Season one will not go down in history as having the best animation...

[The Great Saiyaman]

So let's name the scenes of season one episodes which had the Worst animation and the ones with the best.

Worst
- Hands down "Turtle temper" the roof scene where Raphael takes Mikey in a headlock, the layering is glaringly bad. Also the scene in which the others shoot rubber tipped arrows at Raph, look at their mouths as they insult him, Donnie's in particular is suddenly looking 2D in his otherwise 3D face.
- "TCRI" the scene where the Turtles escape from the Kraang by Using Mikey as a battering ram, as Mikey retracts his head and extremities into his shell, his belt disappears, big blunder here.

Best
- The training scene in "I monster" where the Turtles fight Splinter, It's a homage to the fight scenes in "the Matrix" and even with season one animation it's pretty darn impressive.
- The fight between Shredder and the Turtles in "the Gauntlet" especially the close up scenes of the Turtles' wounds as they get more busted up after getting the snot kicked out of their shells.
- "New Girl in town" the entire episode: the close ups of Leo's face and you can see the cloth pattern of his mask, the organic vats in which Snakeweed is keeping his captives, the fight scenes between Leo and Karai, this episode was easily one of the best of them all.

[CyberCubed]

True, I'm actually scared to think how much the CG animation will age 5+ years from now. I hope it doesn't ruin my enjoyment of the show when I rewatch it in the future, but CG animation of course ages far faster than traditional 2D cartoons.

[neatoman]

Yeah I rewatched season one last year, the animation sure aged poorly very quickly. The fact that assets kept getting reused doesn't help either, it kind of feels like a puppet theatre at some points. I wonder if the Nick excecs thought it was going to be like "Fanboy and Chum-Chum" and gave it a low budget because they didn't think it would matter, or if TV CGI just tends to age poorly regardless of budget? Sine Transformers Prime suffers from the same problem, I'm going with the latter.

[The-Shredder]

At least up until this show, Nick's 3D animated shows were poorly animated. The 2012 series is an improvement, but it still has the same animation quirks as their other shows, such as low quality textures and colors.

[SaurusX]

Yeah I rewatched season one last year, the animation sure aged poorly very quickly. The fact that assets kept getting reused doesn't help either, it kind of feels like a puppet theatre at some points. I wonder if the Nick excecs thought it was going to be like "Fanboy and Chum-Chum" and gave it a low budget because they didn't think it would matter, or if TV CGI just tends to age poorly regardless of budget? Sine Transformers Prime suffers from the same problem, I'm going with the latter.

Animation from every era has its distinctive quirks. G1 Transformers was not well animated, but it's the stories and characters that everyone remembers. Hell, 80's Turtles had plenty of terribly animated shows and it still gets love.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Animation from every era has its distinctive quirks. G1 Transformers was not well animated, but it's the stories and characters that everyone remembers. Hell, 80's Turtles had plenty of terribly animated shows and it still gets love.

I like the fact that all TMNT cartoons have been animated so different.

[Kit31]

I agree. The early episodes of season 1 had some weird animation, but things greatly improved in later seasons. BUT! The one thing that they never could get right (and this ended up being a major pet peeve of mine in this show) was the water animation. It looked great at the surface with the movements and everything - very realistic. Then you get to the part when someone or something is at the surface the water and...it goes downhill from there. It just looks like they put the person/object in the water, but the water doesn't react to something being put into it. Except for a minor ripple in some cases, but still it doesn't look right. The underwater scenes like in "Owari" are beautifully animated, though.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

True, I'm actually scared to think how much the CG animation will age 5+ years from now. I hope it doesn't ruin my enjoyment of the show when I rewatch it in the future, but CG animation of course ages far faster than traditional 2D cartoons.

It's still here to stay, so the next time we get a cartoon like the three earlier, the turtles will probably be back in CG.