Current Events > Why don't more western cartoons try to make settings more realistic like Anime?

(+) Yeah! (+)

If you watch Anime and go to Japan you can see many places Anime has taken inspiration from. If you watch American cartoons most of the settings are inspired by settings from movies/sitcoms rather than real life locations. There has hardly been a house or highschool in an American cartoon that looks like what a typical highschool or house looks like in real life

Hey Arnold
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Timothy Goes To School
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Western companies are all about least effort most profit

Western cartoons have a different purpose from most anime. They're abstract and zany because the style itself is supposed to be a big part of the experience rather than how anime is mostly just a medium for telling a story in ways that other media would be too limiting for. They're also targeted at younger children rather than teenagers so they don't take on a serious tone. Anime is just the animated adaptation of Japanese comics, so you'll find many more parallels with stuff like the DC animated universe than with Nickelodeon.
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With all those details and semi-realism, Japanese animation is expensive. And the more you have to hand draw and the less corners you're willing to cut, the more expensive it becomes. The hope with all that front end cost is that you can make the money up in merchandising. Western cartoons frequently don't need to worry about any of that, and the what merchandising is there is often pretty light and directed towards children who won't be dropping the kinds of dollars gundam fans will drop on model kits or soundtracks/concerts/pop-up cafes/observatory exhibits/signings/etc.
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TheMarthKoopa posted...

Western companies are all about least effort most profit

You see this shit all the time in modern anime.

The character designs look like they went through a generator and hit "randomize", actual word-mouthing is almost never animated, and there is COUNTLESS flavor-of-the-month moe slice of life shit that is just one big mindless fanservice.
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weapon_d00d816 posted...

You see this shit all the time in modern anime.

A lot of the time yeah but there are still companies like Kyoto Animation, Wit Studio, Shaft, and Silver Link that actually put effort into their work and care about quality

Name one Anime that does mouthing right. I understand that mouths just flap because it's cheaper and it makes it easier for dubs, but western cartoons do fine when dubbed in foreign languages.

This is why Western cartoons are garbage while anime is superior
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Anisoptera posted...

Name one Anime that does mouthing right.

All of the good ones

ArmieBuff posted...

A lot of western cartoons are animated in Japan or South Korea anyway

They still have to follow guides


http://old.he-man.org/cartoon/animationart/pp-glimmer-color-guide.jpg

TheMarthKoopa posted...

Western companies are all about least effort most profit

I'm sure they use the same canyon landscape for all animes
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When American studios outsource animation to Asia they send notes to the animators to make sure things go right