Looks like digital ink to me. Cel animation would be astronomically expensive these days, wouldn’t it?
Yes! That would be amazing!
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One element of Merrie Melodies I’d love to see them bring back is Mac and Tosh, the over-polite gophers. Not sure how they’d work that into today’s cultural atmosphere…maybe Mac and Tosh vs. MAGA?
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Great idea, because there are a LOT more nuts out there for the two of them to gather! 
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“Shall we expose them for the racist trolls they are?”
“Yes, I think we should! You go first.”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t. You’re much more adept at this than I!”
'Well, if you insist."
“Oh, I do! I do!”
“Thank you. You’re oh so gracious!”
“Quite.”
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[…] considering where we are now culturally compared to where we were back then.
Are you suggesting that this might not be entirely appropriate today?
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Nope. Nope. Nope. I don’t care about the animation aspect. If the cartoons are all like that preview, I won’t be able to watch them. There’s just no heart in it like the old ones. The last round of new cartoons went too far into being PC and were so awful that I quit trying to like them and never watched them again. This time it just seems to be a series of gags with no real story. (sigh…)
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They brought them back for the more recent show; they ran an antique store and sang songs about their relationship (which was kept a bit vague; they’re either dating or are very close siblings, but I mean, come on)
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To split more hairs 
, Scott wasn’t the only person that Stalling was lifting from.
It always bums me out that sometimes you get people talking about Ives when it comes to the history of sampling in music, but never Stalling. I know Stalling was working under some weird constraints with copyright, Warner’s back catalog, and synching to animation, but the man was doing sampling before it was called sampling. Sure, so were other people scoring cartoon music, but Stalling was really good at it.
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Fanklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton… so what else could it be? Of course so so few people today know who those to actors are.
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Having learned how to use Photoshop and Clip Studio, I say thank God for being able to work digitally. The ability to undo a mistake without destroying hours of sketch work, to be able to correct something without risking the eraser ripping the paper, to be able to put your hands where they need to be without the danger of smearing something - these are freaking Godsends.
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What desensitizes kids to violence - and to bad behavior and too many other things is these crappy modern cartoons where there are no consequences to anything. Nobody suffers when they do something wrong. Violence all around, and nobody gets hurt. Kids in the show do something wrong, and the worst that happens is somebody talks to them. In the old cartoons, when a character did something stupid and dangerous, they got blown up or fell off a mountain or something. When a kid in an old cartoon did something wrong, he got spanked. People watching those cartoons saw actual stories that showed doing the wrong thing caused suffering - they learned from cartoons that actions have consequences. Now, kids grow up with subconcious beliefs that there are no comebacks because they grow up watching 30-minute product advertisements where the only bad thing that happens to anyone is turning on the TV.
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Hard disagree. If you compare the quality of work in Gravity Falls or Hilda or Rick and Morty or even Spongebob Squarepants to the made-for-TV animation of the 60s, 70s and 80s it’s really no contest.
Hanna-Barbera didn’t dominate Saturday Mornings because they made great cartoons, they dominated Saturday Mornings because they perfected the art of cutting corners and were thus able to produce cartoons quickly on a TV budget.
(No offense to your namesakes.)
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Agreed, however having those time saving tools tends to lead to a more homogenized feel to the animation than working closer to the “old school” process. They are a godsend for a commercial product these days, because without them a designer/animator wouldn’t be able to compete professionally with the people who have them.
If speed isn’t of the essence for a project, and the goal is to match the look of animation done in the old days, it would be better to eschew some of those processes, and stick to using some of the older skills.
Hmmm. I was a kid in the 70s and a teen in the 80s. I enjoyed the “older” cartoons all through those years, along with some of the new ones that came out. There aren’t many cartoons that I recall from that time period ending with a spanking, and they were plenty violent with no lasting damage to the recipients of the violence and (usually) no external punishment to the cause of the violence. It’s lampooned and dialed to 11 through “The Itchy & Scratchy Show”, the cartoon within the cartoon on “The Simpsons”.
I feel like your correlation and causation is askew. So many factors can desensitize someone to something, pointing to cartoons as being the cause for the problem is just too simplistic. It’s like trying to blame violence on violent video games. There are many vectors that influence how someone develops.
If you don’t enjoy modern cartoons because kids don’t get spanked at the end…
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Technology can make for a lot of cheap shortcuts. I think one of the main evidences of this in modern animation is a sort of “puppet” style animation that is done on shows like metalocalypse. They do it well, but it always has the feel of someone manipulating elaborate paper dolls rather than actually animating. But you can do animation in a traditional way digitally and in many ways it’s easier. You don’t have to use reams of paper. Spend countless hours scanning or photographing. You don’t have to retrace drawings onto acetate and paint them carefully by hand. All of those things are kinda obsolete even though the real techniques of drawing, acting, humor, pathos, etc etc are still as valid as they were 100 years ago. If you’re using the computer to get around learning to draw or act, you’re doing it wrong. Technology won’t make you a good animator, but it can make the job of a good animator less tedious.
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As Nathan explosion would say: what is a human but a puppet made of meat and blood?
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TV Animation has relied on cheap shortcuts since long before digital tech took over. The reason so many Hanna-Barbera characters had a perpetual five-o-clock shadow is because you could have Fred Flintsone’s head and body stay put while he was talking and just swap out the animation cell that had his mouth on it without having to redraw the rest. And of course about 40% of any given episode of Voltron was just recycled footage of the lions assembling together.
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I’m not in disagreement with the points you bring up.
I’m saying, if the goal is to emulate the look of the cartoons from the 40s - 50s, then reliance on modern techniques and shortcuts tends to show through and leave it feeling as though it’s missing something.
The something I feel it’s missing is the ingenuity of the great animators of the past and the techniques they developed in order to accomplish their goals with the materials they had available. It might be a bit janky at times, but that’s what makes it authentic looking.
It’s in the wrinkles that the software and techniques used these days iron out, giving everything that smooth “sameness”.
Take the teaser video in this post. I believe it feels similar to the cartoons of the past, but it still misses the mark. It’s in the “uncanny valley” that exists when trying to mimic a look from the past. It’s close, closer than a lot of modern animation (that isn’t trying to look vintage) would be, but something isn’t right.
To my eye, the colors feel right, the title card has some nice bleeding in the lettering and looks like it was hand painted, but the black line work in the actual cartoon feels too smooth. No variation between frames that you see with cell animation.
But it does look like they are creating the tweens rather than letting a computer fill them in, based on a random screen grab:
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I like that still! I think my point is that I feel like it’s the animators skills in anatomy, expression, character and acting that were great in the old cartoons - the artifacts of the analog process are fun (like the effects that they did to cuphead) but the artifacts are More like Instagram filters - cheap effects that give the feel of “old cartoon” without capturing the real essence of what made them great - the skills of the artists and directors. (I think cuphead looked amazing on many levels by the way- Not just the film grain and style but you know what I mean)
and…
I also agree with this. Filters/effects are great, but only when the person using them has really studied how they should be used. Just slapping them on doesn’t cut it.
As for this current project, as I said at the beginning I’m reserving judgement, and not taking this teaser as the end-all-be-all of what they are looking to accomplish; it’s meant to generate interest and excitement for the project. I would be shocked if every cartoon they make in this revival lacked purpose or plot, as the one does (aside from the purpose I just mentioned, drum up interest).
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