Quote:
Originally Posted by gunnut
I thought that cartoon was the coolest thing ever when I was growing up. Then Transformers and G.I.Joe showed up.
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You have to be old enough (like me and Pal) to remember the first Space Cruiser Yamato film was a break through in animation.
Back in the 40's and 50's animated cartoons were done at 8 to 16 frames per second. The more frames per second, the more realistic were the movements of the characters (Snow White, Dumbo, etc.). But each frame was a separate cell (or painting on a transparent sheet of celluloid). When TV came along with Saturday mornings devoted to cartoons to keep the kiddies inside and under supervision, it was too expensive and too time consuming to draw that many cells for even 8 frames per second. So they started reducing them to 6 and 4.
Standard 8mm movie cameras were at 16 fps, 16mm cameras at 24 fps and professional 35mm cameras at 48 fps.
The quality of the reduced frames cartoons was horrible and the scenes so jumpy they were hard on the eyes. The worst was where only static drawings of the characters were "flash carded" on the screen and close ups of a character speaking was an overlay of a real person's lips over the drawing.
The Japanese animators found a better way to do higher quality cartoons using a lot of duplicate overlays of the characters and only drawing the backgrounds separately. They developed so many duplicate positions that the viewer can't tell the difference. At least an adult couldn't (pre-schoolers spotted it right away because they have better concentration -
when they want to).
Since then animated films have come back into higher quality and presently Computer Generated Imagry has almost taken over. For example, "Star Wars - Episode One" was one huge film of CGI with only a couple of live actors and all of the aliens being "cartoons".