Limited animation#Techniques
{{Short description|Animation technique}}
File:YukiClip2A.gif-based example of limited animation in the Japanese style: the mouth, eyes, arms and shadow are moving in a looping manner.]]
Limited animation is a process in the overall technique of traditional animation that reuses frames of character animation.
Early history
The use of budget-cutting and time-saving animation measures in animation dates back to the earliest commercial animation, including cycled animations, mirror-image and symmetrical drawings, still characters, and other labor-saving methods. In general, the progression was from early productions in which every frame was drawn by hand, independent of each other drawing, toward more limited animation that made use of the same drawings in different ways.
Winsor McCay, a man who put an unprecedented amount of detail into his animations, boasted that in his 1914 film, Gertie the Dinosaur, everything moved, including the rocks and blades of grass in the background. In contrast, his 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania progressed to using cels over still backgrounds, while still maintaining a level of detail comparable to that of Gertie.{{cite book |last = Canemaker |first = John |author-link = John Canemaker |title = Winsor McCay: His Life and Art |url = https://books.google.com/books?id=vs82AQAAIAAJ |edition = Revised |date = 2005 |publisher = Abrams Books |isbn = 978-0-8109-5941-5 }}
File:The Dover Boys at Pimento University 1080p.webm
The 1942 Merrie Melodies cartoon The Dover Boys, directed by Chuck Jones, is one of the earliest Warner Bros. cartoons to extensively employ some of the processes of what would become known as "limited animation", particularly its use of characters that either stand still or move so quickly that the actual motion appears to be a blur. This animation technique, an exaggeration of the established practice of squash and stretch, has come to be known as the smear frame.Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-betweens – A Life in Animation (PBS 2000)
Countries
= United States =
{{main|Animation in the United States in the television era}}
File:The_Lunar_Luger.webm, a 1957 animated serial that relied extensively on limited animation]]Hanna-Barbera Productions used limited animation throughout its existence. When the company's namesakes, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, separated from the MGM studio in 1957, they opted to take a drastically different approach to animation than they had for their fully animated short films; as television screens were much smaller than theater screens at the time, limited animation, with its emphasis on character close-ups and dialogue-based humor, was a better fit for the more intimate home viewer experience.{{cite book
|ref = Hanna & Ito
|last1 = Hanna
|first1 = William
|last2 = Ito
|first2 = Tom
|title = A Cast of Friends
|url = https://archive.org/details/castoffriends00hann
|url-access = registration
|year = 1996
|publisher = Taylor Pub
|isbn = 978-1250040497
|pages = [https://archive.org/details/castoffriends00hann/page/77 77–87]}} At the time, most feature films (along with animated shorts, including Hanna and Barbera's own work on Tom and Jerry) were transitioning to the widescreen CinemaScope process, which made it more difficult to replicate intimacy; The Walt Disney Company, though they continued to use full animation, had also used character close-ups and personality-driven humor in their early films. When Disney produced Lady and the Tramp in CinemaScope, the process made it difficult to replicate that style,{{cite web|work=Disney Archives|title=Lady and the Tramp History|url=https://disney.go.com/vault/archives/movies/ladytramp/ladytramp.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070224175329/http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/movies/ladytramp/ladytramp.html|archive-date=February 24, 2007}} a problem that Hanna-Barbera did not have with smaller, more square television screens.
The financial benefits of limited animation led to television animation companies relying on the process extensively in the television era. Jay Ward Productions relied on limited animation for those reasons,{{cite web|url=http://www.cataroo.com/cst_ROCKY.html|title=Rocky & Bullwinkle|publisher=Cataroo.com|access-date=2012-09-28}} compensating with its heavy Cold War satire and a style of deadpan comedy that would become a trademark of the studio's style.{{cite web|url=http://cagle.msnbc.com/hogan/interviews/anderson/home.asp|title=Alex Anderson interview|date=26 October 2010|work=Hogan's Alley |url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101026035438/http://cagle.msnbc.com/hogan/interviews/anderson/home.asp|archive-date=26 October 2010}} One of the frequent users of limited animation was HB's Saturday-morning rival Filmation (makers of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and BraveStarr) which gave their work a distinct look.[https://archive.today/20130425041805/http://www.bcdb.com/cartoons/Filmation_Associates/ Filmation Associates Studio Directory|BCDB] Bill Melendez used a form of limited animation to adapt the Peanuts franchise to television and later film; in addition to the cost and time concerns (especially for his first special A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was given only a $76,000 budget and four months to produce 30 minutes of animation), Meléndez also noted that Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz had designed the characters with a flat style well-suited for limited animation.{{cite book|last=Mendelson|first=Lee|title=A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5VTe58NwxPMC|year=2013|publisher=It Books|isbn=978-0-06-227214-0}} The short-lived Cambria Studios turned out three serials (including Clutch Cargo) using one of the most inexpensive approaches to animation possible: known as Syncro-Vox, it involved superimposing film of the voice actor's moving lips over a still frame of the character."Don't believe your eyes! How 'Clutch Cargo' cuts corners as a television comic strip", TV Guide, December 24, 1960, pp. 28-29.[https://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/clutch-cargo/cast/1030235618/ Clutch Cargo - TV Guide] Disney themselves resorted to some limited animation tricks in an effort to cut its budget during the 1960s, particularly with its usage of xerography in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which resulted in artwork with heavier, rougher outlines than had previously been seen in Disney films up to that point.{{Cite web |date=June 2, 2021 |title=How 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' Saved Disney |url=https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-one-hundred-and-one-dalmatians-saved-disney |access-date=2022-06-01 |website=Smithsonian Magazine |language=en}}
By the 1970s, the usage of limited animation in Saturday morning cartoons had become pervasive. Walter Williams, creator of The Mr. Bill Show, noted that cartoons in the 1970s were so static, he expected the artist's hands to enter the screen at any moment and physically start moving the drawings around. This inspired him to create the "Mr. Hands" character in The Mr. Bill Show, who literally did just that.{{Cite book|title=The Mr. Bill Show|last=Williams|first=Walter|date=1998-08-01|publisher=Running Pr|isbn=9780894710858|location=Philadelphia|language=en}}
= Japan =
{{main|Anime}}
Limited animation proved to be particularly popular in Japan, such that the Japanese word for animation, anime, entered the English lexicon as a loanword for the distinctive style of Japanese animation that took root there.[https://www.tofugu.com/japan/anime-vs-cartoons/ Anime's Great Deception-The Difference Between Anime and Cartoons] Anime features scenes of mouth moving with occasional eye blinks, rendered long shots of detailed backgrounds, a low frame rate (especially in earlier productions) and rare use of 2D fluidity on motion-blur filled action alongside reused drawings, using style conventions from Japanese comic books (manga). It also has the benefit of lower cost productions and stylized content as opposed to realistic animation.[https://www.animatorisland.com/is-anime-a-legitimate-form-of-animation/?v=7516fd43adaa Is Anime a Legitimate Form of Animation?-Animator Island][http://showmetheanimation.com/features/animation-styles-what-makes-anime-unique/ Animation Styles: What Make Anime Unique-Show Me The Animation.com] As was the case in the United States, television was a major impetus for the growth of anime in Japan; the country's recovery from World War II led to economic prosperity and a boom in Japanese television ownership, and the development of anime allowed Japan to compete in an animation field where they had, in the era of the Golden Age of American animation, been lagging well behind. By the 1980s, the Japanese animation field was equal to or better than the American industry, making it cost-effective to send American television series episodes to Japan to be animated, then sent back to be finished; such Japanese animated work was not done in the same style as anime, instead being a hybrid style that was not quite full animation but fuller than the limited animation of anime or late-20th century American television animation.{{cite news |last=Winfrey |first=Lee |date=September 16, 1988 |title=ABC hoping Pooh can pull more than honey out a jar |url=http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1876&dat=19880916&id=CqgeAAAAIBAJ&pg=6729,251354 |work=Spartanburg Herald-Journal |publisher=Knight Ridder |page=A9 |via=Google News Archive}}
= Philippines =
{{main|Philippine animation|Outsourcing of animation to the Philippines}}
Limited animation made an early history of Philippine animation in the 1970s, established a historical propaganda film Tadhana, directed by Nonoy Marcelo. Unlike any influential animated films in the Philippines, Tadhana
The Philippines has been a popular offshoring destination for Western animation, due to the country's combination of an extensive understanding of Western culture (in part from its lengthy period as an American territory) and low expense.Ressa, Maria. [http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/misc/9510/cartoons/ Filipino Animators in 'toon' with the Times] and [http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/misc/9510/cartoons/index.html CNN Showbiz Index], CNN, Cable News Network, October 14, 1995[http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/150508_philippine_Animation_Industry.pdf The Philippine Animation Industry Landscape] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110124175136/http://www.tholons.com/nl_pdf/150508_philippine_Animation_Industry.pdf|date=January 24, 2011}}, Tholons, tholons.com, May 2008