Thread by @davemakes

watching old cartoons in HD is so wild, you can see the roughness of the line art, the slight shadow a character's animation cell casts on the background, the imperfect color mixing in the paint

it's weird what you lose trying to continue this style in digital without quite understanding the subtle bits that make it work. Everything has the same super thin line weight (except the weird corn??) so depth has to be achieved by painting (really bad looking) BG shadows

random similar scene from old simpsons, notice the level of detail diminishes as thinegs get smaller because somebody had to draw it all without the ability to zoom in. Character line weight is drawn thicker and they also pop a bit from that cell shadow

the difference is subtle but look at the variations in what is ostensibly the same yellow skintone in the old ones. characters in the foreground are brighter!

this isn't just a simpsons thing, I think the physicality of animation cells brought unintended effects that actually enhanced readability and it's worth considering in modern productions

a modern example I can think of that has embraced this aspect of cell animation is Gumball. They do some cool post-processing to make these super-flat characters feel like they physically exist in a 3D world

I think even without the 2D/3D fusion aspect, it'd be interesting to see more shows explore those subtle shadows, gradients, layering and dare I say, thicker line art

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It's interesting to see people respond to this thinking I'm critiquing old animation for having these artifacts. imo seeing evidence of human touch brings life to the work

folks are pointing out that these aren't shadows from the animation cel, but actually an artifact from the deinterlacing and HD upscaling? I'd be interested in learning more about why that happens, I figured it was from the cels since it appears to happen only around characters

also please don't be an asshole to somebody who pointed out something they thought was neat about the cartoons they were watching! I don't know why this thread got retweets, I don't work in animation, we're just postin' here cripes

and come on, there's obviously weird smoothing and color weirdness from the upscale but you can clearly still see the texture of the line art

and for the record I'm not watching it cropped, I just pulled the images for this thread from google bc it's a danged tweet not a research paper ffs some people need to log off this website

looking at SD screencaps from frinkiac, I'm guessing areas of high contrast create a sort of dark halo effect on video, which the upscaling sharpens into what looks like a shadow?

I'm seeing a similar shadow in animation shot on film, but who knows what process these have been through. Either way, it's an effect that's been erased in the conversion to digital

all right I swear I'm done talking about this but I just learned when the Simpsons switched to all-digital process around season 14 they faked the shadow around characters for a while. A bit heavy-handed but interesting!