants while at work—you’re just going to have to look well past the mainstream in ANY medium to find truly unique stories and perspectives, especially as ballooning budgets make it impossible to take any sort of risk and Hollywood gatekeepers get older and more-out-of-touch.

Thank goodness the situation is a bit better for Newgrounds/YouTube animation, although we obviously need to work on expanding our influences beyond anime and video games, too. ALTHOUGH, although, you also have to consider that two-plus years of the pandemic have forced even the most extroverted storytellers to stay inside and get their inspiration from other media until it is truly safe to go outside and experience life again. It might be a while before we start seeing unique stories from people with lives again, although we already seem to be finding a balance between staying safe and not being a homebody for the first time since 2019, at least where I live.

Emrox 2022-03-28 14:12:08

Yeah it always kind of bothers me when people get up in arms about film people not taking animation seriously - it's like, if you want people to care, we gotta stop making stuff that stinks!

Then again, I'm not sure why anyone wants to be accepted by Hollywood types, since they seem to routinely suck the artistic merit out of anything they touch. Isn't it kind of crazy that when the self-proclaimed film authorities have such an obviously narrow-minded opinion of a medium, we desperately plead for them to understand as opposed to just writing *them* off for having weird elitist tastes that actually aren't especially refined. I don't remember exactly how this story goes, but it's like how the impressionists were all poor and misunderstood because the art gatekeeping committee thought it was unskilled trash, except instead of saying "fuck the establishment" and proving them wrong by making sick ass art, we file our complaints on Twitter to the people who already support us where no one from the academy will hear it anyway.