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Crawl and 1OOO wrote:

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Yeah, what is BAD yankee animation? The first thing that comes to mind would be Hanna Barbara, but that's not as as prominent as Warner or Disney.

I've come to the conclusion that if you view any random cartoon clip, anime or otherwise, on YouTube, there's a really good chance it'll be crap.

The old Don Bluth stuff was animated pretty well, too. (By now, with the millionth Land Before Time sequel, maybe not so much)

Don't know about the sequels, but the first Land Before Time had better animation than most anime I've seen.

One thing about anime is that if you haven't experienced a lot of it, it's weird and different enough the first time you see it that it might impress you. However, the more anime you see, the more you begin to realize there are a lot of shortcuts involved. As Crawl has pointed out numerous times, that things don't move much. (I remember he once said something like, you'll see more frames of animation in a round of Super Punch-Out!! than in Lunar's cutscenes. He also once remarked how in an episode of Rescue Rangers, everything was always moving. Never were there scenes of characters standing completely still that would last for a long time.) I noticed in Killer7's cutscenes that things often would be completely still except for a mouth moving, and sometimes they'd even take shortcuts to avoid that (a camera would pan behind a character when he/she's talking, or the character would be slumped over with their head rested down in their arms so you can't see the mouth.) I saw a clip of some anime on YouTube where a character has the ability to stop time. At this point, I almost have to wonder if this character had this power because someone thought it was a cool power or would make a good story, or because, hey! We can have fight scenes where he stops time and nothing has to move for however long we dictate!

Oh, and those camera pans. Anime artists love them some camera pans. Even my mother once pointed out that a lot of scenes in Dragon Ball Z were just panning across a landscape. A scene in Killer7 pans across the dials of a car. (Of course even the dials aren't moving at all.)

Reused animation. Some American cartoons have this problem, too (He-Man), but it's far more prevalent in Japanese animation. (Voltron, Sailor Moon). I remember Kiera one time talking about this anime movie she saw about people going on a voyage through space. She said that whenever they'd want to show people going from one place on the spaceship to another, they would just show a bunch of legs running. Then she said this happened several times throughout the whole movie.

Because of my experience with it, I can almost imagine what Troy is talking about (except I don't really want to imagine it. )

Of all anime I've seen, Hayao Miyazaki's movies and some parts of the first Tenchi movie had the best animation. But I've seen little evidence of Japan having animation technology that's superior to everyone else's. Or if they do have it, they're holding back on it for some reason.

Also, this post is purely in regards to the animation itself. Things like story quality and character designs are other issues. Most of my favorite cartoons aren't things I necessarily think have great animation. Gargoyles probably has the highest "good animation : how much I like it" ratio. Real Ghostbusters and Transformers were actually (for the most part) done by Japanese animators. The former wasn't bad and didn't rely on much reused animation, but I wouldn't claim it was animated as well as most Disney movies or Gargoyles. (I actually remember when I was a kid thinking that the colors in the syndicated version sometimes looked washed out. The animation on the Saturday Morning version was noticeably better.) Transformers occasionally had some parts in some episodes that were animated really well (Zobovor used to love pointing these out on the bloopers section of his site - I remember in particular a scene in "Make Tracks" where Sideswipe tackles Ravage that looked really good), but even that show had its problems - animation mistakes in just about every episode, and a few episodes here and there ("The Core", "The Autobot Run") that didn't look very good. (However, as Crawl pointed out, there's still a LOT more action in that show than there is in Dragon Ball Z.)

And as I said in another topic, Ren & Stimpy is animated better than Beavis & Butt-head, but the show overall hasn't held up as well.