Limited Animation

The animation industry was affected in a big way by the advent of television. This was a new way to get animation into people's homes and was a massive opportunity to distribute films and make money. Many companies wanted to create material to be screened on TV as quickly and cost effectively as possible, so there was much low-quality animation emerging, often animated on 5's or 6's meaning there were a lot less frames to draw per second than in more traditional high quality animation, which would be done on 1's or 2's. A lot of this was done badly but there were some companies who adapted their animation to suit this new "limited animation" style, creating new and interesting films that worked with their limitations rather than against them.

As an experiment, I've taken one of my old hand-drawn animations and removed many of the keyframes so it seems to have been made on 5's (or thereabouts). The first video shows the original animation for comparison.

The narrative is still quite clear on the edited version although in the original it is much easier to read what is happening at each point. The limited animation also loses a lot of the character from the original in which there are more subtle movements that indicate acting and thought which are lost with the missing frames. It's clear then that the approach to limited animation must be altered to make sure you can still clearly portray character, story and action within the limitation on frames.

I think it will be interesting to look into how companies like UPA approached this and what methods were developed to make sure no quality was lost in their productions.