LuxyHugs

THANK YOU!!!

Alright! There are two aspects in which most of today's 2D animation and the 2D animation made in the 30s differ from each other and those are method and purpose.

Method is rather straightforward. I think most people know that cartoons used to be animated in paper, inked and painted on transparent acetate sheets called "cels", and then photographed. This process was somewhat automated during the years in various small ways but, at its core, it remained the same since its invention in 1914 up to the 1990s! Here are a few scenes from a 1938 documentary showing how Popeye cartoons were made, in case you’re not that familiar with traditional animation:

These days, though, you can make cartoons without using any paper whatsoever. They’re made digitally. And it was through animating digitally that a new method of animation that cut back significantly on the amount of drawing needed was created: puppet animation, also known as rigged animation, popularized by the well known digital animation program Flash.

In puppet animation, not unlike in 3D animation, a character is rigged with movable joints and changeable body parts is created. Then, a bank of expressions, hands and certain poses is made for it. After that, the artist only needs to change them around instead of redrawing everything from scratch, as if they were posing a doll. Frame by frame animation never really fell out of usage and there are many cartoons that still employ it, but puppet animation is very popular at the moment due to being an efficient way of cutting costs and production time without a significant drop in quality in the final product. A lot of cartoons nowadays are fully animated this way, especially those aimed at younger children. If you’ve ever watched, say, Peppa Pig or Bluey with a younger relative, you’ve watched something 100% puppet animated!

As you can see, puppet animation doesn’t necessarily look less dynamic than frame by frame animation. However, having to adhere firmly to the character models doesn’t leave much room for stylistic deformation, which can make the movement look a little “stiff” at times, especially if we’re talking about simpler character designs. So, while it’s not a hard rule, if you compare a current puppet animated cartoon to a cartoon made in the 30s, the latter might look more fluid, even if only on account of having been animated frame by frame.

But you’ve probably noticed that even current frame by frame animation isn’t as “bouncy” as 30s cartoons were. Animation made in the 30s had a knack for making things look elastic and rubbery and unable to stay still and that’s where the purpose comes in. Simply put, we don’t highlight the same things we used to do back then in cartoons nowadays because… the public doesn’t watch cartoons for the same reason it did back then!

You see, animation was created in the 1890s, but the 1930s were when it truly blossomed as an art form! Cartoons went from being made entirely by a single person from being made by a group of artists, each taking care of different aspects of the animation process. This allowed cartoons to become longer and the animation more refined. 24 frames per second became the norm. Designs that looked the best on screen were established, which gave us the so famous half-dressed animals with black fur and white masks characters that we still associate with cartoons nowadays. This meant that animation went from looking like this:

Joys and Glooms (1921)

to looking like this:

Bimbo’s Initiation (1931)

in the span of a decade! Did you ever notice how 30s cartoons usually don’t have much in the way of a plot or dialogue and are mostly mainly animated to a song? Ever wonder why even the background elements were animated? That’s because people didn’t really watch cartoons for the plot back then. They watched them because they were drawings that moved to sound! Both animation and the ability for film to have sound were so new, the appeal was that it existed in the first place! So the focus was on maximizing movement and synchronization with the background music.

Note how, despite it looking like fred is moving, he's actually completely static save for his arm and eyes. The fun thing about early hanna-barbera is that this rigging technique is so early that you can pretty easily figure out what parts were layered where. Or, which animations were being reused, like the classic Scooby Doo run!

It's not like these shows had no original animation whatsoever, depending on the show some of them even had tons of it per episode, but whatever could be saved and reused was.

And in that regard I think it also needs to be taken into account the way the distribution of animation has changed, it used to be only shorts you would see in theaters until various studios around the world began experimenting with creating feature-length animations, and then from that it began to shift to television.

It's easy to make the argument that old-timey animation moved more when the majority of 2D animation we consume is on television, but that doesn't mean all of 2D animation pales in comparison. In a lot of ways animation has only gotten better, you just need to compare what was shown in theaters of the past to what we see in theaters of the present.

Wolf Walkers (2020)

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

And remember, these examples are both feature-length, something that was completely unheard of in the 20's and 30's. They also don't come from America, but that's a conversation for another day. And as stylistically interesting super early animation was, there are things we can accomplish in the digital era that would have been almost impossible in the cell-animated days.

The painters in the cell-animated days were good for sure, but the intricate light and shadowwork of something like Klaus (2019) would've been impossible to keep consistent without digital tools on hand to help track these things.

I also take issue with the implication that rigged animation means things are inherently less fluid. It's all about how you use them. Again, when you look at TV animation rigs things can be somewhat stiff,

But when you translate those tools to theater budgets, you can get something quite fluid indeed:

If you look closely you can still see the rigs, but the higher amount of movement makes it nearly indiscernible.

He contacts you via an anonymous email and is very exacting and precise in his request. Money is no object, which isn't uncommon in your line of business, you're a professional and more than a few customers have been in the 1% range.

So you ask if he's local so you can meet and take measurements and he says no but he will meet you at (conveniently close local craft store) tomorrow after work (you did not mention where you live)

You're a little shaken but you meet him anyways because daddy needs to pay rent, and he's probably not a serial killer, right?

Right?

You had no idea what kind of person to expect, but a 6'2 bald white guy built like a fucken shit-brickhouse with a "FurCon2023" shirt wrapped around his brolic frame was rather on the shorter end of your list. His cargo shorts and pure white sneakers looked like they'd just been picked up off of the shelf and his glasses looked too small for his massive head.

You jump because you don't even notice him until he's tapping you on the shoulder and introducing himself. How did he know it was you?? Alarm bells are going off everywhere but there's cameras all over, he wouldn't try something in public right?? You take his measurements and look at fabrics together.

You ask about his fursona and he very seriously produces a laminated folder with several crudely drawn pictures of a polar bear suit. Well, you guess you shouldn't be mean, they were clearly drawn from references but you could tell this was someone who did not draw often. It didn't even have any accessories, it was just a normal polar bear... But the notes surrounding them were so neat they looked printed! And so in depth! There was one page solely dedicated to the visibility needs, with advanced notes on the camera and display system he wanted in the head. You'd only seen this sort of thing at the national cons, just who the hell was this guy??

You haltingly ask him if he was sure. You tell him this is really advanced stuff and he was looking at at LEAST 10k with all the specific modifications on it. When you first started making suits you would have never been this firm on pricing, lowballing and trying to make up the difference so as not to upset the customer with a hefty price, but you'd learned eventually that undervaluing your work was a waste of your time and effort so even though you couldn't gauge his reaction, you figured being upfront about the price would at least be a test to see how serious the guy was.

He nodded silently and reached into the fanny pack around his waist to produce the cleanest stack of hundreds you'd ever seen in your life, like straight printed from the treasury mint. He places it in your palm and you almost drop it out of shock.

"Will this be enough to get you started? I included some extra to compensate for lost wages as I do need this suit fairly quickly" he says, tone unreadable.

You stammer and try to look professional thumbing through the crisply banded notes and would you look at that, you think this will do just fine!

He nods again, shakes your hand and leaves without another word.

You exit the store, just trying to comprehend what in the hell you'd just gotten yourself into, zoning out so hard that you didn't even realize someone was yelling at you until the word "-fuckin furry faggot" pierced through your thoughts. You were looking at your phone so you didn't notice the band of truck bros creeping up behind you in their suped up pickup truck. There were three or four in the bed of the truck, dangling out over the side in between giant "TRUMP 2024" and "Lets Go Brandon" flags. They have their phones out, recording you and shouting slurs.

You raise double birds at them and turn to walk quickly in the opposite way, hoping you wouldn't see them as you walked home. You'd heard of a couple beatings happening locally and you didn't want to be around if that's what they had in mind.

So when you hear tires screeching and and engine roaring behind you, you break out into a run, hoping to make it to the bus terminal across the parking lot.

But they catch up to you before you'd made it halfway. They all get out and one grabs your phone that you held out to record with. He smashes it on the ground and shoves you into the pavement. Hard.

They all stand over you, jeering and laughing and you try to escape but your limbs won't listen to you. You always figured if something like this happened you'd stand your ground, maybe get in a couple of hits yourself, but in reality you could barely breathe and your chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself, so your attempts to scream for help end up coming out as breathy wheezes. One of them levels a crowbar at you and thats when the screaming starts.

You curl up into a ball to protect your face but the pain never comes. You hear screaming and sneakers skidding across asphalt and oh god, wet crunchy impacts followed by something warm and wet being splattered across your arms and legs.

Its suddenly silent except for the drone of the truck engine but eventually you crack open an eye to get a look around, and for the second time that day you almost lose your lunch.

Its straight up something out of a video game, just absolute carnage surrounds you. All of the tall frat bros are out cold in varying stages of fucked up. You do actually start to hurl a little when you see one with his nose completely sideways like a gory Picasso.

And in the center of the carnage is -no fucking way- your fucking fursuit client, calmly wiping his hands of the blood with some baby wipes from his fannypack.

He looks over at you when he sees you're up and for a second there you see something, a slip in the mask, something angry, something violent. You flinch as you realize it, but oh fuck, this guys like.. killed people before. like, for fucken sure.

He walks towards you and you suddenly feel like a very small animal being stalked by a tiger. You try to stumble away but the mask is back on and he just looks down at you and offers you a babywipe.

"You alright?" He asks plainly.

Turns out the guy is "ex-military" and he hurt himself so he's back in the states and bored out of his mind. His daughter is a furry and wanted him to go with her to FurCon and insisted he get a suit as well. You keep on glancing at all the deep scars running up and down his arms and wondering how the hell you didn't see it before.

He's saying something to you but you only snap out of it when a phone is being placed into your hands. You look up and suddenly you're standing outside your apartment building (did you tell him where you lived???)

"This is a secure line, if anything happens to you or you have questions, I'll answer immediately." He says, pale blue eyes drilling into your skull with their intensity.

The tears start bubbling up in your eyes before you can stop them and you just lean forward, bumping your head into his chest and choking out a thank you as you clutch the phone to your chest like an amulet.

As you figured, his body is make out of steel and he stiffens at the contact, unsure of what to do.

He just lets you cry it out for a bit before eventually placing a heavy hand on your shoulder, pulling you off but he keeps the hand gentle.

He's not looking at you this time but he clears his throat and murmurs a quick "Take care" before turning around and disappearing into the night. You unlock your door and collapse into bed.

"What the fuck" you murmur to yourself as you pull out your tablet, and you start to sketch...