>Defending the '80s (Part Four) | HG Revolution Responds To The Rebuttal

Originally Posted by Jeff Harris

Just mere days after I posted my response to Jorge's case that the 80s were the worst, I got another person responding to the initial post as well as my response, and it's a familiar name to the Toon Zone boards, HG Revolution. He's actually wondering WHY I'm defensive about the 80s and why I feel the need to defend it. I'll tell him why on a future article, but in the meantime, here's HG Revolution's response, uncut and unabridged as it was sent to me:

Hi, Jeff. I've been reading your site since 2003. You may know me as HG Revolution of the Toonzone Forums. 14 years old, so you can probably assume I'm working without too much nostalgia towards older shows. Now, you seem to be getting very defensive about the '80s, but what I have to ask is simply "why"? Admittedly it wasn't the worst decade of animation as some people might make it out to be. However, has there really been a good decade for animation in quite some time?

If you actually read the article, and I know that you did, you would have saw that the good things that did happen in the 80s in fact did have an effect and continues to have an effect on the animation industry.

This I agree with. Good things did come out of the '80s. Still, only a tenth of the output (in America, at least) has had much of a positive impact today. Not that this makes it all bad, but the number of good shows did double in the '90s and the 50-50 ratio of quality-to-crap is probably only applicable in the Golden Age of the '40s and '50s.

See, when you start to separate animation by country, you also lose the argument instantly.

No, you don't. Now, if Japanese and American animation artists both got equal amounts of license and freedom, I'm sure the Q:C ratio (as I'll call it) would be equal between the two nations. However, the animation INDUSTRIES of the two nations are so different that writing an article about the two together without acknowledging the differences would result in a general lack of clarity. In the Middle Ages, Europe was going through a dark age while the Mid-East was in a period of enlightenment (funny how the tides have changed since then).

Does this make the Middle Ages automatically bad or automatically good?

No, but you have to acknowledge that differences in government could make or break a region and that those two governments totally different beasts. Anime in the '80s had much more free reign than American animation had in the same time period. Hayao Miyazaki, often known as "the Walt Disney of Japan", was just getting his start with experimenting in high-budget feature animation and in the process made masterpieces such as Nausicaa, Laputa, and Totoro.

The Disney Studios in America, on the other hand, had lost all inspirational spark and were stuck with fodder like The Aristocats and The Black Cauldron, and their return to quality only occurred when Richard Williams, the student of Golden Age animators Ken Harris and Grim Natwick, came in with a small collective of CalArts students and the Golden Age throwback film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? When American animators started gaining more freedoms in the late '80s, they had to backtrack to the '40s to create a quality product. Japanese animators were still experiencing their "'40s".

Repetitive backgrounds. Head only dialogue shots. Limited animation. Terrible character designs. Yeah, they were prominent in the 80s. They were also prominent in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Heck, those things could even be seen in the 90s and today, so don't act all surprised and be so self-righteous. Hanna-Barbera was a great studio and all, but the animation wasn't always the best in the world. The chase scenes with the long repetitive hallways with that same painting on the same mantle. When I was a kid, I wondered why they always bought multiple copies of one painting in every mansion on Scooby-Doo.

Limited animation is excusable with pretty art. UPA, Samurai Jack, and even some of Chuck Jones' later works used limited techniques and still achieved a high artistic quality. And reversely, ugly model sheets can be excused if they get enough license to go off-model in actual fluid animation. Combine the two issues and you get a work of crap. Crap is still present in all eras. The '70s had the largest pile, but the '80s were still pretty bad. Just because the '80s is the lesser of evils doesn't make it a good period overall.

So, why pick on the 80s?

I don't pick on the '80s any more than I pick on the '70s or most of the '60s. The '80s did have some good stuff (a lot of the anime, Roger Rabbit, the Tracey Ulman Simpsons shorts). And yet its painful how the average American cartoon made nowadays pales in comparison to the average cartoon made in the Golden Age.

I have. But, again, look at any other cartoon from any other era. Particularly every other cartoon from the 60s, cartoon from the 70s and every third cartoon from the 90s and 2000s. Look at a lot of vector-based (Flash) cartoons seen online, on Adult Swim (although in Sealab 2021's case, they're parodying the static look of Sealab 2020), and on South Park. With the exception of angry eyebrow slants, characters tend to lack animation in their faces when they emote.

Which is inexcusable in any era. Even with limited animation, Ren and Stimpy could emote. Flash doesn't have to mean crap. John K.'s various music videos and Fosters have a wider variety of expressions than most non-Flash cartoons on the air.

I love Huckleberry Hound. If anybody ever asked me what are my favorite cartoon characters of all time, Huck would be up there in the top five. His misadventures had great stories and vocal talents and good character and background designs, but the animation wasn't so amazing. The reason Huck and the other Hanna-Barbera shows and shorts worked wasn't so much for the animation, but rather the character and background design, the vocal talents of Butler, Messick, Frees, Blanc, Waldo, and Foray (among others), and good stories. John K. was of the school of Hanna-Barbera and it shows. The misadventures of Ren and Stimpy had great stories and vocal talent as well as good character and background designs, but, like Hanna-Barbera, the animation was lacking.

Old H-B shorts may have been very limited, but they still had more expression and better art direction than H-B's later works. Ren and Stimpy still maintained great artwork even with limited animation. I don't need everything I watch to be Fantasia, but I sure as hell want any cartoons to look better than The Smurfs.

Dexter's Laboratory? Powerpuff Girls? Spongebob Squarepants? Dragon Ball Z? Batman: The Animated Series? Justice League? Fairly Oddparents? Code Lyoko? Homestar Runner? ReBoot? Jimmy Neutron? Some are good in those standards while others aren't.

Uh, Dragonball Z WAS made in the '80s. Dexter and PPG are classic HB cubed: the art direction in them is stunning even with limited animation. Spongebob is similar in quality to Ren and Stimpy just less so. Batman is brilliantly animated, even reminiscent of older fully-animated shorts, though the difference in animation studios is sometimes evident. Justice League is an anomaly as far as TV animation is concerned: it moves great for the most part and the character designs are fine, but there's not much in the way of strong visual direction. As such, despite its strengths in the realm of drama, its a very poor action show, which is a bit of a let-down. Homestar Runner? Its worth a laugh, but it isn't quality animation. FOP and Jimmy Neutron are examples of wasted potential, and Code Lyoko is utterly boring and quite ugly to look at as well. Never saw Reboot, but I'll give it slack for being the first of its kind even if the visuals are dull compared to modern CGI.

So, in other words, you pretty much agree that the cartoons of the '80s are just as good AND just as bad as anything that came before and after them as I stated it. See, you broke the decade in half, the "pre-Renaissance" and the "Renaissance" whereas I see the decade as one decade, warts and all. What's good was good and what's bad is bad. So, the statement, in your eyes was not "further from the truth," but simply "the truth."

But looking at the decade as one big whole totally ignores the progression of animation trends in America. The first half of the decade was ultimately just a continuation of the '70s, only with the derivative mystery shows replaced with derivative toy cash-ins. The second half of the decade saw an increase in quality due to the popularity of Robotech in syndication and Disney's need to reform their animation unit after The Black Cauldron bombed. Lumping the two halves together and saying the Renaissance cartoons (as they're called here) existed throughout the decade is a disservice to proper history study.

My Response.