1: Contemporary Animation (South Park and Home Movies)

Dear Intraweb,
As I was in class, learning about the different types of animation we saw, my mind drifted. I was considering how many different animation styles have been developed over time.  On any given day of the week cartoons are everywhere on television. From Cartoon Network to PBS, cartoons dominate large portions of airtime over a wide variety of stations, and they all look very different and contain a very different messages.  This variety of animation styles establishes animation as one of the most important genres on television today.


The Simpsons was the first animated television show since The Flinstones to be animated on prime-time television and obtain mass appeal. Since then animated show have flourished, as have their styles.  In 2001 Tom Snyder and others patented a new animation style they called Squigglevision (Squigglevision Patent). This was first applied in their animated children's show Squigglevision, but later adopted by Brendan Small for the first two seasons of his show Home Movies. Using figures which have been traced over four or five times, and then animated on a computer, the style gives the figures a static like quality.  Here's an example from "School Nurse" in the first season of Home Movies.

Although the following two seasons stopped using true Squigglevision, they maintained the same look merely through computer reproduction.

South Park also started out with quite a unique style of animation.  Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the two creators, made the pilot episode and following first season out of cardboard cutouts, which they then processed through stop motion animation.  This creates short and stiff movements that lack the fluidity of an animation such as Silly Symphonies. However, like Small, Stone and Parker made the process completely digital after a few seasons, realizing that it takes way to much time to continue producing South Park by hand.
Here are two examples of South Park in which shift from analog to digital animation can be examined. The first clip is from "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" from season one (unfortunately it's pretty bootlegged), and the second clip is from "Manbearpig" in season 10.

Clip 2

Here you'll notice that the early episodes were stiff and childlike, but by the most recent season, they have become more and more life like.   They move more fluidly and seemingly have more joints, reminding me largely of GI Joe figures.  Stone and Parker have more than just used the computer to accelerate the production of their original animation style, but have in fact used the technology to create smoother and more realistic looking characters, even though they still look pretty unrealistic.

I have not yet begun to touch on the other various style of animation that are shown regularly on Adult Swim (anywhere from anime to stop motion), but I hope that I have shown two unique styles of animation.  South Park and Home Movies essentially thought up new animation styles, but this does not mean those are the only styles prevalent on television.  Shows such as Sit Down and Shut Up, Robot Chicken, and Archer, all have styles which differ significantly from the two examples shown above.  Between the 24 hour Cartoon Network, and Fox's Sunday night "Animation Domination", it seems as though animated television is here to stay, and is not just for the children.

Thanks Intraweb,
Noah