Me to american animation: I know your stories are great buy why does your animation suck so bad?
American animation: We have to create simplified characters to make the movement faster and more creative and interesting.
Me glancing at Japan:
Me: k.
Hey you know what studios do in America? Due to animators unionizing, instead of paying all the animators proper wage they started sending animation to be done over seas to lower labor costs. Now most studios’ animation are shipped to Korea and China and etc., which means the designs for the characters have to be simplified for easy character animation. Not to mention the history of American animation overall and how the American cartoon style has led towards more simplified styles over the years.
Also animation in Japan, while it does have plenty sakuga stuff, are actually just budget dumps for the best fight scenes. During normal scenes, characters can be very static and has a lot of holds. There’s also the mouth-flapping thing that a lot of animators in America detest. Everything is revolved around budgets for both countries. For America, to pay animators working wages they decided to cut costs and ship labor overseas. For Japan it means terrible working hours and labor, where plenty of animators have fallen ill or even die in their own cubicles.
So watch your fucking language and learn animation history. People like you are the reason why a lot of studios are cutting costs on their workers in America.
also cool of you to compare comedy scenes to action scenes. Like, it really does come down to the money, but let’s compare apples to apples
Action scene in an American animated adventure show
Action scene in an American animated adventure move (where the budget will be higher)
Low budget Japanese animation (though I’ll grant it’s also dated, it’s what I had):
Hell, these drama moments from a comedy show aren’t half bad
There’s another bigger problem here to my mind:
Visual style is not the same thing as Animation.
Like…Garnet’s wedding dance from “Reunited” is actually very NICELY animated! It’s fluid, it’s dynamic, it’s expressive! It does the thing animation is supposed to do and uses Motion to communicate Narrative.
Buuuuuuuut Garnet’s got a big goofy grin on, her proportions are not entirely “on model” (for the sake of facilitating the big expressive dancing) and the perspective is relatively flat, erego it is “bad” animation.
Except that all of those things are and have been from the very start deliberate aspects of “Steven Universe”’s visual aesthetic. An aesthetic that is connected to the show’s animation by virtue of having that aspect in mind at a design level, yes, but it’s not really the same thing.
The OP’s problem isn’t about animation, but stylistic preference. And that’s a preference which they have every right to! But it isn’t something that can be conflated with nor draped in the supposedly objective legitimacy of citing the animation itself as bad.
