Her Campus Logo Her Campus Logo
The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at GCU chapter.

I spent some time with a friend recently streaming old Tom and Jerry cartoons that I grew up watching as a kid. Revisiting them was great because I saw that they still hold up rather well. I hadn’t realized while looking at them that some of my favorites were released in the mid to late 1940s, which is crazy to think about when you see how animation has changed and come along since then. This got me thinking about how far animation has fallen and how good some of it has become through this change in era.

The Tom and Jerry boxset I had growing up had cartoon shorts from the 40s and 50s, and I still find many of the jokes hilarious. Watching Tom chase after Jerry and get outsmarted time and time again never gets old, and seeing them occasionally team up against a common enemy is always a fun twist. I miss this animation style that kept things classy, but detailed, despite being 2D. The designs of the background were always so appealing and I still wish I could go to the Manhattan that Jerry visits in the short titled Mouse in Manhattan. This does not mean, however, that these shorts were without their issues. Mainly, there are some significantly racist scenes depicting blackface and negative stereotypes about people of color. I’m glad that we’ve left that far in the past. 

My grandparents had a limited array of VHS tapes at their house when I was younger, and I remember a few of them being The Lion King, the 1994 movie The Swan Princess, and my favorite being The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie from 1979. Similar to Tom and Jerry, there were a lot of stimulating sound effects and loud booms, crashes and yelling. I’ll never forget how much Mel Blanc’s voice roles changed my life, especially hearing things like “Stop steaming up my glasses!” and “Turn off those lights!” Plus, not many kids shows these days feature cartoon animals shooting at each other with guns. I wish that kids in this new generation would get to see compilations of cartoons like these because they aren’t designed to dumb you down despite being funny. There are jokes in this movie that you might not understand until you’re older. The cartoons are so much more aesthetically pleasing and interesting to look at. Rewatching this compilation recently meant that I got to notice small details I hadn’t seen before. The mid-century modern house that Bugs lives in as he narrates the film has stuck with me for a long time and I haven’t seen animation like that in a while. 

Where does Disney fit into all of this? Most of my favorite Disney movies to watch as a kid were Robin Hood from 1973, 101 Dalmatians from 1961, and a few modern films like The Princess and the Frog from 2009 and Lilo and Stitch from 2002. The picture-perfect London of the early 1960s in 101 Dalmatians is wonderful because of every careful sketch, drawing, and painting that the artists put into it. Even in the 2000s, the animation, though different, still held a sense of classic Disney magic and amazing characterization. The theming of New Orleans in the 1920s is magical and colorful, and I still love the songs that the cast sings. Stitch is an endearing little alien that you want to grab through the screen and take home with you. It cannot just be that I’m too old to appreciate the current Disney animated releases. 

Have you realized that hardly anyone talks about these new movies? It feels like Disney is working their employees overtime to produce mediocre animation that has no emotion to it, despite the use of bright colors and facial expressions on the little characters. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this, but most animated movies now just feel like a giant cash grab. The stories feel lazy and nothing can seem to bring me to care about them once I’m done watching. Most people I know feel the same way. Why have we become so quick to shun older animation styles? Why can we not pick up a pen and paper and sketch multiple frames? I won’t ask many more questions, but I must know, why in the world is everything overly computer-generated and yet still lackluster?

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was a breath of fresh air that felt like a homage to different major eras in animation, while also creating something entirely new. You have some exaggerated characters and some that are reduced to simple 2D shapes with different frame rates. Hobie a.k.a. Spider-Punk looks drastically different than Miles Morales or even Miguel O’Hara. The animators used extreme perspective and strong silhouettes when making the characters. Because all of the characters are different, they are created to meet the eye differently. The ambience and poses are very different. You don’t have to understand what is different about the characters and scenes to know that something is different.

If animation is going to continue to grow, it had better evolve into something beautiful to look at. Other recent examples of carefully curated animation are the League of Legends show Arcane and Blue Eye Samurai, both of which had cool action shots and well-crafted characters that interact exceptionally well with the objects around them. In Arcane, specifically, everything is overly exaggerated and vibrant, with some action sequences in slow motion and splattering neon colors across the screen depending on the character in focus. 

The conclusion that I have come to is that many companies don’t care about their employees or the content that is released as long as they can make their money. When the animation is rushed or underfunded, it won’t have heart in it, and when it doesn’t have any heart in it, it won’t be any good. Audiences know when the content they consume has no feeling, and I hope that we will continue to see amazing animation in upcoming years, as well as the use of vintage animation because it deserves a comeback. 

Rebecca enjoys talking about niche pop culture topics that make her laugh. She tends to think she's pretty funny. When she's not scouring the internet for a few laughs, she's reading a fantasy book, or writing stories. She loves drinking coffee and tea and is working on a Communications degree with an emphasis in Broadcasting.