Artzune

American animation: We have to create simplified characters to make the movement faster and more creative and interesting.

Me glancing at Japan: 

Also animation in Japan, while it does have plenty sakuga stuff, are actually just budget dumps for the best fight scenes. During normal scenes, characters can be very static and has a lot of holds. There’s also the mouth-flapping thing that a lot of animators in America detest. Everything is revolved around budgets for both countries. For America, to pay animators working wages they decided to cut costs and ship labor overseas. For Japan it means terrible working hours and labor, where plenty of animators have fallen ill or even die in their own cubicles.

Action scene in an American animated adventure show

Action scene in an American animated adventure move (where the budget will be higher)

Low budget Japanese animation (though I’ll grant it’s also dated, it’s what I had):

Visual style is not the same thing as Animation.  

Like…Garnet’s wedding dance from “Reunited” is actually very NICELY animated!  It’s fluid, it’s dynamic, it’s expressive!  It does the thing animation is supposed to do and uses Motion to communicate Narrative.

Buuuuuuuut Garnet’s got a big goofy grin on, her proportions are not entirely “on model” (for the sake of facilitating the big expressive dancing) and the perspective is relatively flat, erego it is “bad” animation.

Except that all of those things are and have been from the very start deliberate aspects of “Steven Universe”’s visual aesthetic.  An aesthetic that is connected to the show’s animation by virtue of having that aspect in mind at a design level, yes, but it’s not really the same thing.

Artemis and Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman (2009) 

#also steve’s expression is priceless i’m literally crying: