Memory, I remember looking at Batman and noticed they drew his nose pointy.  When I looked at the production company it was Sunrise and I was like "Oh that makes sense, a good studio did the episode".  Though they mentioned it in that forum I found the list from.  Though I'm assuming Feat of Clay is the episode where Clayface dies.

Interesting... I have to check those details whenever I watch it again. Thanks for the info ! ^_^

By the way, here's "Feat of Clay": http://dcanimated.wikia.com/wiki/Feat_of_Clay

Clayface appears in another episode later though...

Hmmm I have to look into it as well.

You're right. That was quite terrible of me to compare. Korra did get a lot of help from Korean animators. Shows like Naruto, Attack on Titan, and other really tightly scheduled action shows got help from outside. Note to self. Don't post at 3am.

I guess a fairer comparission would be 90s US animated movies vs  90s Japanese animated movies.

However there are a few studios in Japan that don't rely on outsourcing the backbone of the animation itself.  The ones who surely do 80%~90% of the workin house is Kyoto Animation(Haruhi,Clannad,K-ON). Ufotable(Kara no Kyokai,Fate/Zero) follows the same principle generally. Though they're not that in-house dedicated as the former. IIRC they don't have that much of a dedicated animation team in-house.

Interesting info about the US method of toy sales. Studio such as Sunrise(Gundam) works that way with Bandai and it's proven to sustain them quite well. Most anime in Japan is a gamble and heavily banks on merchandises such as Disc sales(DVD/BD/CD), figures, mangas, novels, etc. Mostly if the anime is an adaptation, it is used to promote the source material. Most of the time, production committees find producing another season for a certain anime series to be pointless if that source material already finished or it is currenlty stagnating.

Glad I could share this vid here. Regarding style, well I'm not really that fond of stylistic approaches myself. There are only a handful of animators I can enjoy who likes to break the model. It's not that I want them to stay on model all the time. I think that at times it's needed to express motion and intensity. It adds flavor the scenes. Things that do get TOO artsy for me irks me the wrong way at times.

Like this one from Asura's Wrath.

I appreciate the detail done and the way they envisioned this. However it was just too wild for me.

Anyway, since I was trying to recall old US cartoons, I remembered SWAT Kats. Piece of trivia. The opening of SWAT Kats was outsoured to Japan(apparently handled by Itsuki Imazaki).

If you watched the previous vid I linked and watched the following parts, you would see the distinct style that a certain influential Japanese animator ushered in.

Well...................I would agree with you up to a point. But if you're going to make a post referring to the Golden Age of animation, and posit that you know what you're talking about, you have to also mention Disney and MGM, as well as Fleicher Studios via Paramount, etc. Warner Bros.' early work was amazing, but so was the pioneering stuff from Walt Disney and Max Fleicher. So were the early works like Tom & Jerry and Droopy, etc., from MGM.

As for you list......well, problem is, many of those cartoons you mention were drawn outside of the US, such as Transformers, GI Joe, The Real Ghostbusters, Batman, X-Men, Spider-Man, Inspector Gadget, Thundercats (was literally done by some of the folks that would be come Studio Ghibli), etc. Almost all DiC cartoons were animated outside of the US, as were most Marvel and DC cartoons. and honestly a hell of a lot of popular 80s cartoons. Major exceptions were Hannah-Barbera, Ruby-Spears, and Filmation, who did He-Man and She-Ra.

@iron_megalith

I hadn't watched all of the "Sakuga" videos before, but now I have. The history recap was particularly interesting to me, with how the Japanese got to that "static" style and frame manipulation we see today. I was aware of Disney's influence on them, but not how close they got to emulate their style before finding their own way... Oh, and go Toei ! ^_^

That Asura's Wrath DLC is wild indeed... I agree with you. While I appreciate the talent and work that is shown there, it's not the style I would prefer. That surrealist way of portraying the characters, with those exaggerated close ups and amorphous designs... It can be great on small doses, but it's easy to get saturated with more. I guess you could say the same for the rest, but I think it's specially true for this one. I also got the feeling from the videos that the current trends seem to go that way more than anything... That explains things.

If you watched the previous vid I linked and watched the following parts, you would see the distinct style that a certain influential Japanese animator ushered in.

Kanada school I presume ? Seems to fit the over the top action style and contrast of light and dark shades. And he does seem to be the most popular of them all... Probably my favorite of these contributions too, followed by Iso and Itano.

By the way, I didn't know that trivia about Swat Kats either... I never paid much attention to it, but I could've noticed it before... I guess the character design was enough to prevent it.

I think it varies. In the post-World War II decades, America had the advantage until the 1970's. Japan started to get better and by the 1980's, Anime blew away anything that Americans were doing. Then Americans made a comeback made a comeback in the 1990's when Disney had their renaissance and you had cartoons like Batman The Animated Series and X-Men The Animated series. Television cartoons had the high production values that were normally reserved for animated feature films. This lasted until the early 2000's. I think one of the last great cartoons from this era was the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. After that, cartoons got more simplistic and later on, many animators started abandoning hand-drawn animation in favor of CG, which for the most part looks crappy on television. So I think Japan is ahead again because their animation has only gotten better over the decades and has not yet jumped the shark.

I don't think you can argue those in Japan's favor, however. Otherwise we'd have to give Taiwan and Korea a lot of credit for stuff that they did not really have a creative hand in. The animators are just the grunts, putting together what the storyboarders (who come from the actual studio) have made

American cartoons were great at one point until they started out sourcing jobs to cheap studios that sometimes produced very bad animations, the same happened to Japanese cartoons for awhile as well. Then came the current style of CGI animated cartoons that have more stability but you can always tell if it was out sourced at the good companies or the bad ones even today, but as far as making more detailed animation goes, unless it's funded to the tee, Japanese has the better animation on average because their art is more detailed, Japanese animation stories can be cliche but not as cliche as most American ones, and their VOs are better dramatized in general.

The problem with most American animations are that they are aimed more towards children, whereas Japanese animations cover all grounds, so there is a huge variety difference to start with and that's why American animation generally can't compete. The last great animation from America that I actually saw in the movies is still Titan A.E. and that came out 13 years ago! I have not seen anything close to that level afterwards, not even the new Heavy Metal from 2000 was that good, in fact, the new Heavy Metal sucked giant balls compared to the 1981 original.

Just as an example, this well known animation for America was actually animated in Japan in the 1980s, that's how good Japan is.

We all loved Thunder Cats in the 80s, don't even deny it.

Looks awful a lot like this in presentation, doesn't it?