#digital emation

To save money, studios will often make you use two or even three overseas studios or the same time. The idea (I think) is that you're getting some time from an "A" or "B" team at an "A" studio, and those episodes will help hide the "C" team from the "C" studio's work. Whatever the reason, the process makes quality control more difficult than it needs to be. Usually within an episode or two, you know which studio is going to be working for you and which is just going to make everyone's lives harder.

For Grim & Evil, we used Digital eMation for Evil Con Carne. ECC was the "middle cartoon", and therefore got less focus so I'd given that show to eMation almost in its entirety. They were an unknown quantity and I wasn't sure I trusted them with the main act, but over time they put out the best work. By our third season, I had eMation take over entirely.

eMation was hungry and eager to show what they could do, and that sometimes included surprising me with little treats. Since eMation started as a digital company, they had a solid 3D pipeline when we started working together. The Billy-Bot was something that eMation chose to do, and I thought it was cool so we kept it.

I can not stress this enough, but what is it with the Korean animation on most Burbank-made cartoons produced after 2015 looking so… slow and stiff???

There're LOTS more on 2s animation timing... and less inbetweening, while characters, props and effects are not as loosely drawn as they used to be before 2016.

Look at this example below of what a modern cartoon looks like when animated in Korea:

Bernard Williams ain't selling the acting well now; is he?

That episode of Craig of the Creek, "Creature Feature", was made in 2020; it was animated by Rough Draft Korea Co., Ltd. — an animation studio founded by Gregg Vanzo as a cheaper means for quality animation on none other than The Ren & Stimpy Show (Don't believe me? Thad Komorowski will tell you).

He's moving too slow. This shot is all on 2s. His arms move stiffly, and his head bobs up and down just a little bit. It doesn't sell the specific emotions he's expressing as richly as they could... compared to something like classic Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon shows of the past. The overseas animators should listen to the audio track, the recorded dialogue. That's what they did on on Ren & Stimpy!

Now let us to go back 10 years before Rough Draft animated that episode of Craig of the Creek... to another Cartoon Network Studios original that Rough Draft animated, the Sym-Bionic Titan episode "The Phantom Ninja":

LOOK HOW LOOSE AND SMOOTH THIS LITTLE BIT OF ANIMATION IS! ☝

This level of Korean animation quality was normal for TV cartoons back in the 2010s.

This one shot has a healthy balance of on 2s animation and on 1s animation.

It's just Ilana Lunis and Octus doing a bit of a... I don't know... a shrug... giving Lance a certain look. Not even talking in this shot, nor is it an action sequence, and this little bit of acting looks far better than Craig of the Creek ever animated in general.

Rough Draft also animates on Spongebob and they're struggling but usually excelling on the animation quality overseas.

This applies to cartoons made and aired before 2016 where post-2105 episode/content are the same quality as most post-2015 cartoons shows these days that're animated in Korea; examples are Uncle Grandpa, Samurai Jack Season 5, The Venture Bros. Season 6 onward, We Bare Bears Season 2 onward, and even later Disney TVA shows as Amphibia Season 3, The Owl House (even Luke Weber noticed the degrade in animation quality) and Hailey's On It! (excluding 2/3 of the first episode)... though mostly it involves Warner Bros. Discovery-owned properties - Turner Broadcasting System-based ones namely.

Now what are the reasons for Korean animation quality since 2016?

In the case of some post-2015 episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, the issue might be TIME, since it's a popular franchise which, among other new Nicktoons these days, Nickelodeon is trying to dump out on TV as fast as humanly possible. The Patrick Star Show seems to rarely suffer from this, however; only few episodes like "The Commadore Episode" were animated mostly on 2s and more stiff than loose - there just might not've been time for retakes, although TV and certainly streaming platforms tend to dump a bunch of episodes out all at once. Those that're animated in Korea would probably suffer from this business practice. Why can't we just put new episodes on every Thursday, Friday, or Saturday... with breaks in-between instead of not stopping until the season is over? That reminds me that most [adult swim] shows tend to have 6 or 10 episodes per season.

On the other hand... may be that Korean animators just need a break. Perhaps the Korean overseas facilities need more money... more direction... more communication... more retakes (as if we could actually afford all or any of that with today's gas prices?). Most American cartoons, which are typically animated in California (namely Burbank), are animated overseas in Korea — more so than any other country, Asian or not. Could America be overworking the Koreans? It's a possibility. Additionally, in 2024, there were some leaks that suggested that other studios had people in North Korea contracted for overseas animation work, and work between the US and the weapon-protected North side of Korea is forbidden.

Instead of overworking Korean animators, why not animate domestically here in America? In Burbank? When America had domestic animation for TV shows crippled, Japan became one of the most popular of overseas production facilities... until they became too premium for America, and America had to resort to other Asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and in some cases even China. In my opinion, the Philippines can deliver better animation (a bit roughly but still better than Korea for the most part) for the US! Taiwan isn't as involved with Burbank animation anymore, and China rarely does anything except to animate for some shows like Secret Mountain Fort Awesome and Mike Young-era Clifford the Big Red Dog. Speaking of Rough Draft Korea, however: Hanna-Barbera sent John Kricfalusi overseas to Cuckoo's Nest Studio/Wang Film in Taiwan to train the assistant animators there in acting, animation, and layout on the 1980s' episodes (or is it a reboot?) of The Jetsons. All that John K wanted to do was character design, but he ended up doing a lot more on the show — and for an overseas Asian animation production facility prior to the founding of Rough Draft Studios!

What about rigging (puppetry in 2 dimensions), though? The future of quality TV/non-theatrical 2D animation may be in the hands of Canada's and Ireland's finest riggers. Mercury Filmworks, Boulder Media, Lighthouse Studios, Snipple Animation, and Jam Filled Entertainment can deliver better animation through rigging than Korea can do for most hand-drawn shows!

That is unless it's the Spongebob Squarepants franchise of course... that and Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? and... pretty much anything animated by Yearim or Yeson (most of which are adult cartoon sitcoms with rather restricted animation so as not to distract from their comedic wordplay, since those shows are more script-driven anyway).

I asked some people about the current condition of Korean animation to see what they think about that. Maxwell Atoms had a good bit to say...

The What's in My Head? podcast interview with Randy Myers largely benefited from a question I suggested on Twitter/X about the animation quality differences between the first 6 seasons of The Powerpuff Girls and the 2016-2019 PPG "reboot" episodes.

Ariel Vracin-Harrell tweeted that overseas animators often follow the storyboards "religiously", and tiny little micro-poses in storyboards can result in the animation looking "laggy and odd". (Perhaps those Korean animators view the storyboard animatics as key animation?)

Lauren Faust says that you shouldn't animate you storyboards. One example to illustrate effective storyboarding that isn't an animated storyboard animatic is the intro to Batman: The Animated Series.

Another possible reason for stiff Korean animation since 2016 might be that the Korean animators are trying to animate as clean (and thus on-model) as humanly possible.

I'll expand more on this post later.

Here are two designs from the background team for our MEGAFOOTBALL episode! My design partner Daniella Rosu-Ortiz drew the inside of the gym, which was painted by William Gibbons. I drew the megafootball stadium and Emily Walus painted it. Here are the original drawings by Dave Alegre from the storyboard:

We call both of these “key backgrounds” which are used as reference for multiple scenes, instead of just a single shot or two. Sometimes (like here) we get the design in the storyboard. Sometime we don’t have a single shot that’s useful as a key, so we have to piece the environment together as a design team. These keys got used for nearly half the episode - which clocked in at about 250 scenes, which is a lot (By the way, we made a front and reverse key for each scene - I’m just sharing one side here).  It’s up to our animation team at Digital eMation to interpret and extrapolate from the key designs as much as they can for all the different shots.

Everyone in the pipeline has gotten so much better since we first started. I mean, we’re better at figuring out what each other need, using their drawings and visual information, predicting notes, and basically the whole TEAMWORK thing. The creator of the show Ian Jones Quartey and art director John Pham have a lot to do with this - they started us all with the collaborative and conscientious design mindset. It’s cool to see complicated backgrounds and loopy angles come back from animation and fit seamlessly with our early designs. I’ve included a bunch of shots from this episode below. This is wild, how everything comes together so well!

Promotional Samurai Jack animation for the Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time game coming out this Summer.

The animation seems to be using “puppets” rather than traditional animation, but it works just fine. The character designs are probably by Craig Kellman, since they look like the general model designs seen in Season 5 of the series.

OK K.O. Overseas Animation Studios and Directors: Season 1 part 2.