CGI is where it's at these days...

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I wonder if anybody even paints animation cells any more. I watched a show about the making of a soon-to-premier animated show recently in which the animators were "drawing" the characters on some kind of touch screen PC monitors with an electronic "stylus". From the priviews of the actual show being produced, it seemed to me the process was much more interesting than the product was likely to be.
eh...

A sort of "special case" - Japanese anime is like the rest of Japan: so weird you wonder if an actual human culture is responsible for it.
LoL
I think some of it might be made the "good old fashioned way". It's hard to tell, and after trying to figure out what freakish cultural references might have influenced what you're seeing on the screen and wondering how much is lost in translating it to English for a while, you sort of don't care any more.

I agree that no "standard" animation done these days can compare with the old days - though my "top of the charts" would be the old Tom & Jerry cartoons, and Tex Avery's stuff. CGI is like warp drive versus a biplane, though.
Hell...I watched some damn crazy movie a little while back titled "9" - about some kind of rag doll robots who were the only survivors of some kind of apocalyptic war or some damn thing. They were cobbled together out crap like of bits of burlap cloth, bottle caps, old lenses, pins and all sorts of junk... ...trying to find some sort of machine that was the key to how they were created - only it turned out to be the same thing that built all the weapons that wrecked the world, or some damn nonsense.
Pretty silly, but holy sweet sheeting Jesus it sure looked snazzy as all hell in 101% CGI !

The only flaw I've noticed with computer animation is that it seems as though some of the guys producing it don't quite "get" the way things move, and certain scenes look "counter-intuitive" because it looks as though some critter's body is moving like no spine, or limb, or whatever could, or some such thing. It's only about as stupid as characters in a movie out-running a fireball by 2 inches and somehow not getting burned, I guess.