Post #11 – Limited Animation

Good animation takes a lot of time. I learned for myself that animation is extremely time consuming and tedious when I did my animation project. It isn’t very feasible to expect every single piece of animation to look as gorgeous as Fantasia or Avatar. It takes a lot of money and effort, as well as a team of highly skilled animators to create something sophisticated enough to compete with one of these movies.

But how can an animation company create a decent cartoon if they don’t have a lot of money? They can help cut down on expenses by using what is called limited animation. The basic idea behind limited animation is that certain elements of frames of animation can be reused, and not completely redrawn, to save time. For example, a background could remain static and the characters could be modified frame-to-frame. The characters themselves can be drawn in a simpler manner, which may be sometimes referred to as the “modern” style. Other ways to limit frames would be to use characters with repeating movements, or to reverse a cell to represent an opposing angle. There are many ways to save time beyond these basic methods, of course.

How exactly can limited animation be applied to the real world? Let’s examine the introduction to the Powerpuff Girls to see how the animators created a stylish and effective animation without spending a lot of time or money. Firstly, the girls themselves are not particularly complicated or difficult to draw. They are quite simple. Most people could probably draw a decent imitation of the Powerpuff Girls without any artistic experience in a short amount of time, and it certainly wouldn’t be challenging for a professional animator, yet they look very stylish and not like they were done hastily. It isn’t necessary to make the characters very intricate for them to be effective and work.

The animators also use simple backgrounds and limited camera movement and action to cut down on the amount of work they need to do. In the very beginning, the Professor is depicted as a simple black and white silhouette, and the background and objects around him are extremely simple. There isn’t too much variety in movement. Later on, we see the girls and villains standing, and then standing or flying in a simple animation that repeats, as the camera scrolls. This provides the illusion of a lot of action, even though this segment was probably accomplished in a surprisingly small small amount of frames.

It’s important to note that as we discover all the time-saving devices in the Powerpuff Girls, the animation remains interesting and stylish. It appears that there is much going on, even though there really isn’t. The point is that the animators were able to create an effective scene without spending a large amount of money and time to create something super complex and difficult.

Animators can also take advantage of reusable stock sequences, like the one above from Sailor Moon, to help use up time.  In this video, Sailor Moon transforms from a normal schoolgirl to her fully-powered form.  This sequence plays frequently throughout the series when ever she (or one of the other girls) is transforming. Instead of creating entirely new transformation sequences each time they want to show the characters transforming in a particular situation (inside a building, outside at night, etc) a sequence like this can be used for all situations.  This helps the animators cut down the total amount of frames they need to animate for each cartoon. Opening sequences (like the Powerpuff Girls example from earlier) may also demonstrate usage of stock sequences to reduce the amount of new frames to be created.

After researching this blog post, I discovered that I had inadvertently animated my project in the style of limited animation (as seen above, and in my previous posting). The background in my animation remains completely static, only the characters move. Therefore, I saved myself a lot of time because I only had to redraw the characters each frame, and not create a new frame from scratch each time. I spent about 3 hours modifying 6 seconds worth of frames, instead of spending an unmeasurable amount of time individually drawing 6 seconds worth of frames, and going insane.

Limited animation is extremely useful. Very few people have the large resources and skilled workers that a company like Disney has to create extremely intricate and complex cartoons. However, animation can be accessible to the ‘little guy’ if they use limited animation techniques to reduce the amount of time and effort they need to create the animations. Limited animation techniques do not necessarily denote lower quality or cheapness, as we saw above, but they can be quite stylish and practical even for professionals.

I commented on Brenda and Bonnie‘s posts this week.

Advertisement