1980's cartoons lost art?
 

Seeing the cross over and seeing the 2d animation was way off vs the 1980's cartoon. Has CGI really spoiled todays animators?

I enjoy the show, but still It seems that that style of animation is a lost art for some odd reason.

What are you talking about here? There are still plenty of great animated 2D shows out there.

The 2D scenes in the Nick show didn't look great because they used one step above flash animation for it.

I cant think of any outside of the comic book cartoons as of late. Most of it is Gumball or something like that level as of late. I really thought the 2d scenes were pretty bad.

I think the last great 2d cartoon was avatar and korra. But that was years ago.

Korra literally just ended 2 years ago.

80s cartoons look awful, it wasn't until the 90s that cartoons started looking better and the 00's and 10's probably had the best looking 2D cartoons. The problem is its very expensive to make 2D while 3D is cheap and the only way to make 2D cheaply is through the flash-like animation. Sadly since kids love CG then companies just don't see a reason to invest in the more expensive 2D alternative.

There are still animators around nowadays that can work in a more or less traditional way, but to get the OT’s look down exactly, they’d have to animate on paper and hand painted cells, and pretty much no one does that anymore. Still, they could get much closer than they have, simply by hand drawing each frame (digitally, like Turtles Forever ), rather than the puppet pin method they are using.

Looks like Nick is using a digital ‘cut-out’ process to animate the 2D stuff, probably because they are already using it to do the other ‘cartoon’ elements in the show, i.e. Super Robo Mecha Force Five or Crognard etc. I guess they could outsource the 2D parts to another studio that is set up for hand drawn animation, but it would cost more than doing it in-house, and probably take a lot longer.

Edit:

You can make traditional looking(ish) animation in Flash, or similar vector based digital animation packages. They call it 'tradigital' animation, and it basically involves drawing directly into the computer on a graphics tablet, and using the software to paint and animate. It won't necessarily give you the same look as cells, but you can get the same type of motion.

What I think you mean by flash-like animation is where a drawing is broken up into segments and manipulated in a manor more akin to 3D animation, i.e. linked together with pivot points and rotated and stretched where ever possible to create poses; with the inbetweening done by the computer.

The problem with 2D animated cartoons today is that the style doesn't appeal to me. It's all jagged lines, simplistic design, no facial detail. That's why I miss 80s and early 90s cartoons. As you can imagine I'm not a big fan of Adventure Time's animation.