Limited animation is a process of making animated cartoons that do not follow a "realistic" approach. An animated cartoon is a short hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn Film for the cinema, Television or computer One of its major trademarks is the stylized design in all forms and shapes, which in the early days was referred to as modern design. The short cartoons and feature films of Walt Disney from the 1930s and 1940s are widely acclaimed for depicting animated simulations of reality, with exquisite detail in every frame. Walter Elias Disney (December 5 1901 – December 15 1966 was a multiple Academy Award -winning American Film producer, director, Screenwriter However, this style of animation is very time-consuming and expensive. "Limited" animation creates an image that uses abstract art, symbolism, and limited movement to create the same effect, but at a much lower production cost. This style of animation depends more upon suspension of disbelief to tell a story; the story exists more in the viewer's imagination. Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is an aesthetic theory intended to characterize people's relationships to art It also encourages the animators to indulge in artistic styles that are not necessarily bound to the limits of the real world. The result is a new artistic style that could not have developed if animation was solely devoted to producing simulations of reality. Without limited animation, such ground-breaking films as Yellow Submarine, Chuck Jones' The Dot and the Line, and many others could never have been produced. Yellow Submarine is a 1968 animated Feature film based on the music of The Beatles. Charles Martin "Chuck" Jones ( September 21, 1912 &ndash February 22, 2002) was an American Animator, The Dot and the Line A Romance in Lower Mathematics (ISBN 1-58717-066-3 is a book written and illustrated by Norton Juster, first published by Random House
The process of limited animation mainly aims at reducing the overall number of drawings. Film is projected at 24 frames per second (frame/s), but no animation studio would ever produce that many drawings. Frame rate, or frame frequency, is the measurement of the Frequency (rate at which an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames The For movements in normal speed, most animation in general is done "on twos", meaning 12 drawings per second are recorded in a way that each drawing is on two frames of film. Faster movements may demand animation "on ones", while characters that do not move may be done with a single drawing (a "hold") for a certain amount of time. It is said that the Disney average was about 18 drawings per second, pretending that all characters of a scene share the same sheet of paper. Limited animation mainly reduces the number of inbetweens, the drawings between the keyframes which define a movement, thus reducing the smoothness of a movement. Tweening, short for in-betweening is the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that A key frame in Animation and Filmmaking is a drawing which defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition.
Limited animation was originally founded as an artistic device, though it was soon used widely as a cost-cutting measure rather than an aesthetic method. The UPA studio made the first serious effort to abandon the ultra-realistic approach perfected by Disney. United Productions of America, better known as UPA, was an American Animation studio of the 1940s through present day beginning with industrial films Their first effort at non-realistic animation, Gerald McBoing-Boing, won an Oscar, and it provided the impetus for limited animation to be accepted at the major Hollywood cartoon studios, including Warner Brothers and MGM. Gerald McBoing-Boing is an animated short film produced by United Productions of America (UPA and given wide release by Columbia Pictures on January 25 "The Oscar" redirects here for the film see The Oscar (film. Warner Bros Entertainment Inc (or Warner Bros, Warner Bros Pictures) is one of the world's largest producers of Film and However, the real attraction of limited animation was the reduction in costs: because limited animation does not place a great emphasis on detail, it is much less expensive to produce. The 1950s saw all of the major cartoon studios change their style to limited animation, to the point where painstaking detail in animation occurred only rarely.
Most of Japanese animation (anime) consists of adapted techniques of limited animation. (anime in Japanese, In this case, the technique is combined with manga styles and aesthetics, and is a very distinct style. ˈmɑŋgə is the Japanese word for Comics (sometimes called komikku コミック and print Cartoons In their modern form manga date from shortly Aesthetics or esthetics ( also spelled æsthetics) is commonly known as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values sometimes called Limited animation in anime is seldom used for character animation but may frequently be used in action scenes such as mecha battles or transformation scenes. Limited animation in anime is seen most frequently in television serials, but the aesthetic is so grounded in the medium that even bigger-budget feature films make use of it. Most Japanese animation is significantly less expensive than its American counterparts as a result, with Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy (the most expensive anime feature film yet produced) costing only $26,600,000. is a Japanese Manga artist and director He is perhaps best known for being the creator of the manga Akira and its anime adaptation, which are extremely is a 2004 Japanese animated film produced by Sunrise, and directed and co-written by Katsuhiro Otomo, his second major anime release following
Limited animation techniques in America were used during the 1960s and 1970s to produce a great number of inexpensive, poor quality TV cartoons, "Saturday morning cartoons". A Saturday morning cartoon is the colloquial term for the animated television programming which was typically scheduled on Saturday mornings on the major American Such TV series as Clutch Cargo are infamous for being produced on ultra low budgets, with camera tricks used in place of actual animation. Clutch Cargo is an animated television series produced by Cambria Productions and syndicated beginning on March 9, 1959 Despite the poor quality of the animation, the TV cartoon studios Hanna-Barbera and Filmation thrived during this period. For the unrelated isometric graphics engine used by Ultimate Play the Game in their 8-bit computer games see Filmation engine.
The cost-cutting techniques used to mass-produce cartoons on a low budget included:
- cels and sequences of cels were re-used over and over again—animators only had to draw a character walking once.
- characters are split up into different levels: only portions of a character, such as the mouth or an arm, would be animated on top of a static cel.
- clever choice of camera angles and editing
- use of camera techniques such as panning to suggest movement
- cell reversal (simply using a mirror image of the cell to represent the opposite angle). Many cartoon characters are drawn symmetrically to expedite this technique.
- the visual elements were made subsidiary to audio elements, so that verbal humor and voice talent became more important factors for success ("talking heads")
- sliding a cell across a background to suggest movement. This is frequently easy to spot as glare, dust and scratches on the cell are also clearly visible (more so in digital cleanups of older cartoons).
Animated cartoons which made use of limited animation included Gerald McBoing-Boing, Mister Magoo, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, The Pink Panther, Clutch Cargo, The Flintstones, and Kinnikuman. Gerald McBoing-Boing is an animated short film produced by United Productions of America (UPA and given wide release by Columbia Pictures on January 25 Mr Quincy Magoo (or simply Mr Magoo) is a cartoon character created at the UPA animation studio in 1949 The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show is the collective name for two separate American Television Animated series: Rocky and His Friends The Pink Panther cartoon character is the main character in a series of animated short films. Clutch Cargo is an animated television series produced by Cambria Productions and syndicated beginning on March 9, 1959 The Flintstones is an animated American television sitcom that ran from 1960 to 1966 on ABC. was a Manga created by Yoshinori Nakai and Takashi Shimada under the Pen name Yudetamago (which literally means "boiled egg" in Japanese
In recent years, nostalgia for the 1970s, combined with technologies such as Adobe Flash, have led to a revival of the genre of limited animation. Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of Multimedia software created by Macromedia and currently Also, some modern graphic styles naturally translate into limited animation (My Life as a Teenage Robot, The Powerpuff Girls, Danny Phantom, Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack). My Life as a Teenage Robot is an American Animated Television series, produced by Frederator Studios for the Nickelodeon The Powerpuff Girls is an Emmy award-winning The show has come under criticism for its rather excessive violence (including images of characters gushing blood Danny Phantom was an American animated television show created by Butch Hartman for Nickelodeon, produced by Billionfold Studios Dexter's Laboratory ( Dexter's Lab for short is an Annie Award -winning American animated series created by Genndy Tartakovsky Samurai Jack is a 4-time Emmy Award -winning American Animated television series created by animator Genndy Tartakovsky that aired
See also
External links
- Cheats, Cliches, Cartoons, Anime... (Limited animation in anime)
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