People complain about CalArts the same way masters from the 40's criticized UPA for being shoddy, cheap-looking, and having janky animation.
Now those same CalArts complainers think UPA is charming and made by artists who knew what they were doing. Ironic.
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Nobody in the 40s ever complained about UPA.
Nigga Calarts isn't like that. It's pure infantile trash
UPA is shit but it's an artistic kind of shit
What the fuck does CalArts even mean. IIRC the guy who coined it was John K., and he used it to complain about post-2000s art styles in general, not strictly those being used in the 2010s. The way Yea Forums uses it just feels like they're using it as a blanket term to bitch about cartoons they don't like.
People find it easy to blame CalArts for everything because almost everybody in the industry went to CalArts except for Rebecca Sugar and Seth McFarlane, who went to Rhode Island School of Design.
UPA were a bunch of commies and their studio deserved to fail.
UPA IS Calarts, Calarts is everything that is simple geometric shapes, no set proportions, no shading, little/no details=Lazy, quick, and CHEAP.
UPA played around with formal shit (backgrounds, audio) in ways calarts shit doesn't.
Hey faggots, did you know? Not all animation has to be totally stunning and beautiful and realistic. Some people would like to take advantage of the ability to be cartoony, you know.
Plus, cartoons with proportions usually turn out to be stiff as fuck.
>t. tumblr.com
>there is one bad thing
>there is another bad thing
>that means first bad thing is actually good
Hating an artstyle is one thing, and I most definitely hate the Tumblr artstyle, but what I can't tolerate is when people sound like they expect all animation to be realistic and pretentious.
All fine and good, but how come modern day cartoons with $300k budgets manage to look even worse than cartoons that were done on shitty wooden desks with terribly cameras in cramped offices basically on slave labor? And this is despite doing similar-looking things.
>The way Yea Forums uses it just feels like they're using it as a blanket term to bitch about cartoons they don't like.
That's pretty much what it is for the most part.
Hardly any animation that gets discussed here is realistic and pretentious.
Meant for
>masters from the 40's criticized UPA
Well no shit, they were masters. Fans and viewers were pretty happy with UPA, and now fans & viewers are sick & tired of the calarts look.
What cartoons are you even trying to talk about?
Most modern cartoons with boring geometrically-shaped characters are "stiff as fuck," and they sure don't "take advantage of the ability to be cartoony."
Then give me an example of a good cartoon that does both of these things.
Inflation. Do you think $300k today is the same as it was in 1945?
California Institute of the Arts is a diploma mill
Wrong school.
there can be multiple
Do you really think in 1945, UPA was spending their equivalent of $300,000 per short film.
What OP doesn't realize is that UPA's limited and flat animation was considered hip, innovative and interesting while whatever fluid stuff Disney was doing at the time was passé, predictable and boring. That's the absolute truth.
>>like they're using it as a blanket term to bitch about cartoons they don't like.
and that was before it got into mass knowledge by every facebook 12 year old due to t cats roar.
They were spending as much as Looney Tunes were.
>ie the animators were being paid as well as the looney tunes animators
means nothing; talent is not defined by payment
They were being paid big money to experiment, not crank out the same films with the same talking animals over and over.
>What the fuck does CalArts even mean.
The first coined Yea Forums's "CalArt" term meant "regression in art" and was referring to this particular screenshot. Nothing more, nothing less. This also means that 1st Yea Forums's "CalArts" didn't mean any style per se.
Only later newfags flanderized it to just "Everything I don't like is CalArts" to mock every new cartoon and associated it with Gravity Falls-esque styles.
As if it was still not enough, people here also found out that "CalArts" was also an old term for "Disney style", nobody ever heard of, so people confuse them with one another now.
People are too obsessed with character animation. What actually matters more is the directing and background art.
I always thought I wanted to be a character animator. At school I realized that my passion is cool backgrounds. Now when I watch cartoons I only focus on the backgrounds and color theory, the characters might as well look like pic related.
they were being payed big money because they were privileged enough to know the men who paid them big money
>"CalArts" didn't mean any style per se.
I'm too tired to write properly fuckk.
Thats every art school.
Sugar went to SVA, besides she only got a show because she became completely absorbed into the CalArts clique at CN completely conforming her style to theirs.
>masters from the 40's criticized UPA
You literally pulled that from your anus. Many of the great UPA animators WERE 40s animators like Bobe Canon, Rod Scribner and Bill Melendez. In the late 40s you already see cartoons starting to become more flat and designy because that's where animators' interests were heading after perfecting volumetric animation for a decade.
I will give you a quick sumary, pal.
>John K sperg about Disney in his blog
>It called it Cal Arts style, but It's really vague describing it
>John K hates modern animation
>Normalfags only know like five or six modern animated shows
>All of them from CN and Disney
>They realized they share the same simplistic character, similar face shape and other shit
>They don't know shit about animaiton, so they called it "calarts"
At the time, It has ben used for describing everything that looks simplistic, dear god, I've even read people calling motherfucking carmen sandiego calarts.
It's just a buzzword to blame everything you don't like from modern animation.
>simple igeometric shapes is calarts
Dear god, imagine being this ignorant in animation. News, faggot most animator uses simplistic characters because it's easier to animate, not only that, but a simplistic character would be easier to recognize for extention It would have a better impact in your viewers.
Despise some expections, every single animation studio has used simplistic characters some of them more abstract than other, but in the end simplistic, because it's part from the animation process. Weebs complain about abstract characters because it's mainstream in Japanimation to have some degree of realism at the expense of animation. Funny enough, 80's nostalfags complain about abstract characters for the same reasons.
It's okay if you don't like simplistic art styles, but don't complan using a buzzword, about something that you obviously don't know shit.
>What actually matters more is the directing and background art.
So it's okay to have power point tier animation if the backgrounds looks nice and cool.
Okay, pal.
That user is talking about the people, not the animation itself.
>The first coined Yea Forums's "CalArt" term meant "regression in art" and was referring to this particular screenshot.
Nigger we were talking about the CalArts style way before rory's retardation and it was definitely more associated with Steven Universe/Gravity Falls. Your revisionist history sickens me.
You don't have to go that far, but with talented cuts and directing you can really cut corners and still make it look awesome. I just watched Neon Genesis Evangelion on Netflix and it was basically like that, even though there were some very awesome animated scenes as well when there had to be. Now I get why people see Hideaki Anno as a genius.
>They don't know shit about animaiton, so they called it "calarts"
Half of them were made by CalArts students. Literally.
all animation should be stunning and beautiful
those people should be killed
Walt hated the UPA-ish cartoons his animators were doing like "Toot, Whistle, Plunk, Boom" because he thought it looked cheap but gladly accepted the Oscars those cartoons won
>amerimutts think this is good or artistic or something
lol look into some indie animation festival. literally every indie shit from 3rd world country has backgrounds like this lmao its just mediocre shit that everyone can do
vector art is shoddy soulless uninspired shit. unironicaly some 6/10 tier japanese visual novel has much more atmospheric and dedicated backgrounds.
I'm not saying all animation shouldn't be beautiful, I'm just saying that there should be room for abstract and cartoony cartoons, or else all animation would look boring and pretentious.
>Evatard Netflix shiller
That aside I won't blame you for liking good backgrounds in toons. I do like a good cartoon with godlike backgrounds, but the thing is If I have to choose between good animation and good background I would always prefer animation, because that's what cartoons are about.
As you said before, people is obsessed with character animation because that's what cartoons are about, if a cartoon don't have good animation then you failed as a medium, that's is.
Kill yourself then because CGI films are a billion times more stunning than 2D.
>if a cartoon don't have good animation then you failed as a medium, that's is.
The 20s and 30s were full of shit animation. Suck a dick.
What do you mean with beautiful? Have you ever watched R&S? Those cartoons are crude and weird humor, but they were beautifully animated.
>The 20s and 30s were full of shit animation.
Like every other decade? That doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
>if a cartoon don't have good animation then you failed as a medium, that's is.
That depends what you count as "good animation". I know many people see Japanese style animation as bad because it's not fluid and instead cuts corners to make it seem vivid.
In general I don't think lot of people really care about animation. They care about the character designs. The designs Yea Forums calls "CalArts" are easier to animate, but let's be honest people complain about them because they aren't attractive. And that's fine since the actual reason to watch cartoons is to fap to the characters.
>cut corners
Ano went over budget so much that he almost broke the studio and his already overworked staff. This is well know.
good, we need more artists like you to do the boring backgrounds i dont want to draw
>I don't think lot of people really care about animation
That's because most people don't know anything about animation besides maybe "animation is hard", that's why they would prefer power point tier animation but with good backgrounds instead something actually well animated. That's frustrating because I see beautifully animated projects that I think should get more media attention but they do not get it because people think it's "childish" or "ugly". Hell I can't stop hearing people complaning about how childish Kubo is despise how beautifully animated it is. I have made stop motion in the past, it's a fuckton effort, do you want some good writing? Then read a book, nig.
BG artists make twice as much as animators to do easier work and don't have to worry about their jobs being outsourced. Reconsider your attitude.
yep, john specifically points to people imitating the rescuers as "calarts". the meme has nothing to do with it.
Don't take it so literally. Anybody who's been molded by an art college so severely that it can be recognized is CalArts. Rebecca Sugar is CalArts even if she never attended, for example. It's just cheap, fresh-from-college animation.
>BG artists make twice as much as animators
Look I'm all for good animation but the fact is that animation is extremely time consuming and TV animation will mostly look like crap. Except ROTTMNT which is good.
I don't know why someone would even want to be a character animator for cartoon. Just go for 3DCG and enter videogame industry, you may even get a proper wage then and not overwork to death.
More like they're force to unlearn everything when they enter the industry. Most student films have so much more soul than what you get on TV.
Well they certainly aren't being paid like chumps. They're basically designers and make designer wages, unlike animators and inbetweener who are the assembly line grunts.
they get paid the same, and i'm also not interested in it whatsoever.
>I don't know why someone would even want to be a character animator for cartoon
Because some people enjoy the effort that is in the art form. It's the same reason people enjoy doing paiting or writing despise earning a shit from it.
Character animation means you want to be an actor but you're only good at drawing. Good acting can unironically save a shit script, but the problem is character acting is split between two actors (animator and voice actor) and arguably three/four if you count inbetween and cleanup animators that can drastically change the acting on keyframes. So more often than not all the elements of good acting never coincide. You get characters over acting like they're in a silent film while the voice actor talks in a normal voice, or vice versa. This is why smooth brains like you are convinced its secondary at best, even though the best moments of animation acting are so good that they become part of the public fucking consciousness.
>I don't know why someone would even want to be a character animator for cartoon.
because they love it. what an asshole question
Exact case with Steven Universe
>have Art Davis and Mike Mignola do concept art for your show
>have a weird but unique personal style of your own that is a mix of realistic anatomy, Doug Tenaple, Paul Pope and Fleischer cartoons
>dumb it down to CalArts shit because no one can draw anymore
So you get endlessly cucked as a character animator, you can never truly aim for your ideals because the industry works that way.
I get the "doing it for the love of it" argument but you can hardly do it creatively that way in modern industry. I've seen countless of amazing key animations which end up looking like crap in the actual product because some Korean shithead inbetweened them that way.
>animation in it's infancy was mostly bad
high IQ post right here
I really wish that comic had been published. The concept was neat.
I would say you can do an animation project by your own, but there's a fuckton of work for just one person, there really are people who has made animated projects alone but they are not the rule.
Which comic are you talking about?
>Yea Forumsmrades getting triggered by the accuracy of a buzzword
>rather than the underlying practice behind the buzzword
I really hate how all of you are just fine with an entire generation of cartoons adopting a simplistic, low-risk, error-proof aesthetic meant to make life easier for Korean animation slaves, but not having a perfect, error-proof all encompassing term for it is fucking unacceptable.
Really missing the forest for the trees, Yea Forums
>Only later newfags flanderized it to just "Everything I don't like is CalArts" to mock every new cartoon and associated it with Gravity Falls-esque styles
this is not true and one quick search in a Yea Forums archive can prove you wrong. the rory shit happened in 2017, calarts was a meme before that (at least by 2016).
Then be a independent animator. Studios are clearly never going to be the artistic incubators you expect of them so don't bother with them.
But they WERE bad, therefore failed as a medium, exactly as that guy describe, right?
>Studios are clearly never going to be the artistic incubators
I have to disagree with you. Do you remember shows like oh "yeah cartoons" and "what the cartoon"? Most TV animated project are supposed to earn money, but those shows were incubator for new animators. I miss these kind of shows. I think CN do have an artists program but I don't think they releaze their pilots like they did in the 90's.
Yea Forums already shits on the artists when it's Hollywood executives that have mandated this style. Par for the course.
>I have no arguments
>but this isTHEM. I told you what they think so it's TRUE
mentally ill
Say what you want about Steven Universe but it's background art is great and the lineart of characters looks good. Like there's some actual weight in the lines. The battle scenes are nice too.
I watched She-ra and everything about it reeked of amateurism. Every line was drawn in same weight and there's way too much of detail happening in one scene, the battle scene animation had zero impact. I was amazed when I found out that people called the animation and art direction "good".
I won't discuss the first two statements, but:
>battle scenes
>nice
Really? They were pretty weak.
Steven Universe's action is awful, what are you talking about. It's clear nobody working on the show is tailored towards doing action.
>UPA IS Calarts, Calarts is everything that is simple geometric shapes, no set proportions, no shading, little/no details=Lazy, quick, and CHEAP.
i'm sorry what? since when? are you a newfag? the geometric shapes a style more relevant to early/mid 2000s, we refered this as the flash, canadian, and twine style
jesus christ you retards can't decide on shit
Calarts ALWAYS referred to bean mouths and bean heads
the only reason why the term became in vogue was because that image showing how all modern characters are like that
i bet you're a retard mad about battletoads
thanks for causing confusion with terms because you just had to use the latest buzzword you fucking retard
seriously you faggots piss me off. go back to Yea Forums.
Don't get what your problem is with this (animator is Joe Johnston). There's impact and both characters' personality comes out in their movements.
This isn't the 90's anymore. All the big studios have 5+ projects being worked on simultaneously and have all hand on deck trying to crank them out quickly within budget. They aren't interested in soliciting ideas or training newb. They hire you to do your job.
>Don't get what your problem is with this
It's S1. You posted S5 screencap. I thought you were talking about recent stuff.
S3-S5 fight scenes are lame, just remember Connie vs Opal or Aquamarine vs CG.
the 90s was 20 years ago user
And that's how you get shows like She-ra, where Netflix admitted most of the staff were amateurs and had never worked on action animation before.
>They aren't interested in soliciting ideas or training newb
They should do, most influencial modern cartoons started inside one of those incubators: KND, Billy and mandy, Fairly Oddparents, adventure time, even fucking Family guy started as a What the cartoon short.
The most similar modern thing is Go! Cartoons from frederator but that's hotshit if you compare it with 90's incubators and I'm not being a nostalfag.
I prefer "beanmouths".
I would add "is using the term incorrectly and don't know shit about animation".
>They should do, most influencial modern cartoons started inside one of those incubators: KND, Billy and mandy, Fairly Oddparents, adventure time, even fucking Family guy started as a What the cartoon short.
cartoon only greenlights shows internally now
meaning the gate to the industry is even larger
like sure you can network through the internet but companies now want things to be more internal
this is probably also why a lot of cartoons today look similar.
KND, Billy and Mandy, Courage the Cowardly Dog weren't produced and owned 100% by Cartoon Network
Like I said, studios are no longer artistic incubators.
They aren't gatekeepers to what gets made either. That's the network's decision.
If office work is this generation's new blue-collar then animation studios are factories, contracted project-by-project to make, not create.
nobody asks for the accuracy. Calarts sounds fun and its useful. so everyone uses it. thats it. do you need something more than that.
its not very useful if its just used interchangeably for THING I DON'T LIKE
It's obnoxious when words with meaning are turned into "EVERYTHING I LIKE/DON'T LIKE".
no. as the image says, its used for beanmouth cartoons. nobody calls she-ra calarts even though the show has also been ridiculed a similar way.
>nobody calls she-ra calarts
Pretty sure there's plenty people who refer to She-ra as Calarts unironically.
no shit. you cant stop them calling like that. someone even calls western cartoons anime like the straya journo called their new 3d cartoon anime in a kotaku article a while ago. words work like that. get over it.
That pic has soul.
calarts has no soul
you could draw all that on a napkin
its shit
You’re talking to a board that praises visual diarrhea like Bojack Horseman, but can turn around and shit on SU for having crap character animation.
This is Brainlet Central, friend, leave consistent thinking at the door.
wow you're really trying to double down on your retardation
I like how the image makes it out to be a relic from the time CalArts dominated, implying it is a bygone era. If only we could be so lucky.
Denial
Ok show an example of someone in the 40s complaining about it
>unironically getting a degree in animation without knowing someone in the industry
Why do people do this and complain about mh student loans
>Implying the one on the left looks better then the one on the right
At least the one on the right has shading.