What do you think makes an animation good?

Dawn Saha: Everything about it has to be solid; the drawings, voices, and plot

Kara Tabian: i like good drawings animation and a great plot

Heidi Creselious: It has to be:1) original. If it follows a formula, it's crap. For example, early Simpsons were ok, but after a couple years they turned into a formula cartoon, using the same fast, slapstick sitcom style to get cheap yucks from the viewer, and often a guest star of the week. It was as formulaic as Gilligan's Island.Even worse, all the cartoons of the next ten years copied the same formula, from Groening's own Futurama to the current plate of dogshit known as Family Guy.So what's a good, original cartoon? Try the 2 Stupid Dogs. About the only good cartoon ever made by Hanna/Barbera, the writers gave it fresh material every episode, and it was always brilliantly funny. There's no formula, except the main characters and some supporting characters and a few catchphrases. And it gets laughs by clever humor, no! t by whack-slap fast scenes with one-liners.2) animated by someone who understands the power of animation itself to convey things without words. Hate to pick on Groening, but this is something he failed at. All his cartoons are full of words - usually a scene is "fixed camera," with a character either rushing in or out like Kramer on Seinfeld and saying a quick one-liner. He's helpless without dialog.There are plenty of examples of totally wordless cartoons, but the example I'll give is Tom and Jerry. Modern prime-time cartoons are unfit to have Jerry stick the end of their tail into a steaming teapot. Groening based Itchy and Scratchy on Tom and Jerry, because he idolized the style but couldn't do it himself for more than 1-minute segments. It's better to have funny things happen to an animated character, than for it to say something funny.3) Voices and animation, and the style of drawing, matter only if the first two conditions are met. A cartoon can get good voice actors! , usually, but for some reason animated Hollywood movies never! use real voice actors, they use film actors instead, and their cartoon quality often suffers. (Eddie Murphy in Shrek was an exception). Cartoon voice-over pros can do things with their voices no Hollywood actor could even imagine. The old "man of a thousand voices" Mel Blanc was responsible for so many characters that the characters basically died with him, nobody can imitate them. Casey Kasem has also done tons of cartoon voices over the decades (he's Shaggy from Scooby Doo!). If you check out the Red episodes of 2 Stupid dogs (available on youtube) the girl who does Red's voice has probably the most brilliant cartoon voice I've ever heard, seamlessly modulating her voice between a sweet chirp and a brazen yell multiple times in a single line. You have to hear it to believe it.Animation has to be well-done, with one exception: Voltron-legacy saturday morning stuff, and anime. These are exempt because they're fans don't care if the animation is bad. Animation should have p! lenty of frames, it shouldn't be filled with dialog where everything in each frame is the same except the speaker's mouth and face moving, and it should have good effects, such as motion blurs....Show more

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