Relive those horrible moments of yesteryear, when you stared at the screen and couldn’t BELIEVE how bad the animation was. American toons or Japanese anime or that horrible stuff that came out of Canada and Eastern Europe under goverment auspices – it’s all grist for the mill. If it’s animated, and REALLY BADLY animated, we want to hear about it.
I’ll start with Clutch Cargo. Didn’t those people even LOOK at the toon they created? Didn’t they realize how queasy it made you feel to look at those writhing lips in the middle of an unmoving drawing of a face? Good God, people! The goggles! The do nothing! AIIIEEEEE!!!
Worst Xerox animation: Hanna-Barbera anything from the '70s or '80s. Not only did nothing but the mouths and an occasional arm move, but the drawings themselves were grainy and blocky, as if made to reproduce well on a…Xerox machine. Skimpy, inflation-age, cheap plastic entertainment for youngsters who were going to live in a cheap plastic world. Even the music tracks sounded like they came off an early, cheap plastic Casio keyboard.
Worst frame-by-frame animation: Warner Bros.’ “a.a.p./Seven Arts” re-releases of 1930s-'40s black & white Looney Tunes. You know these: the ones traced, re-backgrounded, and colored in by an infinite number of monkeys in the mid-‘60s. Actually, poorly-paid Koreans with a hit-and-miss grasp of English (viz: the movie house sign reading WE CHAHGE [sic] OUR SHORTS EVERYDAY [sic]), working on a speed-up so merciless you can see the characters’ arms, legs, and eyes tremble like Jell-O Pudding even when they’re standing still.
Who did Scooby Doo? Was it HB? The thing that irked me so much was the fact that the trap doors-- or anything that moved/was supposed to move was a totally different color than the rest of the background. Cheap animation at its worst, people.
The Tom and Jerry toons from the late 60’s. The ones with the steel drum music in the background. I can only wonder what the animators were smoking when they created those.
Disney put out a movie a few years ago that looked like it wasn’t even done yet. I seem to recall still being able to see pencil-markings. It was about John Henry, Johny Appleseed, Paul Bunyon, etc. I think it was called Legends.
It wasn’t the worst animation I’ve ever seen but definitely the worst modern animation by a company as big as Disney.
The first anime I ever saw was what my youngest sister used to watch after school on weekdays. The shows were Speed Racer and Astro Boy. Everything about these shows appalled me. There was no animation, merely a series of amateurishly drawn stills. The characters were all caricatures. The voices were way over the top. I was amazed at how badly it was done. And, my sister and her friends loved it. I didn’t get it then and I still don’t.
I’ve seen much better anime since then but a lot of the stuff in Toonami wasn’t any better than the stuff i saw in the 1960s. Pokemon? Dragonball Z?
Hey, the cheap animation was part of the charm (you didn’t think people watched Clutch Cargo for the stories, did you?). The lips were fascinating, especially to their target audience.
The worst were those on various direct-to-video children’s tapes in the 80s.
While they are some of the very best cartoons in the history of the world, it bugs me now to see how Bullwinkle’s jaw–the only part of his face that moves–never matches the rest of him. Of course, it’s only apparent since I bought the DVDs. It never seemed to matter when I was a kiddie watching it in grainy black & white.
Weib (Weiss?) Krutz … well, let’s just face that I can’t spell it and say White Cross. It seriously looked like it was put together by some teenagers taking a summer animation program. No wonder the tape I got cost less the snack I had before buying it.
We had fun chanting “We have no money!” at the screen at the really awful parts, though. Later we got to see the live action concert for it, which somehow managed to be even more awful and MSTable. Ah, Anime Club.
Oh yeah, I suppose I should mention that the reason why some parts are whiter than others in old cartoons is that cels aren’t entirely transparent. Each cel casts a white tint over the cels below it. If his body is whiter than his jaw, then his body is on the cel below the cel with his jaw on it, etc.
I don’t think I ever noticed it when I was a kid, either.
One of the things I was thinking about when I was starting this thread was a hentai blowjob animation. It consisted of large pink circle (the face) two horizontal blobs (the eyes) and thwo parallel lines (the cock) with a semicircle at the other end. The parallel lines alternately grow longer and and shorter. Nothing else happened. That was it. What excitement! Hell, it was damn near stick figure art. The weird thing is, most adult anime is WAAAAAY better than this – if it weren’t, there’d be no market for it, because this image was totally abstract, not arousing at all. In fact, see for yourself:
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So, is anybody masturbating like a motherfucker yet? Or are you just doing as I did, and going “WTF!!!???”
Oh, forgot the “money shot”
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Like I said, do these people even LOOK at their animations?
I wouldn’t say it was the worst animation I’ve ever seen, but there was a show on Cartoon Network for awhile–I think it was called “Dr. Katz”–that I simply couldn’t watch because of the irritation I got from trying to track the constantly-moving squiggly lines of the drawings. Was this “Squiggle Vision”? The show gave me a headache. I’m sure it was very funny, but I’ve never been able to sit through an episode to find out.
The worst that I’ve ever seen goes to Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi. A few of the shows listed so far can at least claim a lack of technology regarding the animation process. This utter crapfest came out only a year or two ago, so it has no excuse.