CG or traditional animation?

[Jhiaxus]

Really? Transformers the Movie has simplistic character designs, a REALLY spotty colour pallette which completely fails to be consistent, and the animation QUALITY fluctuates wildly between scenes.

The animation style itself is severely dated -- it looks like an old cartoon. But that's what popular culture works do... they age.

The main difference between a GOOD QUALITY cell animated show and a GOOD QUALITY CGI show will be this:

CGI will generally mean a better CHARACTER PERFORMANCE, as character performance is MORE EXPENSIVE in cell animation than it is in CGI because of the increased amount of art and framerate. With CGI good character animation is still expensive, but comparitively not so much.

Cell animation meanwhile will generally mean a MUCH LARGER cast. Which means we're talking about twenty to thirty characters vs. ten.

Depends what you prefer.

--Jhiaxus.

[1orion2many]

Anything as long as it doesn't look like TF animated again. I don't care how good the stories are when you want to vomit everytime you see the animation. My fave series is BW and I didn't mind BM as well so I may even lean towards CGI

[CryptiK]

I really just dont want a repeat of Energon or Cybertron those where horrible

[GoktimusPrime]

Yeah but that's because those animations were _cheap_... it's not so much a problem with using CGI or cel-shaded CGI, but seems to be more of a problem with budget. Macross Frontier is uses a combo of cel and CGI animation but has much nicer animation than Energon/Cybertron.

[AussieJason]

I still favour the traditional animation, but I'll live with CGI as long as the quality is good.

The problem I have with most CGI cartoons (generally speaking) is that simply not enough happens in each episode. Compared to traditional animation, the pacing is often way too slow for my liking.

In my opinion, the writing is often stronger when it isn't CGI. While disliked by many, I liked TF Animated; as it at least tried to have good storylines and characters.

The CGI produced shows seems to concentrate on the visual way too much. The creators almost expect the audience to be happy with what they are looking at, rather that expect much plot. Many (including myself) are critical of Michael Bay for this, but I think this problem has been occuring in many earlier TF incarnations.

[SMHFConvoy]

CG or hand drawn it doesn't matter to me. CG is good because it allows the characters to stay on model. Where as traditional you do have the problem of going off model but you can be much more flexible...

If the story is good e.g. beast wars and TFA it doesn't matter how the show is done because both methods of animation are still labour intensive. It still takes roughly six months to produce a half hour cartoon.

[Lord_Zed]

Holy smokes you're joking right? Sure the animation errors are glaring (due to lower standards back then) but the overall animation quality is still top notch! Animated is the one thats gonna look dated once that style of animation goes out of fashion.

No i'm not wearing 86 goggles honest

I'm kinda with Jhiaxus and Gok on this one.

On the one hand your right, the Transformers g1 movie is of a high standard compared to most cheapo toy movie cartoons, and could certainly compete with some of its recent cousins like those horrible Pokemon movies, but it's certainly not a great piece of animation. They don't emote much, the lip syncing is crap and there are all those errors (not to mention that wierd bit in the Prime vs Megs fight, where Megs just let's Prime throw him by the head?). Part of that is of course the nature of Transformers and the quick action spam toy cartoon production line.

So yeah a top quality B-grade animation, but in the A league I could hardly call it enduring quality animation, when Disneys 1937 Snow White would kick it's arse with ease.

[Jhiaxus]

Oh sure. IF you're comparing the animation quality to say, My Little Pony the movie... or Challenge of the Machine Men: Rock Lords... or even G.I. Joe the movie... then Transformers wins hands down.

--Jhiaxus.
(It doesn't beat Care Bears though. Care Bears is awesome. ICKY STICKY BUBBLEGUM!)