Okay I've been practicing the Danny Phantom style on and off for a few months now, and I have Thoughts.
Still trying to figure out how to draw Danny... Will prob not get around to Sam and Tucker. But I've mostly been looking for frames done by Stephen Silver because those are really the best frames...
Again, hard to nail down the animation rules when, honestly, the animation is barely ever on-model. But the head and hands are huge.
If you drew his symbol wrong, placed it wrong, no you didn't. There's a screenshot reference for that.
His appearance from behind is so wrong. Why would you design an action character to have a perpetual 90 degree design? In the show, if a character blinks or holds their eyes half-closed, you can still see the outline of the eyelid. Imo looks ugly, and I think the show creators know that too - characters barely do it, more often it's done zoomed out and/or where the circles of the eyes get squished vertically into eclipses - which is also ugly. Prob a side effect of whatever flash or animation software they use. It looks much better if the upper eyelid line is erased entirely.
Also the rules of shading are terrible and should be trashed. The heads are so big that if anyone were lit from above, their entire bodies would be in shadow. So the shading is always either flat or backlit. This especially since the characters are not designed to actually exist in real life.
They tried in the begining but in the end the style limited the show a lot actually, especially bad since this is an action show. All of the fight end up being shot-reverse-shot, cause and effect, punches hardly ever connect on-screen because the designs are nailed to a 3/4 perspective.
Like they didn’t do much with perspective for dynamic fight scenes, until barely in the first few episodes of season 3, during Vlad vs Danny like. And the limited shadow options + the almost constant forced perspective. Ughh. In some ways iconic, in others, moronic.
I can now imagine why the animation may have taken so long. It must have been very time-consuming on a management, lead character design, storyboard artist to final draft, with a character this stupidly designed. Going from computer assisted 2D drawings, to Flash-adjacent software, and occassional 3D scenes that broke style rules in a jarring way… Going from a fight script, to final animation, what a headache. And the end product is objectively ugly 2/3rds of the time, with, again, constant shot-reverse-shot action sequences. If you didn’t give a fk about the plot and wanted to watch cool fights, you would see better scenes on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You’d expect a character design like this to be investigating mysteries with Scooby Doo, not flying through alien dimensions and fightfighting gods.
What is the shape of their jaws? Noses? Foreheads? Eye sockets to bridge of nose? Is his hair really directly in front of his nose? What angles do his ears rest? His nose is always at a 90 degree angle, as is his hair, and his ears are almost always as well. Foreshortening is used in abstraction, so the proportions are never decided. What is the shape of their feet? Different in every shot. Butch spent 3 seasons of animation dodging any further decision making regarding his cash cow character. This character is antithetical to becoming an action figure or video game character.
Then in any 3D form, he looks supid af. Videogames, action figures… It’s just not an attractive design in real space. Any figure modeler, especially ones who only care about the paycheck, are gonna take one look at it and say “what the fuck am I supposed to do with this??” And apparently none of those in charge knew enough about manufacturing, let alone 3D modeling. Dinosaurs.
I think I would mix this with a bit of Toriyama stylization and rules, especially since the action can be similar. But clearly, just like the story, this diamond in the rough was left to become coal.
I will soon attempt to render my tweaked model in the original style, closer to these sketches and style mimics.
