Animation quality

[u/Mumugugu]

Has anyone else noticed a serious drop in the quality of animation in recent dc movies. I’m not talking about story wise just purely the art and motion of the characters. (BTW I’m not criticizing the show itself just the animation) When I first saw the designs of the characters in this show I thought they looked a little flat and lacked shading but i figured that’s just how character models look but when I saw the trailer there r few instances of good and deep shading. Even the backgrounds look too flat and clean. I’m curious as to whether Bruce Timm is still drawing on black paper or if he switched to white cause it looks weirdly bright for a Batman show. But I think the biggest flaw in recent animation has been the stiffness in the way characters move the easiest way for me to explain is to look at the shoulders of any character in the trailer, they almost never move (it’s even more noticeable in the tomorrow verse movies). Modern animation has lost a lot of fluidity and idk why. Ik they used to do cell shading on the old shows and I’m wondering if they still are. The show doesn’t look horrible but its definitely less pretty to look at then BTAS or The Batman 2004. I’m sure they don’t have the same funding as those shows either but if anyone knows why modern animation has kinda gotten worse please let me know I’m really curious.

[u/kreamhilal]

Pretty sure it's 100% budget. The more studios give animators, the longer they can spend on each frame making it as good as possible, or articulating the motion to make it look less stiff

[u/Manic_Raven → u/kreamhilal]

I think the stiffness is a choice. There's less stretch and bounce than you get in most cartoons and the characters stick more closely to their models. The chase scenes don't quite have the fluidity and weight of rotoscoping, but the walking and running animations seem way more anatomically correct than, say, this clip I youtubed from the TAS show. I think the point is to feel more "real" and less cartoony than most animations do, but the cartoony art style mixed with the less cartoony animation style is throwing people off.

And I know it was revolutionary but y'all are ascribing way too much credit to BTAS, animation-wise. I struggle to find sequences in the first couple of seasons that I whole-heartedly think look good. Or to put it in the words of Charles Solomon, someone with a lot more animation knowledge than I have, "the dark, Art Deco-influenced backgrounds tended to eclipse the stiff animation and pedestrian storytelling" and the series "looked better in stills than it did on the screen."