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Answerman - Why Doesn't Anime Use Flash Animation?


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explosionforgov



Joined: 16 Jun 2016
Posts: 80
Location: United States of America
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 1:11 pm Reply with quote
Isn't JoJo's animated in ToonBoom? I figured it was done on a computer, because digitally animated cartoons tend to have brighter colors, but I had always gotten the impression ToonBoom was one of those lesser programs for newbies who couldn't afford Flash. But then again, my brief dabbling into animation classes only focused on Flash and a little Maya. We never really discussed other programs at all.

I never got a chance to watch much of Kappa Mikey, but I didn't mind it. I'm a fan of both American and Japanese animated shows, and I kind of want to see more of a blending between the two.
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Brand



Joined: 30 Jan 2006
Posts: 1028
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:16 pm Reply with quote
ToonBoom is pretty heavily used in the American industry. Here is a listing of what Wikipedia says used ToonBoom. There is some junk but there is some pretty notable stuff too. [/url]
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CheezcakeMe





PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:19 pm Reply with quote
explosionforgov wrote:
Isn't ToonBoom was one of those lesser programs for newbies who couldn't afford Flash. But then again, my brief dabbling into animation classes only focused on Flash and a little Maya. We never really discussed other programs at all.


ToonBoom the poor man's flash? Oh that's too funny! Most animation studios who still use flash do so simply because it's one of the cheapest animating product on the market. Toon boom is now the industry standard.
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Lord Oink



Joined: 06 Jul 2016
Posts: 876
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 2:38 pm Reply with quote
CheezcakeMe wrote:
ToonBoom the poor man's flash? Oh that's too funny! Most animation studios who still use flash do so simply because it's one of the cheapest animating product on the market. Toon boom is now the industry standard.


Flash or Toonboom doesn't change the fact all of Disney, CN, and Nick's shows look cheap and ugly. Correcting someone who calls it cheap Flash animation just seems like semantics.
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moogrin



Joined: 12 Jun 2016
Posts: 43
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:09 pm Reply with quote
I really loved the use of Flash in Ping Pong the Animation: https://vimeo.com/102103466
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Selipse



Joined: 04 Sep 2014
Posts: 216
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:16 pm Reply with quote
Hahaha, the asker has no idea how Flash works. Flash (and Toon Boom) doesn't "create" inbetweens as you might think. It just moves shapes around. You can manipulate them in different ways, but it doesn't draw in the same way a human would. There are really impressive tools that do "draw" inbetweens, but whether it gets to a level where it's widely used remains to be seen. Especially since, as you point out, animators start out as inbetweeners, and you really need that experience to be a good keyframe animator.

Lord Oink wrote:
Flash or Toonboom doesn't change the fact all of Disney, CN, and Nick's shows look cheap and ugly. Correcting someone who calls it cheap Flash animation just seems like semantics.


Most Cartoon Network originals are still drawn by hand, though. On paper, even.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:55 pm Reply with quote
Lord Oink wrote:
CheezcakeMe wrote:
ToonBoom the poor man's flash? Oh that's too funny! Most animation studios who still use flash do so simply because it's one of the cheapest animating product on the market. Toon boom is now the industry standard.


Flash or Toonboom doesn't change the fact all of Disney, CN, and Nick's shows look cheap and ugly. Correcting someone who calls it cheap Flash animation just seems like semantics.


Flash animation is seen as cheap animation "for those who don't know how" because US networks tried to keep Saturday morning (with corporate 00's Flash-reboots of My Little Pony and the Care Bears) and PBS-afternoon animation going as a thing into the 00's--
Even after most of the old-school and independent animation studios like Filmation, Rankin-Bass and DePatie-Freleng had gone under by the mid-80's, and most outsourcing studios were busy enough with Fox's edgy prime-time cult toons.
Up to the end of the 00's, Nelvana was pretty much holding up the entire US-mainstream TV kids-animation industry for networks, PBS and cable (apart from the aforementioned Disney, Nicktoons and what Turner turned Hanna-Barbera into for CN) and even their output slowed to just producing other studios' CGI.

I think we can say, the lack of "real" hand-drawn/computer animators and studio companies has never been a problem in Japan. At least not as much as in North America.
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anime_layer



Joined: 03 Apr 2004
Posts: 45
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:56 pm Reply with quote
Adobe actually renamed Flash to «Animate» in a bid to salvage the application with its increasing irrelevance in the software world.

To me it seems Animate is surprisingly resilient and crops up in unexpected places, even in anime. It's definitely not very widespread but I get the impression that especially some new and less traditionally trained animators are using it.

Two more recent examples are Science Saru, which animated some scenes of Ping Pong in Flash (http://www.cartoonbrew.com/flash/how-japanese-animators-use-flash-to-create-amazing-tv-animation-102340.html) and Bahi JD, an Austrian animator who works on many anime series and has used Flash - at least until 2014 (animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2014-04-16/the-space-dandy/part-ii-bahi-jd).

I also think that assisted inbetweening, where the computer generates the inbetween and an artist tweaks it, is definitely something that will be coming and that's actively being developed by anime studios (I remember a demo video that shows some scenes with automatically generated inbetweens and that looked pretty much like regular anime, can't find the link anymore, though).

Selipse wrote:
Especially since, as you point out, animators start out as inbetweeners, and you really need that experience to be a good keyframe animator.

With more digitally trained animators entering the field, I think the traditional way of entry will lose some of its significance. Like some of the young animators, including Bahi JD, that started out making gifs online and then directly start to do genga without going through the usual douga training first (at least that was the case with Bahi, maybe he had to take a genga test first).
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relyat08



Joined: 20 Mar 2013
Posts: 4125
Location: Northern Virginia
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:04 pm Reply with quote
I was under the impression that a lot of the webgen animators, like Shingo Yamashita, Ryo-Timo, Bahi JD, etc all used Flash.(I know Bahi JD specifically mentions that that is the software he uses in several interviews, though maybe that's changed since the last one which was just after Dandy in 2014.) They don't use it for in-betweens, of course, as others mentioned, that's not how Flash even works, but as a tool for just drawing digitally frame by frame on a tablet, it seems like a pretty good option. A friend of mine who runs a sakuga page with me uses Flash as his animation software of choice and it appears to have a lot of useful tools. He is still in school and not professional, but he seems to really like it. I am by no means a good animator or artist, but if I feel like doodling anything interesting, I mostly just stick with flipbook.in. Smile
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varmintx



Joined: 31 Jul 2006
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:20 pm Reply with quote
I was kind of hoping the totality of Justin's response to the question was going to be "Because it looks like shit."
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#Immie93



Joined: 01 Feb 2015
Posts: 54
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:54 pm Reply with quote
I believe Studio Ghibli used/uses Toonz as they've only recently put the software out online as a free download BUT a lot of the time animation companies heavily modify the software they work with or build their own animation software in order to accommodate the needs of the show they're creating.
For example they might add extra tools to carry out a specific task that's required for the style of the animation.

And in response to the question of bringing one guy in to draw two key frames and expect the computer to fill it in is not possible in 2D. 3D yes but a human is required in order to add frames in for anticipation and overlap of movement else it looks very robotic. For example Ajin/Knights of Sidonia have more robotic movements than Frozen or Big Hero 6.
For 2D you need a person to draw every frame regardless of whether it's on paper or digital. (unless you're using celaction which is a 2D cutout animation software).
And personally I don't like the idea of the computer doing everything. Animation is an art form and in every anime frame someone has meticulously drawn every strand of hair or item of clothing so it flows smoothly. A computer can do that in 3D but it's always more magical when a person can create that by hand in 2D.
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Selipse



Joined: 04 Sep 2014
Posts: 216
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 4:58 pm Reply with quote
anime_layer wrote:
With more digitally trained animators entering the field, I think the traditional way of entry will lose some of its significance. Like some of the young animators, including Bahi JD, that started out making gifs online and then directly start to do genga without going through the usual douga training first (at least that was the case with Bahi, maybe he had to take a genga test first).


And he did inbetweens on those gifs. It's what I was trying to say, you should have the experience anyways. Although I guess it could happen that automatic inbetweening becomes the industry standard and you just have to get the experience somewhere else.
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Sitensis



Joined: 27 Feb 2016
Posts: 35
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 5:18 pm Reply with quote
Since the asker mentioned consistency, I wanted to mention I think that some degree of inconsistency is necessary for a feeling of organicness in animation. Organic matter has too many states, a small movement of the hand creates a change in the shape of the arm, wrinkles on clothes rarely ever take exactly the same shape twice... You could say organic stuff is inconsistent IRL.

In 3d animation, the model is generally static and only the positioning of certain parts changes, which works for mechanical objects but is the reason for the stiff, unpleasant -shitty so to say- looks of 3d character animation.

Whereas in hand drawn animation, those minor inconsistencies in the shapes create this feeling of organicness, so it's not a minus but a plus IMO. Love Live opening is a great demonstration of what I mean, you can see both "consistent" and "inconsistent" animation.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 5:31 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
Most of the successful animation produced in Flash was aimed at undiscerning kids, or intentionally used the clumsy look as part of the feel of the show, such as the under-appreciated Kappa Mikey.


This, too--CN's Adult Swim toons had their own next-gen animators', er, love-hate relationship with old cartoons:
Edgy independent (and often a little fumigated) animators' chief grudge with all the ancient Hanna-Barbera reruns the network had to show up to that point was how "primitive" or static the animation was on a 60's to 70's Alex Toth H-B like Jonny Quest or The Herculoids, or how Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear ran about on perpetually looping backgrounds.
To industry insiders, that was the ultimate embarrassment--And for Adult Swim to use cheap, static Flash animation in their TV-MA parodies like "Sealab 2021" or "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" was not only cable-cheap-@$$, and looked edgy and "ad-libbed", it could also be wielded as their cult-ref grudge-hammer on the head of all those nasty, icky, primitive 60's-70's reruns the network wanted to demonize.

Like Justin says, ugly and clumsy was SUPPOSED to be the joke, and a nasty and passively-hostile stoner one at that. The network just liked it because it was quick and cheap.
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CheezcakeMe





PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2017 6:15 pm Reply with quote
Lord Oink wrote:

Flash or Toonboom doesn't change the fact all of Disney, CN, and Nick's shows look cheap and ugly. Correcting someone who calls it cheap Flash animation just seems like semantics.


Meh. Depends on the show. Done well you can't even tell hand drawn from not. Done poorly you get, well, Teen Titans Go, which is done on the SUPER cheap.
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