fenrir72 wrote:Shadowman wrote:The major difference is Studio Ghibli and Disney's "particular styles" were actually having good animation. Filmation's style was use of stock footage and limited movement, simply for the sake of being cheap to produce.
And from Wikipedia:
Filmation had a reputation for exploiting the technique of limited animation to produce a number of animated series with a distinct look. It made heavy use of rotoscoping in later years (beginning with its Tarzan and Flash Gordon series). It also re-used the same animated sequences over and over, many times, to the point where the Filmation style was instantly recognizable.
Filmation's animation often looked poor-quality, due to the limiting of the number of frames per second used to fewer than the regular 24 frame/second seen on film or 25/30 frame/s seen on video. Frames would be repeated to compensate for the deficiency, resulting in a jerky and cheap look.
This frequent use of stock footage saved production money, but often resulted in sacrifice of continuity. This was countered by cutting from one stock shot to another after only a second or two, long enough to set the scene but before the eye could notice all of the unexplained errors. This became part of Filmation style during a period when most TV and motion picture production tended to run minimum shots of 4–5 seconds.
In contrast to the rapid jump cuts during action sequences, another Filmation trademark was the recurring use of long establishing-shots in which the camera would pan slowly across a very wide background painting, thus filling up screen time with sequences requiring little or no animation.
It's for the exact reasons mentioned above:
1. Stock footage
2. Limited animation
3. Reuse, Sameness
that made the Filmation He-man cartoon the best format for marketing the toys. Simple is powerful, and flashing the same image and message on the screen over and over again to kids dens it into their brains and it sticks with them long after the episode finishes. How many kids watched the show just to see that same exact transformation sequence over and over again. I never got tired of seeing it. That resulted in kids asking their parents to take them to the store to buy the toys.
200X was a great show artistically, but great art and good business sense don't always coincide. 200x changed too much from episode to episode. It did not have the sameness that kids could cling onto and remember, and act out.
Like it or not, to Mattel it's all about the toys. The He-man cartoon must be able to sell the toys or it will not succeed. 200X though it may have been a critical success was an awful marketing vehicle. It could not sell a toy if its life depended on it.
The She-ra cartoon was again a good, quality product but no girls were buying the Princess-of-Power toys, probably because they looked nothing like the cartoon. So, it got cancelled.
Lou Scheimer was a shrewd business man. He worked closely with Mattel. The writers respected and followed Mattel's edicts on sameness. Mattel had a say in the content of the show to market their toys.
The 200X writers were given creative and artistic license, free reign, and they hated Mattel influencing the content and flow of the 'their' cartoon. So, the show failed due to lack of toy sales. She-ra was planned to be introduced in the next season, but that did not happen because the writers became divas, pre-madonnas, and debutantes. They thought that they owned the show, so they would not listen to Mattel when Mattel was asking them to position certain characters (eg. Snakemen) in certain episodes strategically in order to get kids to buy the toys. It was too late because the writers did not want to give up the freedom that they were initially given.