I see a lot of people not really understanding how animated shows are produced and blaming the creators for a lot of things that are beyond their control. So I thought it might be good to go over the different ways animated shows are produced, so you can better identify when problems arise who is to be blamed for it.
Generally speaking if youâre working on an animated TV show for a major company like Disney or Netflix, you are going to work on multiple episodes at the same time.
On Gravity Falls and The Owl House for example, an entire seasonâs worth of episodes were broken up into batches. A beginning batch and an ending batch. Once all the beginning episodes were written, storyboarded, and voice recorded, the episodes then get shipped off to an animation studio to complete the animation. While those episodes are being worked on, the second batch of episodes are written, storyboarded, and voice recorded.
Around this time, about 6-7 months later, final animation comes back. If your series has the budget for it, some shots are sent back to fix animator errors, reanimate scenes to make the action clearer, or add additional scenes in for the same purpose. But I must stress this is only done if the production has the budget for it. Sometimes you have to let animation errors come through if you canât afford to send the animation back for retakes.
Additionally, there are multiple animation studios used for different episodes. For a season of 24 episodes, as many as 5-6 different animation companies could be used to complete animation. This can result in some of the animation being better (or worse) than other episodes, or the characters being off model from time to time.
Once the episodes are edited and put together they are shipped off to the distributing network. It should be noted that at this point the episodes are out of the creators hands. The creators of Steven Universe worked hard to never miss a deadline and got all of their episodes completed on time, only for Cartoon Network to sit around with the completed episodes for months at a time before releasing them.
A single episode can take anywhere between 9-12 months to complete from initial script writing until final animation and editing. This is important to remember because a lot of fans can feel like the creators are responding to their criticisms on a week to week basis, and thatâs just not physically possible. As Alex Hirsch is famous for saying âif you wanted to provide us feedback we needed to know about it a year ago!â
Independent animation is very different from network animation because it can take the form of many different things. The pipeline is a lot less clear because a lot of the same people fulfilled different jobs along the way.
The way The Amazing Digital Circus worked is that they would have modelers and 3D artists working on creating the assets they needed for all of the episodes written to that point. Production would begin on the first episode, and they would not work on the next episode until that first episode was finished. There is some overlap to keep the schedule flowing, but generally speaking you work on them one episode at a time.
This is why each individual episode can take 6-8 months between them to come out. Youâre a much smaller team working on a smaller budget, and you canât realistically plan ahead for 24 episodes to be released on a week by week schedule. This is also why sometimes the scope of a project can shift or change as the series progresses because you are writing each episode one after the other. Unless you have a set plan in mind, things can change as you see feedback from your fans and characters become more or less popular.
I wanna stress that these are GENERALIZATIONS. Each series has its own unique pipeline, and while for the most part they all follow a similar structure, there can be exceptions and changes depending on the needs of the episodes.
A big contributing issue for why people donât understand how long it takes to make animation is South Park. South Park is done on a weekly basis. The episodes are written and voice recorded within a couple days and the remainder of the week is spent on animating it. But itâs important to remember that South Park can get away with this because of how the characters and the animation pipeline is designed. The limited simple cut out design allows them to make the animations super fast. This is not something that can happen on most productions though.
This is also why some characters get simpler designs from the pilot. Steven Universe had really unique designs that got super simplified for the full TV production. And a major factor for why is because itâs faster and cheaper to animate that way.
Honestly the biggest contributing factor for the way errors and mistakes and things happen is time and money. A production that is given the time and money it needs to get done is going to turn out much more polished and better than one that is made in less time. That goes for writing and editing too. And unfortunately a lot of that isnât the fault of the creators. If you arenât given the time and money you need to work, youâre going to have to make compromises and focus your energies on specific areas that tell your story well instead.
Like sure, you can be upset that characters in TADC didnât get completely dedicated episodes for them⌠but also you have 7 main characters and 9 (originally 8) episodes to work with. Thereâs going to be compromises. Thatâs just the reality of production.
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