The best and worst uses of Flash animation

mr3urious

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After being inspired by a few of Drtooth's posts regarding the pervasive style of animation on television that is Adobe Flash, I thought about creating a thread dedicated to it. I also think that Flash can look good if done right, even fairly close to traditional/cel animation.

Best uses:
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (Tooth pointed out many times before how fluid it looked compared to other shows)
- Jacob Two-Two (Has a nice sketchbook/colored pencil style to it that I enjoy)
- The Looney Tunes Show (Very fluid once again, like Foster's, and sometimes resembles traditional animation)

Worst uses:
- Caillou (When it made the switch over to Flash later on, you can really tell by how awkward and Internet-like people tended to move)
- Ctrl-Alt-Del: The Animated Series (Totally flat and lifeless, like the webcomic itself. So many things lack shading and detail. I sadly watched the entire series on YouTube, which was annotated by many other users who point out every single flaw in the animation and made the whole thing more bearable to watch)
 

Oscarfan

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The Looney Tunes Show IS traditionally animated.

Some of the best would have to be Homestar Runner. I don't really care for the animated on "The Critic" webisodes.
 

Drtooth

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Well, according to several other sources (including Wikipedia), it is in Flash.
Well, Wiki isn't exactly the most relyable thing out there...

but it IS possible to animate traditionally IN Flash. Remember, it's a program, a tool. In fact, a lot of so called traditional animation is computer assisted, in coloring, editing, and animation. You can even just flat out illustrate in flash (which I never quite learned how to save something just as a Jpg... but I never really used that one so much as I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for the same).

Flash seems to be the go to for cheap animation. It does tend to keep jobs in their home countries in most cases.

Here are some of my favorites that haven't been mentioned:

Spliced: I can barely tell this is flash. The animation is so fluid, the character designs hide any little motion tween short cuts and library expressions. Plus, it gives it a nice overall look.

Mucha Lucha: the first series to be entirely animated in flash. The first to use library expressions. But these expressions were pretty cartoony and extreme enough that it doesn't seem to stick out as much. They truely were experimenting with the process, but they managed to keep a fully animated cartoon aspect to it.

Martha Speaks: A little more ridgid than the others, but it still retains a TV quality look to it. The motion of the movement is very fluid, I don't know what they did, but they managed to add some sort of filter that makes it look hand animated.

Wild Kratts: using the no black outline technique and working it. That's what Flash animation is best for.

New George of the Jungle: The animation was the ONLY good thing about this dire show.

Now for the Burns:

Doodlebops Road Show: Could you USE any more motion tweens? My rushed college video projects looked more professional than that. Aside from the fact that who the heck asked for a show based on a non-existent fad, it's just very ugly character designs, very ugly stuttery animation.

Spaceballs: I do enjoy the writing and acting on this show, but the animation is very stiff. Especially President Skroob's exceedingly motion tweened arms. But it is enjoyable if you look the other way at the crude animation.

The Cat in the Hat knows a Lot About That: The animation can be fluid on occassion... but OH the merciless overuse of library expressions. Not even extreme ones. Very bland looking designs and animations. Filmation cartoons that used extensive libraries of character poses and expressions allowed for the occasional extreme pose (look at Tex Hex in certain episodes of Bravestarr). Dr. Seuss never looked so visually bland and unappealing. The bad acting from the personality devoid children aside.
 

D'Snowth

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Ugh, I;m so sick of everybody being all, "Oh, Flash animation suck!", "Why does everything have to be Flash animated anymore?", "I can't stand this Flash animation stuff!", Whiney-whiney, mopey-mopey, pouty-pouty.

I took two years of MACROMEDIA (It's not Adobe) Flash animation during my high school years, and it takes a LOT of patience and persistence to do a decent piece of animation in Flash; it took me over a year to do a short film in Flash, but I lost so much patience that I never finished the film, and it still remains unfinished to this day: here's an excerpt from what I HAVE finished...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRvBA_MR-w

Not only that, but I also have animated my production company logos in Flash as well, as you can see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4FDgyHT8eg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrkeyPE8ByQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1b2edOZN1U
 

Drtooth

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Ugh, I;m so sick of everybody being all, "Oh, Flash animation suck!", "Why does everything have to be Flash animated anymore?", "I can't stand this Flash animation stuff!", Whiney-whiney, mopey-mopey, pouty-pouty.
There's a difference. Flash animation in relation to television and computer animation are actually quite different things. A lot of the Flash used on television I see looks like internet cartoons from the early part of last decade. Meanwhile, a lot of the newer flash animations I see hitting the web are so incredibly fluid, they look like hand drawn cartoons. Of course, we all know of deadlines and budgets and all that stuff, and some of these studios went to an all digital flash format. Some always were (like Soup 2 Nuts).

Again, it's all just a tool. Some people use it to assist them, some people use it to make short cuts. Fosters Home and Cat in the Hat are both animated with the same (or similar) programs, but checking out the animation, they're as different as can be. Fluidity is always something to look for in good animation, and I think Flash CAN give you the fluidity that you need. But often times, motion tweens are abused, libraries of expressions and movements are overused, there's nothing visually appealing... and while story is always the most important, there are some with such bad writing and bad animation they're just awful.

I still prefer the look of some of the "traditionally" animated shows, from Curious George to Futurama to Young Justice to Phineas and Ferb. But then again, I like how Mad looks (some of the time) and that uses so many different animation techniques, but mostly flash. I especially like Gumball which is all kinds of computer animation and other weird stuff all mixed together with a fluidly animated flash main cast.
 

Sgt Floyd

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I agree with DrTooth that Wild Kratts is one of the best examples of a flash show. The lack of black lines makes it nicer to look at and has a more...I dunno...convincing(?) look to it.

While I absolutly adore the show and think its on par with Ren and Stimpy and eary Simpsons quality writing, Dan Vs. has some pretty bad animation. Characters are super stiff, and sometimes it is fairly obvious they are copy and pasting poses. Running animations or characters shrinking into the distance are very jarring to look at.

But I dont judge on shoddy animation. I judge on shoddy writing :stick_out_tongue:
 

beaker

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I can't really be dissing on Flash. While it's ubiquitous and I can't get into a lot of it, a LOT of "traditional" animation since the late 90's(Dexters Lab, Johnny Bravo, Powerpuff Girls, Lazlo, Phineas and Ferb) has a flash-ish look. Even before flash was really used for tv production. Hey compared to Clutch Cargo, anything looks like Miyazaki.

But hat's off to people who have figured out flash without getting frustrated. I tried for awhile to learn Flash, Toon Boom Harmony and other "industry tools" and just gave up. What I did instead was develop my own oddball way of animating, and have spent most of this year working on an animated series(which I'm excited to say I'm finally debuting in a couple weeks) I developed a technique with photoshop, some hand drawn stuff and after effects which works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Flash has a lot of barriers I've noticed, even for people I know well versed in it. With frame by frame, you can pretty much pull off anything you can come up with.

I don't have a team of Korean animators(I am but only one Korean! lol), nor a team of college animator students in Toronto I can employ. So people need to find what works best for them. Don't listen to people who try to push the flash exclusive thing. You can do it even pure analog like Don Hertzfeldt does. Im a HUGE fan of late 80's and early 90's festival animated shorts and MTV's Liquid Television...and most of those were hand drawn.

To me the greatest looking animation for tv animation in the last decade has not been flash(Im thinking Fantastic Four, Invader Zim, etc), but Im sure there's lots of great flash works out there. I caught some of Dan Vs and was pretty impressed.
Heck, Rockos Modern Life/Camp Lazlo creator Joe Murray has pretty much decided to do free online content only, all with flash. So some are going with the new mediu,.
 

Xerus

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You know. I've always wondered how my webcomics would look in flash? Would it be easier and faster to animate?
 

Drtooth

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I can't really be dissing on Flash. While it's ubiquitous and I can't get into a lot of it, a LOT of "traditional" animation since the late 90's(Dexters Lab, Johnny Bravo, Powerpuff Girls, Lazlo, Phineas and Ferb) has a flash-ish look. Even before flash was really used for tv production. Hey compared to Clutch Cargo, anything looks like Miyazaki.

But hat's off to people who have figured out flash without getting frustrated. I tried for awhile to learn Flash, Toon Boom Harmony and other "industry tools" and just gave up. What I did instead was develop my own oddball way of animating, and have spent most of this year working on an animated series(which I'm excited to say I'm finally debuting in a couple weeks) I developed a technique with photoshop, some hand drawn stuff and after effects which works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Flash has a lot of barriers I've noticed, even for people I know well versed in it. With frame by frame, you can pretty much pull off anything you can come up with.

I don't have a team of Korean animators(I am but only one Korean! lol), nor a team of college animator students in Toronto I can employ. So people need to find what works best for them. Don't listen to people who try to push the flash exclusive thing. You can do it even pure analog like Don Hertzfeldt does. Im a HUGE fan of late 80's and early 90's festival animated shorts and MTV's Liquid Television...and most of those were hand drawn.
I'd say PPG, Dexter, and some of the others of that era are more of a UPA/Jay Ward/Total Television/Gene Deitch style than Flash. They were very bouncy with those designs. Some flash looks a might rigid. Phineas and Ferb... I don;t know what I'd call it. It's more abstract than just the UPA look... it has some roundness in some characters.

I LOVE indie animators. Well, I'm not big on Don Hertzfeldt... but stuff like Sally Cruickshank, Mo Willems, and especially Plimpton. Crazy crap like that you can only see without interference from corporations and networks. Too bad so much of internet cartoons are video game jokes. I think Homestarrunner had a nice balance. They haven't done anything in a year, and not even a year before that. I've given up hope of ever seeing more HSR cartoons ever again. That was the one regular internet toon I really enjoyed.
 
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