Animation

I am an animator, specifically one who works in 2D animation, so I thought it would be interesting to write a post about it. There are many different types of animation, from traditional hand drawn, to stop-motion, to CG, but for now I will specifically be touching on 2D animation, as it is the type I am most experienced in doing (and also this blog is about 2D art). Animation is the art form of bringing the illusion of life to a still image by drawing very similar frames and then relaying them back very quickly. It is very difficult. This art form is used in everything from children's television and films, to video games, to advertisements and more. Most professional pieces of animated media use from 12 to 24 frames per second, but it depends on the project. There are two major types of 2D animation that you are likely to see, which are traditional (on paper) and digital (which is done in something like photoshop or some other drawing program generally). I personally use both types of animation in my own artwork, but not everybody does. There are also some types of two-dimensional stop motion animation, like when somebody uses paper cutouts. There are many ways to go about doing animation; most people these days just go straight into the animation process after storyboarding, but some like rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is a process in which an animator traces over live action footage to capture realism. It was invented in the early days of animation, but isn't often used these days because it looks sort of uncanny and off. Most 2D animation in America as of recently has been used for television and not film because of the rise of popularity of CG animation in the film industry.

These are two gifs from the Disney show Gravity Falls, pencil animation vs. finished product

 Underneath are some pencil animations from Dreamworks' Road to Eldorado and Disney's Tarzan

And here is a shot from Cartoon Saloon's film the Secret of Kells, which uses a very distinct and time-consuming to animate style; the characters may look simplistic, but in reality they are quite complex.

Here are some examples of rotoscoping; the top gif is from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the lower one is from Don Bluth's Anastasia. These movies are agreed upon as being a good use of rotoscoping. In my opinion, Don Bluth's rotoscoping still looks a bit uncanny sometimes, but it looks fine for the most part. But it's a bit off. Snow White is a very good example of rotoscoping done right.

These are from Ralph Bakshi's animated Lord of the Rings movie, which is generally agreed upon as an atrocious use of rotoscoping, and to be honest I agree that it looks really bad. It looks really, really uncomfortable. How could we let this happen?

And here is some non-western animation, because this post is overwhelmingly taken up by American animation (although the Secret of Kells is a French-Belgian-Irish film). The below gif is from Hayao Miyazaki's film Kiki's Delivery Service (you should watch it). This is done by Studio Ghibli, probably one of the most famous animation companies in the world. It is stationed in Japan.

Anyways. this post is getting really long because I went on a tangent about rotoscoping (which can work, it doesn't have to look bad, but it has that reputation because of SOME movies) so I think I'll call it a day and end this now.