Bahahah yeah, Rocky And Bullwinkle, now those are the halcyon days of masterful animation!
(I love Rocky and Bullwinkle but it contained about as much animation as a slug on sedatives in January)
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that guy was full of shit.
Definite old fart here. Just looked at a clip of Archer. Boring. Unless it is being boring as some kind of ironic effort. Then it is just dumb. You must have loved Mary Worth and hated the early Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, let alone Far Side.
Sort of reminds me of the complaints about the early impressionists from the more realistic styles of academic painting in its day and the complaints about cubism …
Adventure Time is gorgeous! And brilliant. If I want realism I can watch real people act. I want creative and fun. Edgy I can do without though.
I’m fine with The Simpsons as well–maybe because it started when I was a youth, and so it’s “normal” to me. I can also get over animation that I don’t care for. For a long time I refused to watch South Park, based in part on the visual style. (I also thought it was all dick and fart jokes.) Eventually I wound up watching the Chicken Lover episode, and that completely turned me around–I realized it was actually a pretty smart show. I never watched it religiously, but I could enjoy it if I bumped into it.
ETA: I love the old joke about Mary Worth: Someone mentions reading it. The person she’s talking to says that she used to read it, but hasn’t read it in like ten years. The first person responds, “Well, it’s about five minutes later…” 
I never cared for Peanuts, but just because I thought it was boring and sort of sappy; the art was fine. My local paper never carried Calvin & Hobbes, so I missed out on that one entirely. On the other hand, I was a big Bloom County/Outland fan…
I think **dropzone **must be referring to the 2000 Rocky & Bulwinkle feature film.
You have to appreciate Archer’s animation style by remembering that it is not a cartoon! It is an animated series. Much like King of the Hill was. IOW nothing overtly cartoonish can happen in it, as it’s supposed to take place in the (or at least ‘a’) real world. Consequently they shouldn’t look garishly colorful, but realistic, even sometimes gritty. Go by the number of fingers. The Simpsons never gets too cartoonish like having eyes bulge out or anything, but the characters do have yellow skin, no chins, and only four fingers (except God!) Same for the MacFarland shows and Bob’s Burgers. King of the Hill’s characters on the other hand were more realistic (including five fingers). South Park goes in the opposite direction, their characters don’t have any fingers at all! Nor do they even bother having their legs move when they walk.
Nor do they need to. One of the things I think is so wrong with the past ten or so seasons of The Simpsons is that the animation has gotten way, way too good. It’s not supposed to be a Disney show (far from it)! The emphasis is supposed to be first & foremost on the writing, and amping up the animation quality does absolutely nothing to help the poor scripts. The opposite is true for South Park, KOTH, Archer etc. The animation is both uniquely styled and only as good as it needs to be to support the writing and voice performances.
Futurama has moments were it’s just gorgeous. And I know this is kind of a blanket statement, but I love their color palette on that show. It’s just so bright and awesome.
Batman: The Animated Series wasn’t perfect, but it was a high water mark too.
Some of the stuff that shows up on Adult Swim makes me NOT want to know what DIDNT get chosen. It’s just…crap!
I think the change in styles happened around the Ren and Stimpy era. So it’s John Kricfalusi’s fault.
Yeah, love him or hate him John Kricfalusi deserves the credit/blame for quite literally defining the style of independent animation for the past 20+ years! Unfortunately he, as true artists often do, insisted on going too far, not doing anything remotely resembling ‘selling out’ (which usually included making money), and was rather egotistical and acerbic with bosses and colleagues. Still, everything from Adult Swim to *SpongeBob *can trace their lineage directly back to Ren & Stimpy.
That ship sailed for The Simpsons DECADES ago. Homer jumps off the Nuclear Plant cooling tower, climbs a mountain in India, goes to space, and is bitten by an elephant in season five.
Other factors:
Target audience. The target for many of the shows you are bemoaning is a young adult demographic. Once upon a time most animation was aimed at kids with (in the better ones) just enough thrown in to make the shows tolerable for the parents trapped watching them too (and for the writers’ kicks). Plenty of kids cartoon look just the same as they had decades ago. The YA demographic often wants “edgy” in their animation, just like in their humor. Not standard animation.
Nostalgia. Most of the shows from decades ago were actually animated for shit. Quality animation cost and Hannah-Barbera showed that cheap (limited) animation, re-using the same cells over and over again, little character movement but characters with distinct styles, dialogue and joke driven, could be very profitable. They required only a fraction of the individual that cartoons previously required. The Flintstones was popular but quality animation it was not.
Computer graphics. How do hand drawn cells compete with even relatively lower end computer animation? By creating styles and feels that are distinctly different and new. Helps if they are also not expensive to produce. Certainly not by trying to look more realistic. Mind you using computer animation as a tool create these new styles and feels is also legit – but in an era that computer animation can sometimes not be told apart from life action impressing with realism, spending the time and money to create realism, is a losing proposition for a TV show’s budget.
I can agree to disagree that the “art style” of *Archer *is “fine.” But as animation, it’s as wretched as everything else done with limited-motion and sprite animation since the Hanna-Barbera TV days.
Fine, no one can afford to do proper full-motion animation any more, especially not on a TV budget. But this trend towards posed stick-puppets that’s only “finer” than the animation of* South Park*… well, it’s pretty much judging which pile of shit is higher.
It ain’t get no better than Squidbillies!
Move along now…
Adventure Time (and John K’s stuff also) owes its style to the old UPAcartoons (like Gerald McBoingBoing and Mr. Magoo). They in turn were influenced by Columbia Cartoons and Terry Toons who were influenced by expressionism in the modern art world. This isn’t anything new. It’s just what you are used to. Mainstreem cartooning is just catching back up to where we were in the 40s and 50s after a long fallow period.
Hanna Barbera, that was crap animation. Good stories, but the animation was crap. This is stylized for a purpose, not the same thing as crap. You might not like it, but it’s not crap.
I think you have to differentiate between art style and animation quality. I’ve seen quite a range of artistic style, from South Park’s paper cutouts to… oh, say, the better sequences of BAS and BB. But when the animation frame rate is somewhere between zero and ten per second, with character motion like cutout paper dolls… I don’t really care how amazing the “art” is. I’ll take WB simplicity with at least an attempt at full-motion.
Well sure, that’s why I pointed out HB and how their animation was crap. But with computers doing so much of the animating who is doing limited animation anymore? I haven’t watched Adult Swim much in recent years, but the limited animation that I have seen there seems like it’s an intentional choice rather than a lack of funding or skill. Even South Park only does it as part of the joke these days and that started because they couldn’t afford to do more. Animation has gotten cheap enough that it’s just not necessary as long as you aren’t totally independent.
I’m an Archer fan myself but I laughed when I saw it being hailed as an example of fine animation. I always felt that it was hilariously stilted and rigid.
I don’t know anyone doing full-motion animation for TV. Some is optimal limited-motion, but far too much of it descends to HB and that awful anime trope where they just move a still image around a lot.
All the characters move as if they have paper-brad joints, and it tends to be one-move-at-a-time on top of that. Even with computers managing the lines and flow, it’s not the same as true full-motion, which is admittedly expensive… but they could do better than this jointed-puppet work. I think it’s “intentional” because they can get away with saying so.
I like animation. I like gritty, funny stuff. I just can’t stand Archer, though, and the animation is a good part of it.
In a strange way that’s why it works - the stiff animation makes the over-the-top dialogue even funnier. In a way, Archer is the television equivalent of Partially Clips.
The art style works for Adventure Time, too.
If AT (which I am not a fan of, but know enough about to know how the style fits the show) can be called bad art despite that, then so can Archer’s limited animation of mid-90s clipart.