Astro Boy is closest to the type of cartoons I watched as a kid, although I’ll admit I was watching older cartoons. So this type of hand-drawn, thick-lined animation is very nostalgic to me, and I personally will always prefer this type of two-dimensional work over the newer three-dimensional work. I think I feel this way because the newer three-dimensional work can come off cold and veer off from being cartoon-like. The artistic choice of using 2d animation will always visually attract me more than other works; it fulfills the expectations of what I want from a cartoon/animation, regardless of the topic.
BEAUTY reminded me of what I used to see in the background of Little Einsteins, a cartoon teaching children about music, and mostly the classics. The very traditional oil painting type backgrounds mixed with movement, making worlds collide. I will say that I didn’t like this as much as others because I guess you could say it shatters my expectations for an animation, but also the movements of the art make me anxious. It reminds me a lot of how people will use AI to generate moving images, but I also do not like those either, so that’s probably a bigger reason why.
Rejected and HERTZFELDT ON BLU-RAY are two videos I really liked because they’re gag videos. I instantly connected them to other animations like the asdfmovies. They’re funny, silly, and not meant to be taken seriously. The plain background really contributes to it because you don’t need a complicated background to get the joke across. Truly like bringing a joke panel to life. I guess you could compare it to reading a text sent from a friend about a funny story versus them reenacting it in front of you.
