Line #10 Main/ClipArtAnimation


1	%% Image selected per Image Pickin' thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1640494622004908600
2	%% Please do not replace or remove without starting a new thread.
3	%%
4	[[quoteright:350:[[Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/terry_gilliam_animation.jpg]]]]
5	[[caption-width-right:350:Something seems [[{{Pun}} fishy]] about this picture.]]
6	%%
7	%% Caption selected per above IP thread. Please do not replace or remove without discussion in the Caption Repair thread:
8	%% https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1404492079030138900
9	%%
10	->''"Guy drops a couple of jpegs in his cartoons and thinks he's like, the guy who draws ComicStrip/{{the Lockhorns}} or something. And that guy knows funny!"''
11	-->--'''Strong Bad''', ''WebAnimation/HomestarRunner''
12
13	The cheapest way to create an animated short is, simply put, not to animate it at all. Rather than actually creating a new set of cel animation drawings, you can simply take some existing piece of clip art and just sort of... move it around on the screen. It doesn't have to look realistic; in fact, the more obviously fake, the funnier it will be. While this is sometimes done for StylisticSuck, it can sometimes be done to give the impression of a comic book.
14
15	While forms of this have been around for as long as film, it was until recently mostly associated Terry Gilliam's sequences in ''Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus'' and the subsequent films. Now, however, with the explosion of web-based video collages, the techniques have become democratized, and entire [[{{Animutation}} new genres]] based on it have arisen.
16
17	Compare and contrast BattleOfTheStillFrames and CutAndPasteComic.
18
19	----
20	!!Examples:
21	[[foldercontrol]]
22
23	[[folder:Advertising]]
24	* The Guinness Draught "Brilliant!" ads that aired in America featured this style heavily.
25	* ''Advertising/HealthHotline'': Ellie and her grandma are clip-art images with added animated mouths.
26	[[/folder]]
27
28	[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
29	* A ''ComicBook/NinjaHighSchool'' collection CD released in 1995 did this to the first story arc of the series.
30	* Some of the [[ArtShift witch sequences]] in ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'' look like this.
31	[[/folder]]
32
33	[[folder:Films -- Animation]]
34	* ''WesternAnimation/TheAdventuresOfPrinceAchmed'' uses a similar technique known as silhouette animation, which uses jointed figures made of black cardboard lit from behind. The effect is similar to Oriental shadow puppets.
35	* ''WesternAnimation/Nimona2023'': Nimona’s fairy tale in the trailer has a princess comprised and animated from what appear to be magazine clippings. Nimona in the same comic is a sketch clearly cut out from a notebook and there is a moment of dialogue comprised of a CutAndPasteNote.
36	* ''WesternAnimation/TwiceUponATime'' uses a technique its director calls Lumage. The characters are made of small pieces of plastic or fabric that are moved on top of a light table. It also uses black-and-white photographs for the land of Din, which is meant to be the real world.
37	[[/folder]]
38
39	[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
40	* Played straight in ''Film/{{Birdemic}}'', which has a lot of this in its bird effects.
41	* The Creator/VincentPrice film ''Film/CryOfTheBanshee'' has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiLej1V1RYI opening credits]] like this-- animated by Creator/TerryGilliam.
42	* ''Film/{{Madeline}}'' applies this to the front covers of the first three ''Literature/{{Madeline}}'' books in its opening credits, and to title and "[[TheEnd Fin]]" cards drawn in a similar style.
43	[[/folder]]
44
45	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
46	* The introductory sequences in ''Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus'', and many of the shorts in it as well.
47	* The opening titles of ''Series/DesperateHousewives''.
48	* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' story "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS2E8TheChase The Chase]]", shots of the Daleks' time machine pursuing the TARDIS through the Vortex are clearly achieved by moving cardboard cut-outs of the two ships on a painted background.
49	* ''Series/GoodEats'' does it on occasion as a ShoutOut to Terry Gilliam, ''Creator/MontyPython'' being one of the biggest influences on Alton Brown when he was conceptualizing the series.
50	* ''Series/TheRonJamesShow'' has the ''Li'l Ron'' segments animated through clip art.
51	[[/folder]]
52
53	[[folder:Music]]
54	* The music videos for Music/TheChalkeaters' [[https://youtu.be/YPN0qhSyWy8 "It Just Works"]] and [[https://youtu.be/jpw2ebhTSKs "Count to Three"]] animates every character by having them stiffly move about while being propped up from below, giving them the appearance of stick puppets. When a character speaks, the top of their head unhinges at an angle, Pac-Man style.
55	* The music video for Music/TalkingHeads' [[Music/LittleCreatures "And She Was"]] is animated in this style, using the inherent surrealism of a moving photocollage to tie in with the lyrics about a girl that would regularly recount her acid trips to frontman Music/DavidByrne.
56	* The music video for Music/WeirdAlYankovic's "[[Music/{{TI}} Whatever You Like]]" is animated predominantly using pre-existing photos, albeit with the characters and [[BlandNameProduct products]] being heavily photoshopped to fit the video's absurdist tone. Weird Al's character, in particular, has lip syncing provided by at least a dozen different photos of his head.
57	[[/folder]]
58
59	[[folder:Video Games]]
60	* One of the levels in ''VideoGame/{{killer7}}'' has cutscenes done in this style.
61	* The entire game of ''VideoGame/TheWorldEndsWithYou'' is done in this style.
62	[[/folder]]
63
64	[[folder:Web Animation]]
65	* Website/JibJab is famous for doing this for political parody.
66	* {{Animutation}}s, [[WebAnimation Flash animations]] featuring cutouts of random characters and things usually lifted from Google Image Search.
67	%%* Almost all ''Flash Poop'' variants of YouTubePoop are done that way.
68	* ''WebAnimation/HomestarRunner''
69	** The animation "The Reddest Radish" consists of cutouts of the cast crudely colored in with crayon.
70	** The Shirt Folding Store Manager in ''WebAnimation/TeenGirlSquad'' Issue 11 is made up of various facial features cut out from a magazine article about Mary-Kate Olsen, as well as photos of Chuck Taylor All-Stars.
71	* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55oVPn7sFuM Spongmonkeys,]] a pair of lemurs wearing hats and sporting rather creepy-looking human faces that were featured in Quiznos sub shop commercials.
72	* ''WebAnimation/InfernoCop'' uses it to its fullest parodic potential. The characters are cut-out models who don't change -- they even get reused as different characters.
73	* ''WebAnimation/IfTheEmperorHadATextToSpeechDevice'': Essentially runs on a bunch of ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' artwork, along with some additions (the infamous Fabstodes for example, are literally just the [[Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure Pillar Men]] with blackened custodes helmets replacing their heads. Exaggerated in the "historical" scenes, which have literal paper cut-outs with pencil art of characters on them held up by visible Popsicle sticks. Later seasons do add some basic animation, in the form of having people's arms move up and down, or otherwise folding, although it's still quite limited. Leman Russ, for example, technically has a walking animation, but his art can't have its legs separated so he does so by hopping around like he's in a sack race.
74	* ''WebAnimation/EpithetErased'' uses it to great effect.
75	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWYBOC_AKvU Steamed hams but it's the icons on my desktop]], as the name implies, is a recreation of the "Skinner vs. the Superintendent" skit from "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS7E2122ShortFilmsAboutSpringfield 22 Short Films About Springfield]]" using only Windows icons wiggled around over the desktop background.
76	* In Cas van de Pol's [[https://youtu.be/2XiUqNJraJU recap animation]] of ''WesternAnimation/{{Madagascar}}'', Alex giving into his hunger and wild nature is symbolised by having him transform into a photo of a lion. Multiple photos of lions (and a hand, at one point) are moved about and used for scenes of him running, roaring and sulking.
77	[[/folder]]
78
79	[[folder:Western Animation]]
80	* ''WesternAnimation/TheMarvelSuperHeroes'', one of the few uses not meant solely for comedy. It was like watching a comic book on TV with classic art by comic book greats like Creator/JackKirby.
81	* ''WesternAnimation/AngelaAnaconda'': It's très interesting how they did this. They had models come in and take about 30 or so pictures for every mouth movement and a mouth movement for every letter in the alphabet. They then took the model's face and mouth movements and created each character.
82	* Parodied in the "Badly Animated Man" shorts on ''WesternAnimation/RawToonage'': the titular character is "animated" in this manner, while every other character is done in Creator/{{Disney}}'s typical fluid style.
83	* ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' was originally done like this, at least for the pilot - today, it's done in {{CGI}} drawn to resemble this style.
84	* ''WesternAnimation/{{Mad}}'' does this when spoofing real people. It ranges from full-bodied cutouts to having the head just be a cutout while the body is drawn using CGI.
85	* ''All'' of the land animals from ''WesternAnimation/FishHooks''.
86	* One episode of ''WesternAnimation/{{Arthur}}'' featured a parody of ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark'' where Arthur Read is kidnapped by aliens and Buster Baxter is crushed by their flying saucer.
87	* WesternAnimation/GoldenBookVideo was known for doing this in their {{Animated Adaptation}}s of their various Golden books, taking the illustrations from the books and adding cheesy limited animation effects at times, a technique Golden Book Video called "Picturemation."
88	* ''WesternAnimation/{{Animaniacs}}'' used this in "The Presidents Song" in an intentional Terry Gilliam-esque manner, "animating" old portraits and photographs of the past presidents.
89	* The storybook characters in ''WesternAnimation/SuperWhy''.
90	* ''WesternAnimation/WonderPets'' is animated with cut-out photographs.
91	* ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae-IYPEPrjQ Transformers Beginnings]]''; based on the prequel comics for the film.
92	* The [adult swim] cartoon ''WesternAnimation/TomGoesToTheMayor'' was done using this. The people in the show appeared to be clip art photographs run through Photoshop's "Photocopy" algorithm to render them monochromatic (blue, looking somewhat like a mimeograph of a traced photo) and would usually Jump Cut from pose to pose, with occasional more "sophisticated" movement (like cutting the photograph's arm at the elbow and moving the forearm piece from side to side to make them appear to wave).
93	* Giant Realistic Flying Tiger from ''WesternAnimation/UncleGrandpa'' is done this way.
94	* Cartoon short ''WesternAnimation/FrankFilm'' does this throughout, as Frank Mouris illustrates the story of his life with clip art animation. It's taken to the limit here as the clip art sometimes involves a bewildering number of clips flying by at blinding speed.
95	* The animated ''WesternAnimation/{{Bibleman}}'' videos will have a OnceAnEpisode sequence telling a story from the Bible done in a style resembling that of flannel.
96	* ''WesternAnimation/TheRedBook'' is an experimental short showing a woman with amnesia struggling to regain her meories, done with cut-outs against painted backgrounds.
97	* ''Animation/AdventuresOfCaptainVrungel'' is one of the few full-length series to be done in this style before computer animation, and the process of creating the 2 hours-worth of footage took about four years to complete. For some scenes using complicated simulated camera angles, though, they switch to cel animation.
98	[[/folder]]

Context Main / ClipArtAnimation