Good stuffs!

I look at things like this and other CalArts animations, though, and I wryly reflect that today's CalArts kids are probably turning in nice slick Flash animations as their "pencil tests"...and I wonder whether that is really progress or not. Sure, this picture is rough looking and muddy, but goddamn does it have ENERGY!

In some ways I'd say Flash is an improvement; it removes alot of the grunt work of animation and lets animators concentrate on the basics; it's more about rigging models and setting up keyframes then having to do all the inbetweening work yourself. It's a good tool for teaching animation basics for that reason.

But on the other hand, it's got quite a few limitations that hand-drawn animation just doesn't, if you're willing to put in enough effort on the latter. Some of Roz's stuff looks, even at the pencil-test stage, straight out of Rock and Rule, and that just ain't possible with Flash.

Ezzackly. Flash and vectors gets ya FiM, Powerpuff Girls, TUFF Puppy and the like; while they're good in their own ways...Fantasia or What's Opera, Doc? they ain't.

Well, a good part of that isn't the fault of Flash; it's the fault of animation studios forced to work on ever-lower budgets because TV networks refuse to pay for decent animation, and haven't for decades.

In the 80s, that got a bunch of Saturday morning cartoons that were barely more then keyframes and recycled footage. With Flash, far more slick animation is possible under that same budget - compare FiM to the 1980s MLP. As well, the FiM folks have done things with Flash no other animation team has ever dreamed of doing. But they can't make it do all that hand-animation is capable of, and never will. I look forward with great eagerness to the day where hand animation once more becomes something studios are willing to fund.

A-fraggin-men!

I hadda watch Don Gato after that. :)

Ohhh, COOL! Been years since I saw this'n. Where can a fella score more of these Calarts ruff 'toons?