iron_megalith said:
Whilst I believe that to be true for 3D animation; 2D animation in US is not top notch anymore. There's a lack of sense of evolution in their style of animation. It's really dated. The only recent animation I can remember to associate with US animation is Avatar. However some parts of it where outsorced to other countries. Now Korra season 2 is getting help from Studio Pierrot(Bleach, Naruto, Yuyu Hakusho) IIRC. So it's not really a full american production. The likes of Spongebob were decent. However the most memorable US animation I can note is the old Tom & Jerry shows. Those were really really good. Now for some little trivia. Japan might be getting praised for a couple of great works but the production conditions for animation there are usually so damn constricted. I'm sure you guys encountered quality drops when watching anime. It's rare for them get so much time before the thing airs. Some even stretch as low as 6 months production time. If it's an action anime it's gonnna get bottlenecked by terrible scheduling issues hence getting a lot of drop in quality. Now some studio wants to challenge that and try something new with producing a 13 episode show within 3 months time. Spells disaster if you know how these things usually work but it's gonna be interesting if they pull it through. On a side note. I dunno how US animation gets produced back then but in Japan the show itself is funded by sponsors. Most of the shows are aired late night. And I mean late night. Some even air as late as 23:30 - 24:30. The reasoning behind here is that the slot is much cheaper. Here the TV networks don't alot or fund the animation shows. The production committee buys the slots for the show. Usually if it's an adaptation, the ones who will surely be a part for funding are the owner of the source materials. So with that, budget for these shows are usually very tight. They make do by spreading quality episodes althrough out the series. But of course some of the drops will be very noticeable, others won't be(magically). And that's one of the special things about Japanese animation. They developed neat tricks on how to depict motion with fewer frames without hampering the fluidity of the scene. It's really admireable that even with constrictions like those(I'm not even listing the other things I know) they still tend to produce quality animation generally. Pardon if this thing goes a little out of topic and my sentences are a little scattered. I should really be sleeping now. :P For more insights watch this video.
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I was refering to Disney for more current; even then it's ristricted to movies. Disney full featured movies are probably the best you'll see worldwide. They also made one animated feature film in the past 10 years which is terrible (Like full grade production). But stuff earlier on like Fleischer's stuff and Loony Toons/Merrie Melodies. Those pioneered animation. Then everyone switched over to Japan back in the 80s and early 90s. Korra's animated in Korea. I think Avatar was done in Korea too. But I'm sure they want Korra produced fast, it takes a year to make an episode so they might be outsourcing to Japan as well. I hope Japan figures this out cause they're outsourcing to Korea too. I don't think Naruto is animated in Japan anymore for instance. Though it's interesting about cartoons; the U.S. uses toy sales (Young Justice was pretty much cancelled due to toy sales vs high ratings that it has). Japan uses sponsors (From what you're saying).
