as much as I like the older teen titans cartoon I can admit the animation is not the best. I think it's rose tinted glasses mostly. The new stuff looks fine to me.
^ Actual career animator, people.
And also, same. I mean, when you’re 8-11 years old, you’re not exactly aware of “animation” “””quality”” (which is subjective anyways), so as kids we didn’t notice those things, and certainly didn’t compare them to other shows with a ferociously critical eye.
A close friend pointed out that the animation in the 00′s show really fluctuates in quality between the seasons. Like there are some shots where to this day I look at it and I just go starry-eyed, because it’s so pretty in its composition and the little details of their postures/expressions. (Not to mention, the background art is always a treat, and the storyboarding is usually Glorious-- at least to me, as someone who’s kinetic-dominant and not sight/shape/color-dominant? I don’t know how the boarding compares on a professional level, but I really like the motions and ‘camera’ angles they used for a lot of the episodes.)
But then there are shots where you look at it and you just know, you know, that if cartoon crit was a thing back then, they’d be all over the cross-eyed, miscolored, anatomically-implausible frames. (Wasn’t the budget cut when season 5 was green-lighted? Because I’m pretty sure I remember there being lots of articles about Budgeting Issues, and the animation kinda... slackened towards the end there.)
Personally, animation-wise on GO!, even if it’s rigged, it doesn’t look like awkward puppets to me, and they use plenty of Expressive Movements to keep it ~visually interesting~. I actually thought the new character design and style looked kind of cool, way back when we were getting the first glimpses. The only visual thing that really “bothers” me is the high saturation of the palette, which stylistically is fine, especially for a cartoon for kids! It’s just that I, in particular, need low saturation, or selectively high, to stare at a moving picture for ~11 minutes without being Constantly Distracted and Eventually Getting a Headache. (Because brain stuff, adhd, and photosensitivity. Even my computer monitors all get Low Red/Yellow and Low Contrast/Saturation settings; my brain just isn’t good at the whole Processing Visual Information thing.)