Limited Animation - Techniques

Techniques

These techniques used to produce cartoons on a reduced budget included:

• Cels and sequences of cels were used repeatedly — animators only had to draw a character walking once.
• Characters are split up into different levels: only portions of a character, such as the mouth or an arm, would be animated on top of a static cel.
• Clever choice of camera angles and editing.
• Use of camera techniques such as panning to suggest movement. A famous implementation of this is the "crash" technique, which involves the camera shaking rapidly back and forth or up and down to simulate a shock wave.
• "Smear animation:" movement is rapid and portrayed in only three frames: the beginning state, the ending state, and a "blur" frame similar to that of a picture taken with a camera that had a low shutter speed.
• Cel reversal (simply using a mirror image of the cell to represent the opposite angle). Many cartoon characters are drawn symmetrically to expedite this technique.
• The visual elements were made subsidiary to audio elements, so that verbal humor and voice talent became more important factors for success ("talking heads").
• Silhouette helped avoid having to keep track of shading on an animated character or object.
• Sliding a cel across a background to suggest movement.
• Stock footage: sequences that are reused frequently. This is the case of the character transformations in the Magical girls subgenre of Japanese anime series. Filmation used this strategy for much of its productions, and Hanna-Barbera often used it when necessary (most notably on Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.)
• Extensive recaps of previous episodes or segments, to cut down on the amount of new material necessary (used often in serial shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle or Underdog).
• The most egregious case of limited animation, known as Syncro-Vox, involved pasting a film of the moving lips of a real-life person over a still frame of an "animated" character to give the appearance that the character is doing the talking. Cambria Studios held a patent on the technology, and as such, it was primarily used on their productions, such as Clutch Cargo; it still has limited use today, the most widely known example being the online series The Annoying Orange.
• Chuckimation, another notoriously low-budget process, simply moves various "animated" figures by hand or by throwing them across a space. Most commonly used with stop-motion animation, it usually does not allow for characters' mouths to move.