The evolution of cartoon drawings
Cartoon drawings are an underrated art style by most people and for the last 50 years, cartoons have gone from simple and bare bones to works of art with great detail and effort put into them. What started as something as a form of children’s entertainment has become something that anybody of any age can enjoy.
While Walt Disney really brought cartoons to the mainstream it made them viewable for other people, they really did not take off until the 90′s. The 1990s brought a whole new wave of cartoons from all over the world.
American animation itself matured through outsourcing and technological advances, though in the late 90s American cartoon drawings took a lot of influence from Japanese animation.
While the art style of Japanese cartoons, also known as anime, did not really become emulated until the mid-2000s, the art direction very much influenced the direction of American cartoons in the 90s. Also, animation techniques were also mimicked by American animators.
However, there is a big difference between drawings and animation. Animation is a collection of cartoon drawings all drawn in sync to create a scene. So in essence, animation is a collective of drawings.
Before technological advancements in this field happened, cartoons were all done by hand. Each frame in any animated feature was done by hand, including the outlines, the final drawings, and the color.
All of a cartoon was done by hand; that meant that the outlines, the final drawings, and the colors were all by hand. This is a very difficult task which took quite a long time in order to finish even a 30 minute television show.
Starting in the late 90s and early 2000, computer animation really took hold. By using computer software, animators could then take away half the work they had to do before and produce animated features at a faster rate. It is much cheaper to animate by computer than by hand, as there is much extra needed when doing it by hand.
An increasingly common animation platform is flash. Flash is a very simplistic and easy way to produce animation on the computer, but does not give the greatest results at all times. This method is mostly used by amateurs posting their homemade cartoons online, but some professional studios use flash for cartoons.
The best example of this style would be a French cartoon, known as “WakFu”. This cartoon has the most advanced usage of flash animation to date, and it really shows you what flash as an animating platform can do.
Adults now enjoy the more mature cartoons that are marketed towards them, since cartoons are no longer thought of as a children’s only medium. Animated television shows and full length animated films marketed towards adults are becoming all the more common.
Looking at cartoons now, it is easy to say that they have grown a lot and will only continue to grow in maturity and popularity as time goes on.
No matter your standpoint on cartoon drawings as an art form, there is no denying that they have changed over the years. The advances in techniques and technology open cartoons to a whole world of possibilities.
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