MovieChat Forums > Doug (1991) Discussion > Anyone hated the animation in the second...

Anyone hated the animation in the second season?

posted 10 years ago by vnisanian2001
3 replies | jump to latest

The first season had some pretty good animation, but the second one looked really weird. It looked like it was in PAL mode, judging from the constant ghosting.

In 1992, Ellipse Programmé, a French animation studio, joined production of the show (not really sure why). And I never really liked the PAL look the second season had. However, for what it's worth, they were also involved with the last two seasons, yet the animation looked perfectly fine, none of the PAL problems from the second season. The last two seasons had easily the best animation the Nick version had to offer.

[–] jptf2 10 years ago

Season 1 had the best actual animation in terms of poses. They were far more expressive and creative than any of the other seasons, as were the angles/perspective. As it turns out, that was the only season where they did the layouts in house. This meant their numerous freelance cartoonists/animators got to do the key poses and then HanHo would do the in-betweening.

The issues you speak of have nothing to do with the animation itself, they're about the telecine process. You'll notice the high end of the vocals for the characters seem to be higher pitched in season 2...possibly because of that 2 or 4% PAL pitch change.

[–] vnisanian2001 10 years ago

Like most American animated productions, they record the voices first, so that they can sync up the voices with the animation, before they do anything else.

Could it be that during the second season, Ellipse didn't know they were dealing with an American production, so they sped-up the voices? Like I said, the last two seasons had none of the PAL Ghosting, and the voices sounded normal in contrast.

[–] jptf2 10 years ago

Perhaps it also aired in Europe and Australia and the like on their versions of Nickelodeon, hence they thought PAL would be a good idea?

What's also interesting is once they started having Hanho do the actual production layouts in season 2 (now working off key paintings that Jumbo did in house), Hanho had different teams of people working on different episodes, hence there was a lot of variation in both the art work and animation. Seasons 3 and 4 were pretty similar to each other overall, but season 2 was different from both 1 and 3/4. I suspect that part of it was the the result of Jumbo determining that their thin-lined (with occasional trademark wavy lines or squiggles) background art style was difficult for Hanho to copy after seeing that season 2 came out very hit or miss in that regard (whereas season 1 has some of the best ambiance ever seen in a cartoon). After all, Jinkins originally intended to do the actual characters with squiggly lines, as seen in Doug Can't Dance (inspired by R.O. Blechman), but Jinkins's animators pointed out that oversees in-betweeners would have difficulty replicating that so they went with the straight outlines instead. So for 3/4, they switched to pretty much straight (and thicker) outlines in the background to make it easier for Hanho.

One final thing I found interesting - the head of the background painting department for the Nickelodeon series, Michael Zodorozny, was not originally part of the Disney series. I suspect Disney wanted to try to "standardize" the show so that it looked more like other Disney cartoons, hence the new, garish color palette.