Sea Salt ice cream! :D

Oh for fucks sake. Really?

So, now you have to be your own old-Google. You have to think: Who knows this information? and: Where will they publish it?

I mean this as a directive. You have to learn to do this. You have to think: Do I need a visa for this country? Where will that information be made available by an official source? and take yourself to the government website. You have to think: Is my dentist open on a Saturday? and find your dentist's website, and call them up if they haven't put their hours online. You have to think: How long was Teresa May prime minister? and go to Wikipedia or the parliamentary website and work it out from there.

Animation cel for a deleted scene from the "Mama Luigi" episode of the Super Mario World cartoon series.

ENDLESS LOVE

Tanoshii Youchien, April 1994 Release date: March 1, 1994 Based on: Episode 88

It's the final battle! Can Sailor Moon restore Chibiusa to her true self and defeat the evil Wiseman?

Trade magazine showcase for a line of cancelled 1999 "Mario's World" Nintendo action figures.

Which is a sign of domestication, btw. And why you should keep them inside.

Keep your fucking cats inside, no exceptions. Your whimsical feelings are not worth shortening your cat's lifespan to a QUARTER of what it would be inside.

it’s more difficult to draw inbetween frames for two highly-detailed keyframes that don’t have every detail consistent, so the animation looks weird or stiff. the colored and detailed linearts take up time that could be used for other things.

(on the topic of inbetweens, every show has shitty inbetweens no matter what style it is, so i’m not going to touch on that)

in animation you have to budget your time rigorously, otherwise you either don’t finish or you get a few decent scenes and a lot of trashy, half-assed ones (or even worse, things get scrapped). rounder art styles also lend themselves to more fluid animation, which can make an action scene; this coupled with the style’s current popularity is the reason many mainstream shows (especially shows with lots of action) use this style. 

an argument of ‘they have lots of time between seasons, they could invest that into making the old art style look better instead of redesigning everything!!” has some issues, too. we don’t have the studio’s perspective. a scenario i could see happening is that a decision gets stuck somewhere in the pipeline, and the whole project can’t move forward until it gets resolved, and so the animation winds up rushed and the show looks like garbage. however, what i think happened more with crystal is that the budget is limited, so the animation teams have to choose which scenes look good and which ones are sacrificed. 

(^ originally posted by @sailormoonfever​)

something like these are scenes the animators decided were very important and needed the best the studio had to offer. they look good. they’re slow and beautiful and there’s lots of attention to detail. each stand of hair moves with different timing. the fabric folds are beautifully animated. sure, the watch tweens away and isn’t animated and queen serenity’s bodice is kind of funky, but it doesn’t subtract from the gorgeous, delicious detail.

however, things they would have to sacrifice to give these scene this kind of quality on their budget and time restraints are scenes like the infamous one:

this glorious thing. it’s the example everyone points to when they say crystal s1+2 had bad animation. and they’re right; the quality of a show’s animation is the cumulation of all its parts, not just the best ones. and, well, if the bad parts overshadow or even rival the amount of good ones, the show can be considered poor animation. 

(i actually think yuri on ice has the same issue, but that’s for another time.) 

s1+2′s art style lends itself to this trap. to make the good scenes look great, they have to animate every individual strand in usagi’s hair, every wrinkle in the fabric (especially those s-shaped pleats - animating those looks like a nightmare). it does look gorgeous, but that kind of detailed animation takes time and money.

which is why we wind up with scenes like the moon stick scene. aside from the obvious shitty stick spinning, look at her hair. somehow it manages to both look like it isn’t moving and like it’s moving, but in the wrong way. hair doesn’t just stay in the same position all the time, the stands should move independently of each other, like it does in the watch scene. but even if we keep them in the same position to save time and budget, they should be consistent in placement - they move around really weirdly and it doesn’t much like these were drawn very carefully.

as for s3,

(^ originally posted by @sailorcinnamonroll​)

these kinds of scenes are what s3 is good at, action shots with lots of movement. the flying scene has the same hair issue that the moon stick scene does, but because she’s moving dynamically, it’s not nearly as prominent. 

the attack scene has very simple hair design, only one strand per pigtail, but it works much better than attempting to slap in a second one - it makes the motion much clearer, and allows for more animation in their bodies and the attack itself. the skirts and faces are the same way - because they’re simpler, the team can afford to be less detailed and have it still look good.

of course, there’s still shortcuts here and there

(^ originally posted by @sailorcinnamonroll​)

but, again, this one doesn’t bother me as much as the moon stick scene. particularly because it’s a very fast spinning scene that lasts about a half second, unlike the 1.5 second still staff spin, and it transitions into a slower, more detailed spin. the hair issue isn’t a problem here because most of it is drawn as one clump, as per the style. it would look glaringly bad in the old style.

(it probably speaks volumes that it took me almost 10 minutes to find a gif of s3 that looked poor, but aboue 20 seconds for s1+2??)

now, i’m not saying i hate s1+2′s art style. there are things about it that bug me, sure, but i really like the detailed hair and other such things. but, with the budget toei had for this show, the s3 style works better. it lends itself to low budget animation better, and (whether you’re a fan of moe trends or not), it’s likely to appeal to a very large audience. many diehard sailor moon fans will still watch it, even if they don’t like the style, and that’s what toei’s banking on. 

Scan of the full sheet of official Super Mario Japan Post stamps from 2017. Note that this provides a better view of the stamps than the press release image issued by Japan Post, which is in lower resolution and also strikes out the text so that it cannot be printed out and used as stamps.