Hey, do you
guys remember Chalkzone? It was a rather obscure cart that aired on Nickelodeon
in the mid 2000's. The thing that always interested me about this
show was the shift in art styles when they left the natural work and when into
the “Chalkzone”. Granted the main characters never changed they appearance but
the world around them after they the charted go through the portal turned into
this chalk drawn world.
Although this show has been on for
a while and is for children yet again, The Amazing World of Gumboil is
surprising with its animation style. Although I would assume the set style is
that of the main character, each secondary character carries their own animation
style with them, ranging from flat 2-D to 3-D and everything in between. The
great thing about The Amazing World of Gumball is the way they incorporate as
many different animation styles as they can and the result is somewhat
disorienting as well as charming! (But again keep in mind this is a children's
show so yeah be wary.)
Cult anime series FLCL — otherwise known as Fooly Cooly — will be getting two more seasons, according to an announcement from Cartoon Network parent company Turner. The two seasons will include 12 new episodes, and be produced with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and Japanese anime studio Production I.G. Series creator Kazuya Tsurumaki will also return for the new seasons, which will air on Cartoon Network's Toonami block.
Remember the PowerPuff
Girls? If I remember correctly, it was a spectacular cartoon that was super
girl-power oriented and amazing! Well, the PowerPuff Girls was rebooted by
Cartoon Network and a couple episodes were released and I was a bit
apprehensive when it came to watching them.
I figured this reboot would
end up like the Teen Titans one, basically like every other show on Cartoon
Network that makes fart jokes. The other problem with the Teen Titans reboot is
also the fact that they really lost what the Teen Titans were really about,
fighting crime and saving the city against whatever aggressor.
However I was actually pleasantly
surprised with the PowerPuff Girls reboot. The animators attempted to preserve
as much of the essence of the original PowerPuff Girls as possible, and yes the
voice actors are different and the show does contain one too many fart jokes,
the essence of the original PowerPuff Girls is still present (at least I'm my
opinion and by present I mean I still feel the aesthetic and core values of the
original in the reboot)
Anyways! Possibly the
greatest thing to come from this reboot is the PowerPuff Yourself! It’s super
fun and delightfully nostalgic!
So over break I was watching my brothers for my parents and they were watching Cartoon Network. Now like any TVR major I can't resist watching TV when one is on, and I recognized a show from my childhood, Teen Titians Go! The only thing was that in the early 2000s it was called Teen Titans and it looked and sounded much different. The old series that ran from 2003 to 2007 had darker color scheme, it was sleek and not completely obtuse. When compared to the rebooted series in 2013 that I saw my brothers watching, I had to wonder why the drastic change? Is it because we as an audience have less of a standard for animation when it comes to a younger audience? This would certainly be the case in the Teen Titans franchise and similar cartoon shows across the board. I cannot say I blame the animators since they are just creating what the producers and studio wants. I will not get into plot structure or the crude humor influencing young minds in the reboot, but as a visual work the new Titians are lacking what they once had, class.
Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is an American animated television series that aired on Cartoon Network. It centered around Mac, who had to give up his imaginary friend Bloo because he's "too old." When he brings him to this home, he gets to make a deal that he has to visit the home everyday and Bloo won't be put up for adoption. Through this, we meet the other characters from the house who are all different imaginary friends (aside from Frankie and Madame Foster. The animation is fun and colourful and bright, which gives all the characters more ability to be different and three dimensional(personality-wise) and more well rounded. Each character has different quirks to correspond with the different personality as they were each created by a different kid who wanted imaginary friends.
I LIKE CHOCOLATE MILLLK.
If you're a Cartoon Network geek like me, then I'm sure that you've heard about the new Powerpuff Girls reboot. Being a huge Powerpuff Girls fan myself, you would think that I would be excited about this. I grew up with the show, I've idolized those girls, and I've been told that I can do a mean Bubbles impression. However, I find myself not feeling the hype for the new girls, and my reasoning is all behind the scenes. Craig McCraken, CREATOR of the Powerpuff Girls will be having nothing to do with the project, and that certainly shows when you look at some of the previews. While the animation looks smooth, and well budgeted, the art style is what turns me off. One of the things that made the Powerpuff Girls what it was was the unique art directions it went in. Everything was drawn with nice thick lines, and very sharp edges. It gave Townsville a personality, and it made every character very distinct looking from the next. This reboot decided to go in the complete opposite direction, and made the lines thin, and round.... Just like every other show on Cartoon Network today. The personality is gone, and I find it very hard to tell all of these characters apart, because they look like they can be on Steven Universe, or Clarence.
Maybe I'm just a ppg purist, but I feel like the reboot could be well done if it looked more inspired, and less like every cartoon I see today.
If you want to see the trailer, watch below. I don't mind the trailer too much, and the animation is pretty well done. Try to ignore the stupid song, though!
Hey everybody! So for my title sequence I'm thinking that I'll transform the beautiful landscapes of over the garden wall into a series of paper cut outs, and them have them move across the screen in 3d to give a cool parallax effect. Now I only really know as much photoshop as I've needed to know in order to get by here, so I was wondering if any of you out there might be able to offer me some advice.
Just so you guys can get a sense of what I'm trying to do here's a landscape that I'm halfway through paperizing.
It looks a little flat right now, and I'm thinking that I might stay from the original color scheme a bit since it's currently very hard to see the paper texture that I'm trying to put across. I also feel like it might be good to add a sort of vignette filter over the top of things to add a little extra visual intrigue. I'd love to know if you guys have any insights on how I might make this puppy pop. It's a real challenge trying to boil down these visually brilliant landscapes into their rawest form, but I'm confident that it can be done, and done it a way that doesn't make it look like a reject south park background.
For my title sequence I thought that it would be an interesting challenge to create an intro sequence for the critically acclaimed cartoon mini series "Over the Garden Wall".
For those of you who haven't seen Over the Garden Wall, the story follows the journey of two brothers lost in the woods, who with the help of a magical bluebird, traverse the land of the unknown. I enjoy watching a lot of the cartoons that are currently running on cartoon network (Steven Universe, Adventure Time), but I've not seen anything in recent years that has captured my imagination quite like OTGW. The show itself oozes with atmosphere, each background is an original water painting and every bit of music composed for the show is an original orchestra performed composition.
I feel as though this would be a really interesting piece to create a title sequence for. I look forward to dissecting the show further to better understand all the moving pieces that work together to create it's unique atmosphere. A lot of the show's music has been published online as well , so it'll be really interesting to see if I can find some sounds that'll resonate with the world of OTGW in a cohesive way. All in all I'm really excited to start working with such an intricate and interesting piece of media, I hope I can put something together that'll at least capture a bit of the show's timeless magic.
While trying to keep a hold on my fleeting youth over the summer, I managed to fall in love with a cartoon called Steven Universe. Amazing, the representation in this show is goddamn incredible with gender and sexuality but I also want to cry at the aesthetic that it upholds. While the crewniverse (all of the people who work on the show) keeps the fans updated on tumblr with most of the process that it takes, all of the backgrounds and character sheets that are used are posted in high quality. I've personally found that they help as reference sheets for my own work and actually help a lot as colour palettes. Some are just plain cute, honestly.
Their early designs were a lot more complex character-wise and it took a little tweaking on their part so they could animate the characters in a quicker fashion but they been noted to say that a lot of their actual focus goes much more into the story, music, and backgrounds specifically. The show tends to have a very overall relaxing quality and after looking at still frames of the show, I've found that it's really the backgrounds of the show that enthrall the viewer and suck them into this almost tangible world.
The detail that is put into some of the backgrounds genuinely gives you more of a sense of the fuller environment and even though the backgrounds tend to be static, the motion of the surroundings can still be noticed, especially in the clouds, the ocean, and the beach scenes. I believe they actually put motion blur on those things, which is honestly very smart and an easy way to get away with minimal animation in the background, keeping the focus up front.
Another thing that I very much love about SU is that there isn't much hidden in the process that they use to create the show. Aside from the simple behind the scenes that is usually given in a pathetic ratio to the actual show, SU gives more than they honestly should. But who's complaining. They post all of the creator, Rebecca Sugar's, demos for the songs (which, by the way, are adorable) and most of the storyboards including this little bit of the full version of the theme.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that you should definitely just watch the show for the weird storyline and the sweet gift that the damn thing is. The style and the colours are definitely a constant inspiration for me art-wise and the efficiency that they've strived to gain is very admirable. I hope to be able to pump out as much as they have and in that amount of time as well; god knows that my time is spent procrastinating and watching Steven Universe so my extra time would need to be well spent.
The animated show, "Chowder," on Cartoon Network ran from 2007 - 2010. It was created by C. H. Greenblatt, who has worked on Spongebob Squarepants and Fish Hooks. Chowder is one of my favorite animated shows of all time.
It centers around a food-loving apprentice of the talented chef, Mung Daal who runs a catering company with his abrasive wife, Truffles, and assistant, Schnitzel. Yes, all the characters are named after foods. It is very silly and fast-paced.
The animation is very fun to watch. The characters clothes and fabrics are filled with a pattern that stays stable as the characters move, creating a cool aesthetic. They also incorporate stop motion into the transitions.
Here's an amazing interview with C. H. Greenblatt, in which he explains the process for creating an episode of Chowder. It takes the length of a pregnancy to create the baby - an 11 minute episode.
Also, Chowder is on Netflix, so you have no excuse not to watch it now. You're welcome.
Usually when you think of a cartoon, you expect that all the characters and background will be in some kind of unified style. But that is not the case with a popular cartoon that currently runs of Cartoon Network, The Amazing World of Gumball.
The main character, Gumball, and his family are a typical 2-dementional cartoon, though the world that they live in is rendered in 3D. And it's not just the difference between the main characters and the background that makes this show unique. Many of the supporting characters are also in differing animation styles. There are some characters rendered in 3D, like the Tina T-Rex and Bobert the Robot, and a others are made with realistic CG, creating real world objects like a balloon and a piece of toast, just slap on a face and they are characters.
It's a quirky little show, and if nothing else, it is really interesting to see the different animation styles interact with one another.
As we become more familiar with animation software like After Effects, it seems like computers have made animation ten times easier. With the class's limited understanding of basic functions of After Effects, we can create a ball that bounces for ever in a matter of minutes. Imagine what we would be able to do with deeper understanding of the software. Because the software seems to make animation so easy, one may assume that all big studios would utilize those programs rather than rely on older animation techniques. Of course, there are a number of shows that make use of older and much more difficult animation techniques, like stop motion. One such show is Cartoon Network's Robot Chicken.
Robot Chicken is a sketch comedy show that airs during Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" segment nightly segment. The show makes use of stop motion animation, where they move the figures in tiny increments, recording each new placement one frame at a time. The do make use of some computer generated graphics for explosions or mouth movements, but a majority of the show is done stop motion, a technique that can take hours to just get a couple of seconds of video, and that's not counting the time it takes to make each figure and setting. You may not like the crude humor that the show has, but you can appreciate the amount of work that the creators put into each ten second sketch.
This week Cartoon Network featured a same sex couple in an episode of "Clarence".
The show follows Clarence and the various other people in his life. It's a slice of life comedy that boasts a well-rounded cast of characters.
"Clarence" featured openly gay characters in an earlier episode, but they were background characters.
Apparently it was originally going to be a mouth kiss, but the network said no
Where "Clarence" really shines, is in its diverse characters. Clarence himself is from a non-nuclear family, consisting of his mom and live-in her boyfriend, Chad.
This week's episode "Jeff Wins" centers around one of the main characters, Jeff, and the annual cooking contest he has trouble with each year. In it, we get to meet Jeff's moms!
It's so important that we get openly gay characters in children's media. Jeff having two moms was by no means the focal point of the episode. It's little things like that that make the biggest differences. There are all sorts of families, and there's nothing wrong with that. At all.
If you're interested in seeing the episode for yourself, you can check it out here
Over Thanksgiving break I got a chance to binge-watch a couple of shows. One of those shows happened to be an animated short series on Cartoon Network called Over the Garden Wall. It tells the tale of two brothers, Wirt (voiced by Elijah Wood) and Greg who become lost in "The Unknown", a dark forest that is filled with all sorts of mysteries. They must find their way home, but they are completely lost. Through their journey back home, they befriend a frog that sings show tunes and a blue bird with an attitude. The four of them make an unlikely and often argumentative group, but they have to stick together to make it out of the forest.
The show has a overall dark tone to it, which is atypical for a kids show, but it still is filled with laughs, smart dialogue, and intrigue. This short was the first miniseries that Cartoon Network has developed and as far as I would say, it was a great success. Patrick McHale, the creator of the show, put together a show that appeals to a wide variety of people. Once I started watching it, I couldn't stop. In fact I loved it so much that I made my friends watch it as well. The show is has only 10 minute episodes so it is definitely binge-worthy. Over the Garden Wall is definitely a show that I would recommend
You know those series that you kind of snap out of watching in a fumbling, blurry mess, not knowing where you are or what time it is? It's kind of like getting drunk, but then having the hangover happen almost immediately. You love it but you hate it, you question your life over it but you'll do it again. And for me, this (the binge-watching daze not the drunk one) happened late one night when I was looking around for something to distract me from doing actual work.
And luckily I happened to stumble across this little series, Over the Garden Wall, by Cartoon Network. The little eight year old within me perked up at seeing something that resembled the cartoons I had grown up loving fondly. And so I thought, why not, and plunged into the abyss. And so I found myself awake at 4am, desperately wanting to tell someone to experience roller coaster of emotions I had just been thrown on.
This was everything that I love about cartoons because it's not something that can be explained completely in one sentence. Like I said, it also felt like a throwback to my childhood: a strangely dark and oddly twisted sort of storytelling.
Written by Patrick McHale, it started off as an award-winning short called Tome of the Unknown that was picked up and produced as a full-length, ten-episode mini-series. Gathering some well known talent such as Elijah Wood and Christopher Lloyd, they've put life into these characters that is realistic in style and performance. Every single actor put life into their characters and they certainly wouldn't have been nearly as interesting had they not had the right voices. Over the Garden Wall follows two brothers (Greg and Wirt) who finds themselves lost in the woods, trying to find a way home. Their journey takes them across many lands and into many people, all of whom they effect in different ways. But while their journey seems whimsical on the surface, there's a darker tale that follows them like an ominous shadow. It's as if Alice in Wonderland and Courage the Cowardly Dog had a lovechild that was into musicals. It's a crazy sort of storytelling that you can't keep your eyes off of.
And the aesthetic is something that made this a truly outstanding thing to see. It's a dark sort of animation in both context and illustration, one that only helps to express the tone of the series better than anything. It's as if we too are lost in these imposing woods, surrounded by an ominous feeling of being watched.
Seeing the credits roll after the final episode, I was left feeling unsatisfied. Not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you question the universe. Because it was a story about two brothers more than it was a story about two brothers being lost in the woods. There's a sense of astute realness to their conversations and their actions (without the rigid confines of a writer trying to be too serious and prolific). And while it may have been non-sensical at times, there was still something about it that made sense in a linear fashion. Looking back, you can almost piece together what would happen next, given the many hints and clues that allude to what exactly is in "The Unknown."
It's definitely a series to check out: if not for the aesthetic, for the story (and vice versa). It'll suck you in and it won't let you go until you've long since passed the urge to turn away. It'll leave you with more questions than answers, but you'll be okay with it. Because in the end it's just about two brothers. Two brothers who went over the garden wall.
Today I'm going to talk to you about one of my very favorite television shows, "Adventure Time". For those of you who don't know, "Adventure Time" is a cartoon that airs on Cartoon Network and it was created by Pendelton Ward. It tells the tale of a boy and his magic dog living in a post apocalyptic world of Ooh along with mysterious and magical creatures. Although this show is geared for kids, it has a strong following for people outside of its target audience, including teenagers and adults (and me). The show's appeal is that it is simple, fun, and light-hearted, but below the surface there is a whole depth of meaning to the show. It is brightly colored giving the show a seemingly positive and worry-free world, but there is also very dark themes throughout the show. It also includes witty humor that definitely goes right over the heads of kids who watch the show.
What impresses me about "Adventure Time" is the execution of the episodes and the creativity behind each and every character and scene. Each quirk is unique to this show. One of the main characters, Jake, is a magical dog that can grow and stretch and transform into just about anything. There is also a floating cloud-like character, Lumpy Space Princess, who has more sass than anyone I have ever seen. The character detail is not overly complex, but the colors used in the show are truly breathtaking. The episodes are a labor of love and the process takes about 9 months to create just one episode (including storyboarding, writing, animating, coloring, voice-overs, etc.). It feels like so much more than a kids show to me and I definitely would recommend it to just about anyone.
Back in 1998 Cartoon Network debuted an interesting new show. The premise involved three, evil fighting, chemically created young girls. In every episode Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles would defend their town and deal with their own issues of growing up. The show lasted until 2005 and even transitioned in to a highly acclaimed feature movie.
The Powerpuff Girls were loved by many audiences and took risks that many other "children's" programming wouldn't dare to. Fighting gender stereotypes were at the backbone of every episode as the girls would constantly prove their worth and prevail against stronger, more traditionally masculine characters. The villains of the program fought gender stereotypes as well. One of the recurring villains, HIM was essentially a cross-dressing devil who expressed himself in female clothes. The Rowdyruff Boys acted as a parallel, masculine version of The Powerpuff Girls who constantly ridiculed and belittled the heros, but always ending up powerless in comparison.
The artwork and animation of the show used pastel colors and flashy, short animation. At times the animation seemed almost choppy, but it always seemed to fit within the action packed, comic-like world The Powerpuff Girls lived in. The girls themselves looked young, and fresh. They sported their signature large, baby eyes that could change in a seconds notice if it was time to seek justice. Cartoon Network recently announced a reboot scheduled for the show. They plan to bring The Powerpuff Girls back to television in 2016. Along with this announcement the network also shared a shot of the new animation style for the girls. It features harder lines that add a realm of darkness to the girls persona. I personally am not a fan of this new style and feel like this art style fits in more with the world of the Cartoon Network show Samurai Jack, rather than the bubbly land of The Powerpuff Girls.
Below are the original artwork and new artwork. What do you think? Should they have just kept the original art style or is it a much needed upgrade?
Well folks it's the end of the year. Our screenings start next week and most of our projects are done…I hope.
For the posts I've researched this semester, I've finally had the chance to find out how some of my favorite pieces in animation were made. A lot of the other posts that I've seen on here have shown me some motion graphics and animated topics I wasn't aware of.
I want to end my entry time here with some of my favorite forms in animation I've come to to love over the years.
You Are a Pirate
Fred Perry
Gold Digger Time Raft
(Hand-Drawn Animated Style)
The Boondocks
Adult Swim
(Japanese Animation Style)
Robot Chicken
(Stop Motion Animation)
The Mask
(CGI)
This last video has been one of my favorite animated transformations. I've been looking around to find what programs they used for getting the mask on Jim Carrey, but my research has yet to yield results.
As for its sequel Son of the Mask….
….I like to think of it more as a weird phase Loki was going through before he returned in Thor and The Avengers.
Maybe that round with the Hulk brought him to his seneses
While I don't think I'll be pursuing a career in animation to the degree of Toy Story, I'm glad I was able to get the experience of learning some of the basics of using after effects.
