Action Cartoon Style: Realistic Designs or Stylistic Designs

What style of design do you prefer in an action cartoon? Personally, me, I would watch an action cartoon with designs that suit the tone of the show.

What exactly do you mean by "tone"?

I tend to usually go with stylistic designs. They're easier to animate and you get more fluid fight scenes out of them. Not to mention they tend to yield more creative and varied designs than realistic ones do.

Realistic designs should only be used if you have enough budget to do them. Otherwise you end up with slow, clunky animation from the 90's Marvel cartoons or recycling Young Justice's assets for DV Ds

I personally prefer when the design is stylized for aesthetic reasons, but when it comes right down to which is ultimately a better choice to use, it really depends on what the show is going for, the talent of the crew behind it, and the budget, really.

What I mean by tone is that what type of action cartoon a particular show is. Is that show a serious and dramatic action cartoon, or is it a light-in-tone and comedic action cartoon?

Art style doesn't really determine those things, though. There's no specific "serious action show" art or "comedic action show" art. It all depends on the tone of the writing, voice acting, and directing.

Well, I would consider Legend of Korra to have realistic designs, and I like it. Stylized designs should only be used...if you really and truly have a sense of style.

I remember, for instance, that Batman:The Animated Series and the first X-Men series aired at nearly the same time. Batman had stylistic animation and some really creative, powerful art direction. You could tell that the X-Men was going for realistic animation, but the effect was clunky and just plain ugly, and the direction was pretty awful. I do agree that budget plays a big part, but tone really doesn't affect whether something should be stylistic or not. It just affect what kind, and what degree, of stylization should be attempted.

I like how the OP prompted us with a clear option one or option two survey, only then to negate his own answers and take a third option.

Yes, I too like "whatever animation matches the tone and doesn't glaringly clash with the themes of the work". I'll have what he's having.

Somewhere in the middle? The problem with realistic designs is that it you end up with a lot of sameface squarejaws that plague a lot of comic book inspired stuff. On the other hand you get stuff like Spectacular Spidey or The Batman which look goofy and runs the risk of turning one off from artstyle alone. I think it also needs to capture the tone of the show, like say Avatar's or Teen Titans' look despite being psuedo-anime fit them pretty well.

X-Men looked MUCH better in its earlier seasons then it did when it got more stylized and cartoony due to the studio change. That change was enough to make me stop watching lol. Much of its animations issues were more the faulty of budget/shoddy animating.

edited 3rd Mar '14 6:07:08 PM by Vertigo_High