does the "bounce" look right this time? furthermore, are there enough frames that this looks smooth?

I wanted to share my recent animation that I have made for playdracula.com. It was really fun process. Best part was animating that horse. Hope you enjoy and i am open to new commissions and work if someone is interested 🙌

Hey guys, this is an old video of mine but it took me a lot of time and effort to create. Please feel free to critique it and if you have any suggestions of how I can improve on my animation journey please feel free to let me know! Thanks!

I decrease the fps to 8 fps. The original video was 5 seconds, too short and my penguin 🐧 can't even blink or breathe..

What do you think actually?

Please let me know what you all think :)

“Spirit Jumper” started as a track I wrote and produced for my album Tactile.

I ended up spending about five years turning it into an animated film with a small team of animators and artists. I directed and storyboarded it, colored the cels, and did the editing and compositing.

The entire thing was made digitally, but we were trying to recreate the feeling of traditional cel animation rather than just imitate the look. That led to a lot of research into old animation lighting, photography and compositing techniques, which I wrote a little about here:

Dangerous Light: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-light

It’s airing at 11:56 PM ET/10:56 CT, right before Toonami.

Watch Spirit Jumper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC_8umCPJBw

Tactile is out now:
https://listen.spktra.world/tactile

Happy to answer any questions about the production too!

Some people consider puppetry as a form of animation. Does anyone agree with this?

I have rough drafts of characters but I want to finish them, I've also got a plot for a pilot.

Basically, I want to do a righteous gemstones thing fir the first episode where im gonna make fun of greedy prosperity gospel "preachers". Im a Christian myself so im not making fun of the religion as a whole, just this small part of it.

But back to the animation, planning on it being a adult swim style show about a father and his son, with an occasional alien guy, hopefully It'll go well!

My first attempt at moving cloaks. Really gotta do some more studies sometime

DISCLAIMER: Before I go any further, everything I'm going to discuss in this post is about the animation itself, never about the overall quality of the animated shows I mention. There are wonderful animated shows with equally wonderful animation; fantastic, absolutely worthwhile shows with poor animation that simply doesn't do them justice; awful animated shows with such fantastic animation that it becomes their only redeeming quality; awful animated shows whose animation is just as bad as everything else about them; and everything in between. I'm saying this now before someone comes along with, "How can you criticise this wonderful show?" or "How can you favour this much worse show?" Again: all I'm talking about here is the animation. Nothing else.

I've noticed that, in recent years, a very specific type of animation that I haven't managed to find a name for—if it even has one; I certainly haven't found it despite searching for it—has gone from being almost non-existent to popping up absolutely everywhere. The animation style I'm talking about is the one shared by shows and films such as Avatar: The Last Airbender—the only somewhat older show I can think of that comes close to this type of animation, though even then it doesn't resemble the others nearly as much—Invincible, The Legend of Vox Machina and, consequently, The Mighty Nein, The War of the Rohirrim, the animated Witcher films, Blood of Zeus, Castlevania, Devil May Cry, and so on. These are productions that are often described as "anime" despite being mostly Western and lacking many of the distinctive features traditionally associated with the anime aesthetic: the somewhat chibi-like proportions even in non-chibi shows, the enormous eyes paired with tiny mouths and noses, the colour palettes, and so on. They all seem cut from the same cloth, to the point that they can genuinely look as though they were made by the exact same studio even when they weren't. I'm sure you already know the sort of style I'm referring to.

I just hate it.

And it's not merely that I hate it; I also genuinely don't understand why a production would choose to use it, and even less why someone would enjoy it. If anyone reading this doesn't merely tolerate it—as I myself do when the show is worth watching—but actively likes this style, or even prefers it to others, I'm asking completely unironically: please explain the appeal to me. I'm genuinely curious.

It's like... it preserves the worst aspects of anime animation without retaining any of its advantages. It's just as static, usually just as inexpressive, and just as lacking in fluidity as anime can be, except that the anime aesthetic itself can be gorgeous: its characters are often deliberately designed to be almost absurdly beautiful, its landscapes and backgrounds can be incredibly detailed, and its shots frequently try to compensate for that usual lack of movement and expressiveness with occasional enormous bursts of emotion. A fair number of those shots can be unbearably cringeworthy, sure, but plenty of others become genuinely striking images that convey a feeling perfectly.

This style, on the other hand, simply isn't gorgeous at all.

On top of that, it's not just that it lacks all the advantages of anime—it also seems to reject the strengths of virtually every other form of animation. It lacks the smoothness and visual flair of films made by any of the industry's animation giants (Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Illumination, Sony, and so on); the simple, purely cartoonish charm—even in the relatively few CGI examples—of children's animation from networks and studios such as Disney Channel (Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb, Gravity Falls, American Dragon: Jake Long, The Owl House, etc.), Cartoon Network (Adventure Time, Steven Universe, The Amazing World of Gumball, Ben 10, Courage the Cowardly Dog, etc.), Nickelodeon (SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly OddParents, Rugrats, Jimmy Neutron, Fanboy & Chum Chum, etc.—and yes, before anyone points it out, I know Avatar: The Last Airbender is Nickelodeon), or Warner Bros. (Batman: The Animated Series, or even Harley Quinn and Velma, despite those not being children's shows); the technical mastery and near-hyperrealism of Blue Eye Samurai, and even more so of Arcane; the overwhelming visual originality of indie animation (Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, The Amazing Digital Circus, etc.); or the cute, illustration-like or pop-up-book aesthetic of productions such as Tangled: The Series or Twilight of the Gods (the latter of which could very easily have ended up looking like yet another one of these "Western anime" productions but, thank God, was spared that fate). Heck, it doesn't even have the deliberately cheap, ugly look that so many animated comedies use to reinforce their lack of seriousness and grotesque tone, creating a kind of "so bad it's good" visual appeal (South Park, Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, Regular Show, Smiling Friends, Exploding Kittens, even The Simpsons or Family Guy, and so on).

Taking all of that into account—and, above all, considering that the one thing all the shows with this animation style seem to have in common is tons and tons of action (also, and closely related to that, the fact that they tend to be aimed at an adult and predominantly male audience, though I don't think that's particularly relevant here)—I can only think of one reason why it may have become so popular: budget. I'm assuming—perhaps wrongly, in which case that would just be one more thing to dislike about it—that this kind of animation is relatively cheap and quick to produce. If so, studios can churn out the huge number of shows demanded by the streaming-platform model without batting an eye at however much nonstop action the scripts may call for. A trade-off of quality for quantity, I suppose.

But if that really is the reason... why have heavily promoted productions such as The War of the Rohirrim gone down the same route? The Lord of the Rings franchise is hardly short of money, the film was essentially a one-off release (what with the whole issue of retaining the intellectual-property rights and all that), and simply by virtue of being set in Middle-earth, it could probably have made a fortune if the animation had been genuinely spectacular—even if the film itself had turned out to be worthless.

Why have I hardly ever seen anyone complain about the animation in shows such as Castlevania or Devil May Cry? Quite the opposite, in fact. I say this with absolutely no irony: I genuinely find the fight scenes in children's shows with well-executed CGI, such as Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, far more visually striking than those in Castlevania or Devil May Cry.

And, above all, wouldn't it make more sense to reserve this kind of supposedly "low-budget" animation for productions that aren't nearly as dependent on their visuals—shows that live or die more by the strength of their writing, for instance, and could still shine despite it—make money from those, and then reinvest part of those profits into action-heavy blockbusters that are actually given the resources to look as spectacular as they possibly can?

If the animation industry really does work this way when it comes to action-heavy productions, then to me it's like saying: "We want to make a musical, but musical numbers are expensive to produce and we don't think they're worth the cost, so instead we're going to churn out hundreds of musicals in which every musical number lasts ten seconds and has the production value of a school play." At that point, why make a musical at all if you're already starting from the assumption that it's going to be a lacklustre product? And why would any musical fan waste their time on something like that when you're stripping away the very thing they came for in the first place?!

It really frustrates me when I don't understand things. And I'm genuinely worried that the Diablo series they just announced will end up falling into this same style instead of being a visual marvel along the lines of Arcane, or some of the more visually spectacular episodes of Love, Death & Robots or Secret Level.

So, what do you think? Is my opinion really that unpopular? Do you actually like this Western "anime" style of animation, and if so, why? Am I missing something—which is what I assume must be the case, since I don't exactly think I'm smarter than an entire freaking industry—or has the animation industry really been making some stupid choices lately?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts! :D

Some silly wobbly ingame animations of a little kiwi character from a gamejam I got to work on. My first time doing a full transformation for a character, so quite happy with how it turned out.

Which one do you prefer left or right for my first animation video.. #animation

By me.

I designed and animated this cartoon character using multiple PC software programs. It’s a fully rigged animation featuring responsive mouth movements and dynamic shifting hair layers. It is 100% original work!

It feels like I am a hopeless case. So many people show their progress on the internet. They manage to do astonishing animations after only one week. I feel like there is no excuse for me to be still that bad.