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alt title(s): Conspicuous CGI; Obvious CGI
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The high-tech equivalent of Conspicuously Light Patch.
CG allows you to consistently animate complicated images with regularity (like Instant Runes). CG-rendered animation was particularly embraced by the Humongous Mecha genre as it allows for good animation sequences without totally sacrificing the budget for the rest of the scenes in a show.
Unfortunately, this means it stood out considerably compared to a traditionally animated show. Recent techniques in digital inking (such as Cel Shading) have alleviated this slightly, but the ironic problem remains that CG looks too good: it moves too smoothly and creates a 3D effect in an otherwise 2D universe. Because of this, animators usually use them for sequences where 2D characters are not moving or not even seen, lest they look pasted on, or on objects already portrayed with simple color palettes or textures,
Sometimes it would be far too hard to animate things in 2D: for instance, a rotating thing with perspective is far easier to make 3D than 2D. This probably why most vehicles like cars, planes, and spaceships are CG in an otherwise 2D TV show these days.
See also Special Effect Failure, Uncanny Valley, Serkis Folk and Cel Shading. Often crops up in games with a Sprite Polygon Mix.
For when everything is CGI, see All CGI Cartoon. Voluntarily switching between CG and another animation style is Medium Blending.
Examples
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Anime
- Trumping any of the below examples of unconvincing 2D/3D meshing are the helicopters from Golgo 13: The Professional. Of course, those helicopters have a good excuse — they were the first use of CG in anime history. You can see it here.
- In BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, in some sequences where Ryusuke, Koyuki and Taira play their instruments, there is a CG close up of their hands on the fretboards and strumming.
- The Lensman anime used CG for some of the spaceships and the titular Lens.
- Almost anything by Studio GONZO. Really.
- Gankutsuou took this as an artistic choice. About the only things that don't look CG are the character's bodies and faces. This helps to humanize them in the context of their gaudy, artificial, futuristic surroundings.
- Blue Submarine No.6 was one of the first anime to use CG extensively.
- And looked less visually jarring than pretty much any other Gonzo series, due to the widespread use of blur filters to simulate DOF and that almost anything that wasn't a character was CG.
- Black Lagoon uses CG cars that stick out like a sore thumb.
- Candidate for Goddess used entirely 3D mecha.
- Vandread actually had all scenes of mecha as 100% CG and all scenes with humans cell-shaded. This meant that the jarring disconnect of 3D CG and 2D characters interacting was very successfully avoided.
- Karas averts the living hell out of this trope. The CG is obvious, but extremely well-integrated, not to mention extremely good-looking.
- GaoGaiGar used CG for when the Mirror Coating was applied to the robots, and for the Zonders morphing their bodies. Since CG wasn't used extensively yet at the time, it tended to really look out of place.
- Lost Universe used CG for some of the scenes involving the spaceships, with fairly good results (though sometimes the frame rate of the CG sequences was very low giving quite a jarring effect. Other times they were smooth as silk). What was unusual is that the ships were just as often rendered with normal cel-animation which was... just not as cool-looking.
- The transformation sequences in Futari Wa Pretty Cure, the Queen of Light, and the Dark King have 3D CG which looks rather odd, since everything else is normal animation.
- All the Pokémon movies have made use of CG, with varying amounts of success. PokéBalls began to be animated using CG during the Johto era and other CG effects began to be used more often in the main series from the start of the Battle Frontier saga.
- In the various Digimon series, the evolution transformation sequences of two of the seven heroes (at least in the first two series) will have a CGI Transformation Sequence, usually the main hero and The Lancer. All the other characters will have regular animated Digivolutions.
- In one of the seasons of South Park, this is parodied. Mmm, yes!
- Certain scenes in Full Metal Panic.
- The Instant Runes in Fullmetal Alchemist and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.
- Sakura Taisen IV and V, as well as the ST movie, all have CG kohbu and some CG backgrounds.
- The CG blends in very well in Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, notably the robotic Tachikoma. However, the Title Sequence of season 1 is 100% CGI, and looks very different than the rest of the series.
- On the other hand, the theatrical film Ghost in the Shell Two: Innocence, which is in an Alternate Continuity from the series, uses almost 100% CGI backgrounds. The CGI is quite breathtakingly gorgeous in places, to the extent that it's a shame they had to obscure it with all that crummy cel animation.
- It's also an interesting, probably unintentional metaphor for some of the elements of the series, the blending of the new and old.
- An episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! had the realistic guns on one of Bandit Keith's monsters replaced with futuristic lasers for the dub... In America. However, the lasers were done in CGI, which jarred dramatically with the monster's hand-drawn body.
- The backs and fronts of the detailed playing cards are all CGI.
- Let's not forget the stark contrast in Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds between the Conspicuous CG Riding Duel segments and the rest of the series.
- And the monsters that tend to be more bi-dimensional in the CGI than in the hand made drawings.
- And let's not forget season zero, which tended to use this trope more commonly.
- Not to mention the CGI swimsuits put on Alexis/Asuka and her friends in the 4Kids version of Yu-Gi-Oh GX to give the impression they're not in a onsen but in a pool. A pool with steam all around, apparently...
- Without forgetting the crappy CGI shirt that was used to cover Yami's collar bone and shoulders.
- Duel Masters features CGI effects for the monsters. This, being Duel Masters, is lampshaded by the characters quite often.
- While later episodes use cel-shading, the cars in early episodes of Initial D stand out extremely oddly from the background, especially as the frame rate used for the CG is much higher than that of the animation. This gimmick is so well-known, parodies of it often reproduce this exactly, even if the show is otherwise traditionally animated.
- The Gundam spinoff MS IGLOO is a whole series of conspicuous CGI, which is quite a feat.
- Happens in the various Zoids anime series as well, with varing degrees of success. Oddly, the least successful and most jarring integration occured in the last series, Genesis.
- Generally forgivable as the CG Zoids and animated humans are rarely in the same non-cockpit shot, given the size difference between them the Zoids are usually in the background when humans are at the fore, or vice versa. And the Zoids looked cool.
- Rebuild Of Evangelion utilizes CG for a few of the angels, with Ramiel and Sahaqiel being the most obvious examples. This trope was probably intended, though; the CG just makes them look all the more alien compared to the rest of the world.
- The Kirby anime had this a lot. King Dedede and Escargo(o)n frequently switched from being CG'd to being animated regularly, and Kirby is never shown any other way. This also sometimes happened with other characters, such as Fumu/Tiff, Bun/Tuff, Lololo/Fololo, and Lalala/Falala. And, of course, various machines and vehicles (the monster transporter, Dedede's tank, the Halberd, etc.) were almost always CG'd.
- Dyna Blade, the giant armor-covered Bird God, was completely CGI in her appearance. She was also rendered pretty realistically compared to the rest of the CGI, with gradual shading, more muted colors and highlights. Though a bit jarring seeing her with the other CGI and hand-drawn portions, it did lend her an otherworldly feel.
- In the 2008 adaptation of the anime Someday's Dreamers ~Summer Skies~, the backgrounds are so realistic that they might as well be photographs. Unfortunately, they contrast sharply with the much less detailed character designs, accentuating the lower quality of the moving animation.
- Seen in the last few (more serious) episodes of Excel Saga. Parodied earlier in the episode "Bowling Girls", which animates a scene of a character attacking another character with conspicuously bad CG that stands out because it's so crappy-looking.
- The Anti-Spirals mechs from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann are the only thing in the series in CG, which adds to how alien they are.
- In a fairly trippy sequence in Fate/Stay Night where Shiro faces down a very badly animated CGI dragon.
- Moonlight Mile. CG hallway. Man, it really look out of place.
- In the Nodame Cantabile anime, CGI is used for most close-ups of instruments being played.
- Cel-shaded versions were used in Transformers Super Link (Transformers Energon in America) and Transformers Galaxy Force (Transformers Cybertron) except in places in Super Link where fine movements and great detail was required, which is when they went with normal animation. Human characters were animated normally, effectively "hiding" the CG artifacts as affectations of mechanical lifeforms, but this resulted in the robot characters' chronic inability to facially emote.
- Macross has used CG ever since Plus to help flesh out the increasingly complicated transformations of it's trademark variable fighters.
- Macross Plus was, as stated, the first to use CG — the most conspicuous would be the sequences where you see what the YF-21 is inputting to Bowman's brain and the space fold tunnel.
- Macross Zero had CG that was so awesome that it couldn't help but stand out and play this trope straight.
- Macross Frontier uses cel-shaded CG for the mecha, spacecraft, and their requisite battle sequences. If they hand drawn the mechas, the transformation sequence of a single episode would probably drain the budget for the whole season...
- Sousei no Aquarion and Koutetsushin Jeeg used CG for some machines, and occasionally, a character would have to interact with a CG environment (Apollo entering a wide shot of Aquarion's cockpit in the first episode, Kenji riding his motorcycle also in the first episode). The characters would then be rendered in fairly obvious CG along with whatever they were riding.
- The 2000 Anime adaptation of Metropolis used CG effects for the ziggurat at any time where it wasn't being shown head-on.
- The gigantic camel cricket in one episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
- Also, the reconstruction of the classroom after the Yuki/Asakura battle.
- Note that this is more-or-less accurate to the novel
- Used a lot during the battle sequences in Divergence Eve, flipping back and forth between 3D and 2D animation every few seconds.
- And it is VERY conspicuous, owing to the terrible quality of the CGI.
- The Animal Crossing movie had some CGI during the opening (Kapp'n's cab) and the ending (the UFOs). A small amount compared to some other examples, but it really clashed with the otherwise-beautiful art.
- Dennou Coil has an inversion — we're able to accept the CG Satchiis because they're computer programs. The weirding out happens when, in one of the final episodes, a Satchii is inexplicably hand-drawn.
- Many of the battle scenes in Utawarerumono.
- In Baccano, a good percent of scenes in the halls of the Flying Pussyfoot have incredibly conspicuous CG'd backgrounds.
- Keroro's ceiling fan. That's all.
- Some of the scenes involving giant or many warships in Last Exile are CG-animated and, while they look pretty good, it's a noticeable change in style.
- The Stock Footage of Kaze's Demon Gun from Final Fantasy Unlimited.
- French-Japanese collaboration Oban: Star Racers is sort of an aversion to this. Racing scenes are rendered in cartoon-style 3D while all other scenes are drawn in a fairly traditional 2D anime style. However, the 3D and 2D animations are made so close in appearance and often mixed in the same scenes so well that it often takes watching an episode twice to spot the difference in many instances.
- Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: Divine Wars uses CG for all of the mecha, and some of the ships.
- The Blue Seed anime's opening had some pretty horrifically rendered CG plant monsters.
- The Disgaea anime usually only uses CG for magic effects (and the spaceship of Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth!), but the Prinny stadium in episode 8 is quite disturbing. And somehow hypnotic.
- Haruka's house in Noein.
- In Letter Bee, the Armorbugs — large, mechanical insects — are obviously CG. Even with the Steam Punk / Cyber Punk feel of the series, it can still be a bit hard to accept.
- Gundam examples: both the Archangel and the Ptolemaios are often, if not always, in 3D.
- Probably one of the reasons Fushigi Yuugi's third OVA Eikou Den is hated so much is the fact that the Four Gods stand out way too much. It gets ironic when you consider that everything takes place inside a very much two-dimensional book.
- A recent episode of Naruto had some rather conspicuous CG mountains in the Valley of Clouds and Lightning. This probably had something to do with the fact that the a large part of the area is destroyed during the events of the the battle.
- Long before that one technique which Orochimaru used that made hundreds of snakes with swords in their mouths was in very conspicuous CG.
- It shows up in the second episode of Tears To Tiara - the horde of revived skeletons are all CG.
- For the most part, Kekkaishi is an example of the right way to mix computer graphics and hand-drawn animation. The barriers and Instant Runes are done so well that you could watch the whole series without realizing how they were done. But then you see a car moving and it all goes to hell. Automobile animation is still the kryptonite of CG.
- All over the place in Romeo X Juliet, though worst in the finale.
- The heart's eggs, X eggs, and mystery eggs from Shugo Chara.
- Sol Bianca: The Legacy is almost nothing but—to the point of panning over CG-animated backgrounds with the pan at a noticeably lower framerate.
- The butterflies in the Umineko No Naku Koro Ni anime.
- The watermill in the Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni anime.
- The vectors in Elfen Lied.
- Although its quite hard to notice at times there is a very large amount of CG effects in Bakemonogatari.
- Sometimes, after the Skypiea Arc, especially noticeable on the openings, sailing shots of the Merry/Sunny in One Piece are CG.
- Texhnolyze makes use of CG effects when showing Ichise's Texhnolyze arm and leg before they're attached.
- Each of the Sailor Moon movies includes an exterior shot of the BigBad's base rendered in CG. Even with a grainy filter added to make it blend in, it's still very noticeable.
- Unfortunately Darker than Black's cars have a nasty habit of sticking out like a bruised pinky.
- The leaves of the willow tree in episode 2 of Requiem From The Darkness look obviously computer generated.
- Cowboy Bebop : The "Pierrot le Fou" episode.
- Clannad uses CG for the alternative world. It looks convincingly classic but still sticks out. One of the few cases were the CG looks like the rest of the anime, only smoother.
- The film Arashi No Yoru Ni uses CGI for the rocky territory in the gorges. It stands out a bit, since the rest of the movie is otherwise animated in a very soft, watercolor-esquev storybook style.
Comics & Manga
- 2000AD's Durham Red was produced using a combination of CG and painted artwork, but to poor effect in many episodes; where the murky colour choices meant the CG looked almost unidentifiable and the characters were jarringly painted on.
- All over the place in Marvel Max's US War Machine. It's especially jarring considering how raw & sketchy the rest of the art looks.
- A couple of examples from manga: Ken Akamatsu is extremely fond of using computer-rendered backgrounds for his series, and hand-drawing individual characters. This results in a white area just beyond the characters in question in every scene with a CG background, so you can always tell what was rendered and what was hand-drawn. This can be seen in both Love Hina and Mahou Sensei Negima.
- The recent full-color re-edition of the manga Space Adventure Cobra makes heavy use of CG imagery for backgrounds, vehicles and monsters. Those updated elements are still the work of the same author, Buichi Terasawa, and are certainly gorgeous — going easily into Scenery Porn. But they also stand out rather sharply with the original 2D-art.
Films — Animation
- Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, a forgettable rip-off of Star Wars from the mid 1980's, was one of the first to incorporate CG and traditional animation. Needless to say, age was not kind to this one.
- The Dragonlance animated movie has very bad example of the type. Most of the film is done in traditional (bad) 2D animation; however, the dragons and several other monsters are rendered in rather sub-par 3D CG. The interation between the two is particularily jarring.
- Pop quiz! That innocent-looking band of monks are all CG animated. Whyever could it be?
- Averted in The Iron Giant, in which the animators went out of their way to program slight line irregularities into the rendering of the eponymous character with fantastic-looking results.
- The same rotoscoping technique than in the Flash Gordon series (see below) was used for several scenes in the animated film Heavy Metal, most notably the final long sequence with the Last Terakian. The difference between the rotoscoped female warrior and the traditionally animated characters is obvious and jarring.
- Disney invented this technique to do the cars in 101 Dalmatians. The scene where Cruella's car drives out of the ravine was filmed with the model on sand, which is why the snow looks so weird in that shot.
- Quest for Camelot has above-average 2D animation for most of the movie... except for the giant troll, which was rendered in 3D reminiscent of ReBoot. Jarring, to say the least.
- Anastasia, especially the crashing-chandelier sequence.
- The King and I animated musical, especially the dancing Buddha statues and the ship.
- Heavy Metal 2000: The Chamber of Immortality at the end of the movie is clearly not rendered with the same 2D animation used in the rest of the film, nor is Odin when he unmasks himself and walks into the Chamber.
- Disney's earlier forays into mixing CG and traditional animation; Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin are two of the most obvious examples, with the ballroom scene in the former and the escape from the Cave of Wonders in the latter being particularly obvious (and jarring) examples. Interestingly, The Lion King also used CG, but because they knew what they were doing by then it WASN'T conspicuous.
- Sadly, the more recent ones are pretty noticeable too. The Hydra in Hercules still looks pretty CG despite advanced cell shading simulation techniques being applied, and many of the moving objects designed to look like background elements in Tarzan are clearly 3D.
- Perfecting the blend between the two mediums was pretty much the whole point of Treasure Planet. Your Milage May Vary on how well it worked.
- Ironically, aside from the obviously non-curved lines on the cement mixer, the CG vehicles in Oliver and Company look pretty convincingly hand-animated. Helped, no doubt, from the fact that most cars in The Eighties were extremely boxy.
- Disney's first use of 3D in a movie, The Great Mouse Detective (it's the clock fight), is pretty much seamless; the fact that all the gears are hard-outlined creates an effect not unlike Conspicuously Light Patch, but it's less noticeable since there are no painted background elements in this scene.
- In that particular case, a computer used a wireframe model to draw the clock's insides on animation paper, an artist drew the characters onto another piece of paper, and the composite was copied onto a cel.
- In The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, they used CGI to render large crowds, counting on the fact that nobody would be looking at the background characters to disguise the fact that it was really obvious CGI. Take a look at the people in the background of the "Topsy Turvy" sequence sometime.
- Speaking of Beauty and the Beast, there was another example in the direct-to-video sequel, The Enchanted Christmas. The movie is drawn and animated traditionally, but when we see our villain◊...yikes.
- In Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, CG is used when the rabbits are floating about in the giant vacuum thing. It stands out more, as it is CG shown against stop-motion clay animation.
- DreamWorks Animation on the whole was really bad about this, even compared to Disney's early CG backgrounds, largely because they didn't just stick to backgrounds:
- Eris's monster minions in Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas look horribly out of place in the otherwise well-animated movie.
- The Road To El Dorado had some of the same problems, the most obvious being the "To Shibalba" sequence (all the golden items are CG) and the barrels being lifted onto the ship. They weren't even cel-shaded.
- And then the train in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmarron.
- Dragon Hill makes quite some use of CGI; sometimes it looks decent mixed with the traditional animation, and sometimes it is horribly out of place. The sequel takes this Up To Eleven, considering how it was made on such a low budget.
- Jetsons: The Movie has it in any shot of the Orbiting-Ore Asteroid.
- The Chinese animated film The Fireball suffers from this, as does most recent Chinese animation in general.
- The Fearless Four starts as a typical traditionally animated movie for its time, but as the movie goes on it becomes basically a CGI movie with traditionally animated characters.
- Titan AE mostly used 3D for ships and environments and 2D for characters, playing to the strengths of both mediums without (for the most part) trying to disguise either as the other. Unfortunately, this made the few times it broke with this rule all the more jarring.
- Batman And Mister Freeze Sub Zero occasionally used CGI for the Batplane (and cars on the freeway during a chase scene).
Films — Live Action
- Once Upon A Time In Mexico stands out for this. Many effects, from muzzle flashes to Antonio Banderas climbing a wall, were done near-perfectly...so it's all the more embarrassing when nearly every instance of blood or fire is painfully obvious CG on the level of a 1992 cartoon.
- The Mask
- Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has Count Dooku jump from one platform to a lower platform on a spaceship destined to crash-land. However, said Sith Lord decides not to just jump down, but flip multiple times before landing... and the CG swaps in there, flips, then swaps out.
Live Action TV
- According to Steve, you will find it in every single scene of Double The Fist.
- A rather unfortunate submarine in the fifth season of Lost, especially since they usually have good or at least passable effects, especially since the entire shot may have been CG and looked like a screensaver or something.
- The Buron Booster add-on for Kamen Rider Kiva is pretty obvious, moreso because long shots necessitate the use of a mediocre CG Kiva. This is especially jarring since Kiva's larger-scale battles (those using Castle Dran and the Sabbats) are pretty good — and since Den-O, the series immediately before Kiva, used CG trains and giant monsters in about half the episodes and didn't suffer any real problems.
- Some monsters in Sliders are painfully obvious CG. The dinosaurs aren't the worse; there were also a huge spider, a giant beetle and "spider-wasps" that are looking really out of place in a live-action series.
- At least the Lazarus creature in Doctor Who.
- The White Collar season 1 finale ends with a parked airplane exploding. It's painfully obvious it was either CG or a really sloppy matte job, though to be fair the show is a relatively low budget comedy-drama that normally uses basically no special effects.
- Every single monster in Hercules:The Legendary Journeys. Most noticeably is Proteus from the episode Protean Challenge.
- The pilot episode of Memphis Beat had a glaringly out-of-place neon marquee for a radio station slapped on top of a building (In reality, the buiding in question is the headquarters of a local newspaper and the radio station in question went off the air in 1966.)
- The History Channel Miniseries America: The Story of Us at times. A few that particularly stick out include the steamboat that went by Abraham Lincoln's little raft, the log jam, and Lady Liberty's construction.
- Pops up several times in Pushing Daisies.
Web Comics
- The Arkentools in Erfworld are rendered images superimposed on the drawn art. In this case, it's a deliberate effect intended to make them stand out by looking a bit "otherworldly".
- Possibly inspired by the similar use of CG to identify "Martian Technology" towards the end of It's Walky.
- In a similar vein, the use of digital brushes is very conspicuous in the scenes with masses of bats.
- Platypus Comix sometimes utilizes CG backgrounds.
Web Original
Western Animation
- The Dreamworks animated mini-series Invasion: America did this most often, including: In all the space shots, all the shots featuring flying ships or aircraft, all the scenes in the underground base, all the scenes on the surface of the moon and the meteor launcher and meteor attacks
- Used extensively (and expensively) in Futurama.
- It's more prevalent in the earlier seasons, especially when used on Bender. For someone who's a robot, these are the only instances in which he actually... looks robotic.
- Averted at some points where even the crew doing the commentary have trouble distinguishing what's CGI and what's hand-drawn.
- CG is becoming increasingly more common within American animation, no doubt due to the budget saving potential. The Simpsons, American Dad, and Family Guy make almost equal use of it (usually for cars).
- The Family Guy episode "One if by Clam, two if by Sea" has a Tron lightcycle sequence done mostly in 3D, like the movie. The reproduction of The A Team's opening sequence in another episode uses it for vehicle shots.
- After it was Un Cancelled, all vehicles use CG rather than traditional animation.
- The "outer space" episode of Phineas and Ferb features this in spades. Dr. Doofenschmirtz's giant robot in particular will switch between traditional cel animation and 3D animation between cuts.
- "The Chronicles of Meap", for Meap's spaceship and for Balloony/Collin (the latter of which falls somewhat in the Uncanny Valley)
- The Christmas Special, for Santa's sleigh
- "Cheer Up Candace", for the Mix-and-Mingler Machine and for when everyone is ejected there (a particularly egregious example)
- In fact, in later episodes, CG was used extensively for moving vehicles and other such things.
- Most recently, "The Beak" superhero costume the boys make.
- Winx Club uses CG for, say, school buildings and vehicles.
- If only they used CG just for buildings and vehicles... In the second season, most of the scenery was CG-rendered, often very poorly, not to speak of many lame light effects used for magic attacks. Or just see the effect of the rocks falling in the water, in the last episode of that season, to cringe. Or, worst still, some painful CG hair on a masked motorcycle rider. Thankfully, the third season toned down this excess of CG, and many backgrounds looked much better.
- Besides the Medium Blending of 3D Cyberspace vs. the "real world" in Code Lyoko, in the 2D animated parts they would often use CG to animate mostly doors swinging open and closed (but also for some other less noticeable items). Ironically enough, in the first season it blended well, but as the seasons progressed it got more and more obvious.
- Pre-CG example: The spaceships in Filmation's animated Flash Gordon series from 1979-80 were created by photographing actual models painted black with white grid lines against a black background. The footage was printed in negative directly onto animation cels, then hand-painted. The effect stands out as much — and in the same way — as the CG spaceships in Futurama.
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, art directors at first attempted drawing the Fire Nation tanks by hand, but the design turned out to be so complex that CG had to be brought in.
- Later designs for the evil flotilla of zeppelins in the finale were also largely CG. Unfortunately, in some wide shots, the CG suffered, as they used an obvious low frame rate as compared to both the hand-drawn characters in the shot and the moving background paintings, causing them to visibly jump back and forth as the scene zoomed out.
- A shot of Aang in his glider chasing an angry spirit through the woods screams CG
- The turning portions of the doors in the Air Temples (the ones that "unlock" via airbending) are obviously CG.
- Also, the Lion-turtle in the finale, most obviously its face.
- Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends spoofs this: After Eduardo refuses to be in Bloo's movie, Bloo says that they'll use CG to put him in later. Sure enough, we later see the movie, and it contains a Conspicuous CG Eduardo.
- The Star Wars: Clone Wars miniseries used CG extensively for the space ships. The Definite Article Clone Wars series just upped and went into All CGI Cartoon.
- Spider-Man the Animated Series frequently used CG for cityscape backgrounds, and it showed horribly. We all thought it was pretty cool back in 1994, though.
- The Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series is possessed of highly simplified, bright, flat character and background designs, so when fully CGI black helicopters show up, it's rather jarring.
- The worst example is a large Christmas tree in the second season episode ""Reinforcement". It topples over after being set on fire and somehow manages to clip through the 2D background elements in the same scene, while moving extremely unconvincingly for an object of its size.
- The Battle Tech animated series used CGI when the mech pilots turned on "Enhanced Vison" for battle scenes.
- The French animated series Space Strikers uses CGI for spaceships.
- The 1994 Iron Man animated series had this for the eponymous character's transformation sequence in the first season, with the same background regardless of where Tony currently was. The second season replaced it with a better-animated 2D sequence.
- In the otherwise excellent episode "Doomsday" of Justice League Unlimited, there was a much reviled Special Effects Failure of the Batplane racing to intercept a Nuke over the ocean — all in low-grade CG, causing some Narm in what should've been a tense scene.
- There was also all the CG Javelin planes they used, which all looked horrible.
- "Dark Heart" contained some truly terrible CGI helicopters.
- In Fearful Symmetry, a CG surgical robot attacks Supergirl. The claw is supposed to grab her arm, but it's about half a second behind her arm movement. You can tell the editors cried a lot over that scene.
- And the terrible CG intro of the first two seasons.
- If you watch an early episode of South Park concurrently with a recent one, the CG used for the recent episode can be jarring in how obvious it is. Interestingly, every episode except for the original pilot ("Jesus vs. Santa") is entirely CG animated with 3D software!
- There's also the episode that re-used footage from the first episode. Now that was a sticky situation!
- Class of the Titans began using CGI in its second series to animate cars in a transition sequence. It shows... badly.
- Invader Zim, mostly for space sequences and the like.
- According to the commentary on the DVDs, the CG was so expensive that the mere addition of walnuts to the "Room With A Moose" episode blew a severe part of the budget. However, this may be an exaggeration. Not only that, but they didn't even ask for CG walnuts; they just got them.
- Probably its own trope, but some modern 2D cartoons, like Kappa Mikey or Spaceballs: The Animated Series, have Conspicuous Flash. Because animating in Flash offers many time-saving shortcuts for 2D in the same way that animating some things in 3D is easier, studios are finding it cheaper to use that to animate their shows. On the other hand, because of those shortcuts, the cartoons acquire some visual quirks and tics unique to Flash animating (like objects not "dragging" properly when they move-for example, if a character jostles a plant with large, floppy leaves, the leaves will move, but they'll retain their shape as if made of stiff cardboard), which are jarring. This just serves to illustrate that Flash, in spite of the ludicrous cost, is not a tool to be used by professionals for broadcast. Interestingly, you can make broadcast-quality animations with Flash (see the works of Adam Phillips, for one), but to do so requires that you already be a skilled 2D animator, and to ignore the countless time-savers that the program offers.
- Not to mention all the unnatural squishing and bouncing everyone's going through in most low-budget productions. Robots don't squish, for Pete's sake!
- This is particularly obvious in the intro to The Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!, which is a Flash re-animation of the classic opener, that stands out very much mostly because everyone knows what it's supposed to look like. The rest of the episode actually is pretty decent.
- You didn't seem to notice it in Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends...
- Ben 10 Alien Force has several instances of this. Kevin's car gets swapped for CGI on several occasions, as well as the Rust Bucket, which had already received this treatment late into the previous Ben 10.
- Sherlock Holmes in the Twenty Second Century uses especially painfully obvious CGI to animate the futuristic city whenever there are no characters shown.
- Batman The Brave and the Bold uses Conspicuous CG for automobiles and planes, though it still looks better than what's used in Justice League.
- The 2D drawing style being close to cirka 1970 comics style could be part of what makes it Conspicuous, as then anything 3D stands out as being Conspicuously Modern.
- Kim Possible has a robot toy army attack Ron Stoppable in The Movie; whilst they may both have been computer animated, the robot toys appear to be created with a different animation or CGI effect to the rest of the show.
- A crossover episode of Lilo and Stitch: The Series where they meet Jake Long and his friends at a skateboard competition. The prize is a new fancy skateboard that rotates in its glass case. It's CGI.
- Bounty Hamster uses cel-shaded CGI for spaceships and other detailed objects which are required to move very fast.
- Galactus, in the 1990s Fantastic Four series. Hungorto, his Captain Ersatz in Duck Dodgers was also Conspicuous CG, possibly as a reference to this.
- And while we're on the subject, many elements in the Silver Surfer series, but especially Galactus.
- The little-known banned British program Pope Town has static backgrounds that are obviously CG, in stark contrast to the flat, low-tech character designs (which are a notch below The Simpsons). Also features Idiosyncratic Wipes that aren't really wipes (think Third Rock from the Sun or That70s Show), consisting of a helicopter shot jumping from one building to another.
- The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! cartoon has painfully, glaringly obvious, conspicuous CG. But then, given the inspiring material... that is probably intentional.
- The Fairly OddParents: An early season one episode had a Matrix parody. The season six finale, and the original Grand Finale, had a Matrix parody. Both times the CGI is so blatant it had to have been intentional.
- The airships in The Secret Saturdays are this, but it somehow seems to fit with the show.
- Sector V's treehouse when it turns into a rampaging tree monster chasing Nigel and Lizzie in the episode "Operation: G.I.R.L.F.R.I.E.N.D." of Codename: Kids Next Door.
- Metajets has racing planes that are quite blantantly CG compared to the rest of the animesque style.
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