Hey look, it's my Star vs. storyboard! :D What an honor to be featured! I'm so glad that you highlighted the amount of work that gets piled onto board artists in the US. It is . . . exhausting. But I do think the reasons behind it are complicated. I would point to a couple things that have created this culture: 1) In TV animation, board artists are essentially expected to be keyframe animators. The mantra is "if it's not in the board, it won't be onscreen." 2) It's a bit of a budget thing--if a board artist draws a pose in a board and the animator doesn't draw that pose in, the overseas studio has to pay for their error. If a board artist leaves room for an animator to interpret a pose and they don't hit the mark? The US studio has to pay for the retake. 3) There's a huge disconnect, at least in my experience, between the board artists and the overseas animators. I've been at the director level so far and even I have literally never interacted with anyone from an overseas studio in my entire career. I'm sure the higher ups interact with them, but the board artists (again, in my experience) have literally no interaction with them, so there's no way to understand their thought process or what kind of board would be helpful for them. In a culture with no communication, OVER-explaining becomes the default, especially because we will be blamed for any errors in animation. 4) Also..... and this is purely anecdotal, but I suspect a lot of people in US animation don't think terribly highly of overseas animators. There's a lot to unpack there, but it can become easy to blame artists you never see and whose process you don't understand for every single mistake in production. I would LOVE to have a working relationship with an overseas studio like they had in Avatar the Last Airbender, but I think there are complicated industry reasons why that isn't the norm. (Which likely all go back to issues of time and money.) Incidentally, a big reason why I love your channel is how you highlight a step in the process that I don't get to see, despite working in the industry myself. It's incredibly refreshing to see this channel celebrate animators in their own right, and to see how the process is handled in Japan. 5) Finally (sorry, I have a lot to say on this it turns out) whenever you get a bunch of artists working together, an inevitable unspoken competition pops up. The more hardworking, high-level board artists work together, the more complicated their boards will get over time as they all try to live up to each other's best work. The result is "nearly animated storyboards", and they can get even more complex than the ones you've already pointed out (my go-to being the Rise of the TMNT boards). At this point, board artists may not even be thinking about how their work fits into the overall pipeline and may be working harder for pure love of the craft . . . or because certain showrunners think that "nearly animated storyboards" just look "cool." (Heavy sideeye to those showrunners intended.)

I work at a studio that does more anime-pipelined work, and we do jobs both in-house and with outsourcing, and the outsourcing really is the hinge on the necessity for clean boards. In-house will almost always be boarded by one person, and pretty loosely, and because everyone's there with the director, it's easy to communicate needs. Any time we have to outsource though (that outsourcing almost always being to non-english-speaking studios), the preproduction work nearly triples (more detailed model sheets, a complete clean animatic by a team of board artists, a full set of establishing layouts and drops ins from bg), and the needed revision work scales with how clean the boards are, because there's really only so much that you can communicate, even if everything does essentially have to be redrawn (though that canadian studio, I can't imagine why they'd ever need boards that tight). Really, the moral here is: the big companies who commission shows need to give the budget to let studios be able to do more in-house :) (it's why so many talented outsource studios can't afford to do their own series either!)

I co-storyboarded the pilot episode of the show before taking a hiatus from the industry... Suffice it to say, the process has changed a lot over the years... but as a 25 year veteran, I can attest that the demand for “practically animated” storyboards is nothing new. Which is why if you don’t love doing it, you’ll probably burn out. For myself, I had a blast with my section of the show and everyone I worked with on it was great - especially Justin. Take that for what it’s worth. Very insightful video, though. Well done.

as someone whos an animator in Vancouver where all these shows get sent to, really cool for you to talk about this!

Really makes me wonder how Cartoon Network gave OK K.O. Let's Be Heroes so much more creative freedom compared to their other shows. That one literally had the storyboarders draw whatever they wanted. It was off-model, but done in such a cool way that you knwo WHO drew it, like one minute I'm like "Oh, Parker Simmons did this, Geneva Hodgeson drew that, Dave Alegre did that insane as heck detailed gross expression", and like...it'd be cool to have more of that. You guys should do a video on that show.

As an animator, clean boards can be great. You do feel like someone else did a lot of the thinking for you and with tv bid times than can be a huge relief, just to focus on the “mechanics” of the movement rather than the acting decisions and camera stuff. Also a smaller trusted crew of storyboard artists who’ve studied narrative can maybe be trusted better by the showrunner vs animators who might go overboard with smears and wacky movements. I guess the animation director could be brought into conversations earlier to help smooth out the style, but when they’re overseas or across a border it can be harder. The US preproduction community is really its own thing compared to us animators who are considered more of a post production or suppliers of technological labor needed to actually make the polished visuals.

It seems to me that they are bringing animators on board in the creative process. Making the analogy to Japanese norms, it seems as if what we're calling storyboard artists in the US are really more like what Japan would call the key animators. The Canadian studio seems to essentially be doing the inbetweening.

Wow this is refreshing to see. A lot of reviews or breakdowns of american shows don't get into the process very well if at all. In case anyone missed Canipa's point toward the end the budget will dictate EVERYTHING. A lot of the animators on shows that look cheap are actually very good, but they don't get the time or creative freedom to show off their chops. Some shows have direction that is very "exactly as the boards" as CTE mentions. Do differently and it can cost you plenty of overtime and side-eyes from your directors as you correct your shots. And trust me plenty of people aren't trying to risk their jobs by not following direction. People online talk a lot about what animators should and should not do, but on many productions the animators don't have that kind of control. Period. And it's not just Canada. Several studio artists outside of California are in Bardel's shoes. I love seeing what gets pushed in digital animation and every time I see something great I wonder if a show got a very good budget or if the artists had to work themselves terribly to make it happen. All in all thanks for this video TCE

It’s insane how little freedom animators have in the US, the whole point of their job should be to add life to still drawings, stifling their creativity like this must be so daunting for people starting out in the industry and being spoon-fed what to do. I’m sure there’s lots of animators who might prefer this way of having very detailed storyboards as it leaves them with a final animation that they know will be liked by the company since it’s exactly what they wanted but it does seem to make the job a lot more boring than it should be by taking away their own ideas

The Canadian thing reminded me of Rocky and Bullwinkle being outsourced to Mexico, wonder if that will start happening if the Mexican industry starts growing, since it's convienient for the USA to outsource to it's neighbors over countries with vastly different time zones.

Thanks for this video! As much as I love anime I really appreciate these videos that cover other industries. I've always been curious as to what's going on in Korea, they've been outsourced to since the 1980s, even anime outsources to them, and the language barrier keeps a lot of their work totally unknown despite their skills. It's nice to see some change between Studio Mir's work with Netflix and Red Dog Culture House's upcoming short series The Summer, but I wonder what we could've been getting the last 40 years if they were afforded creative freedom. How many Avatars have we totally missed due to American execs and creative teams not trusting international artists?

I imagine the storyboard need to be so detailed so the overseas companies and outsourcing companies don't make any mistakes, right? I think that was an issue with Steven Universe where they used less detailed storyboards and they copied too much from it making parts of the show look wonky.

I would kill to see a video from you on the Monogatari series.

Glitch Techs emulated Ankama studios method of combining toonboom and flash but used harmony instead, combining hand animation with rigs to create a dynamic show. Its key team came largely from Avatar, Korra and ROTMNT. Few assets were re-used but despite how ambitious the show was it mostly was killed in a regime change who froze gt and tmnt in favor of less developed animation. Costs of GT were comparable to other action shows with the exception of a hefty amount of CG development nobody on the creative team ever wanted. Mandated entirely by the studio it took months of development. Storyboards were indeed tight but animators flocked to the project from Ankama after meeting the creators on an animation test and joined up as part of hand picked teams that worked with Flying Bark, Studio100 and eventually Top Draw. The staff, including the animators abroad have been vocal online about their love of the project which they found fresh and original, most citing a kinship with the board teams and creatives in the US. Of course it never had a chance.

tl;dw. Animation is cool, but the american system of animation is still broken and provides no creative freedom for the animators.

There's NO language barrier in this case -- I worked at Bardel briefly years ago, and it's a vancouver studio-- while there may be animators from other areas (though mostly from bc itself, due to massive tax benefits using local workers) the studio itself is 100% english. Not all USA based productions are as iron fisted as R&M though-- I briefly worked on MLP for concept art and all pre-production was done in house (at DHX media, now wildbrain, I believe) other than the first season. Another one I worked on was an even odder one, where the entire production was canadian based. A lot of the best animations/previs people end up in the usa from here since the amount of work allowed creatively is hard to find. Storyboard artists now are more like animation directors, if you want to look at anime terms. They do a LOT, even when a show has a script and can sometimes change said script when the boarders and episode directors are in house. So I think more than anything else, thats the reason why the boards look the way they do-- it's like you're sending stuff off to inbetweeners vs actual animators (except the animators in this case are more than able to work off of less explicit boards). The overseas studios have made any and all decisions before sending boards off.

I still like inconsistent drawing on each frame more than 2d rigging....

This was definitely not expected from this channel but I'm here for it. Excellent video!

Great video! I would also love to see a video on how overseas studios like Rough Draft handle these storyboards. They stick so close to the boards that many scenes in CN shows don't have variations in spacing in the inbetweens!

those storyboards are *nuts*. I looked away from the vid for a moment and when i turned back to it I thought I was looking at key frames. That's alot.

Awesome job, dude. Getting to know the process and the struggles inside American (and Canadian) studios is important for us, animation fans.

I was talking about this issue with some professional artists friends. Thanks to social media and studios that like to show off their most talented artists, clients and beginners artist believe thats the standard, bein able to draw super good, able to video edit your animatic, able to animate... Everytime expecting more for the same money

that stuff about storyboards needing to be super detailed reminds me of something i heard applies to most 3d animation but i only know from the show "all hail king julien;' that that shows storyboarf was able to be very off model and not super detailed because it was 3d; which i honestly think made the storyboards super cute. while 3d and 2d are obviously different; puppet animation feels like itd totally work with that similar style of storyboard seeing as the rigs would do all the being on model stuff already

I already knew animation took time, yet this show specifically always seemed to have really long hiatuses between seasons, but thanks to this video I know why. It's nice to know just how much effort goes into making it. Also it's too bad Studio Yotta might do less work for western cartoons now. Their most recent project, the Animaniacs (2020) anime sequence, looked really cool.

4:37 I've Been to a workshop led by onionskin regarding rigging and character animation and he made very good points about the complexities of even basic rigs letalone overly detailed rigs that break the rules huge respect to puppet animators

Great vid as always. Also, wanted to bring to attention that it appears that Thomas Romian, creator of Code Lyoko, seems to be one of your patreon supporters. If you were unaware, Code Lyoko's a pretty cool French animated production that has both 2d and 3d animation. Thomas Romain has also worked on anime series before, and also has a youtube channel. I think it'd be pretty cool if a collab could happen :)

Yikes, the joys of creative work in the presence of management, unionization, and globalization.

Season 03 Lead Animator here. Rick & Morty is extensively animated beyond the rigs. It's especially painful to hear this person narrating about the limitations of puppet animation over the top of scenes that I know for a fact required tons of work outside the rig. Which, on RAM, is nearly *every* scene. There are a few reasons why you can't just "give the animators more freedom" when sharing work across multiple crews over 3-4 countries while holding to the schedule. But overall I suspect this essayist doesn't actually know squat about the actual pipeline on Rick & Morty, or the challenges in staffing, or the complications that arise during production.

Rick and Morty is one of those shows that have achieved legendary status.

You should check out the owl house and especially Spencer Wan’s work

really great video!! are you considering doing a spotlight on powerhouse studios and talking about castlevania?? season 4 had some incredible episodes of action animation, would be nice to hear u talk about the anime influence on that show

Thank you. I am FAR MORE INTERESTED in this side of this program than hearing Harmon and Royland talk about how they fart into the microphone. And this explains why I keep seeing SB artists talking about keeping the characters ON-MODEL during the boarding process. I was trained that fast-and-ugly was the desired goal as long as the board described the action and rough framing. You nailed it stating that they do everything twice. It's like the boards are the key poses and instead of just going to inbetweeners and cleanup artists, they're just starting over in flash. Nice work.

R&M IS SO AMBITIOUS... that it has a very strict storyboard that gives many animators and artists zero chance of making creative contributions

rick and morty is hybrid rig and hand drawn from what i can tell. Purely anecdotally, in house animation tends to get looser boards, and outsourced/freelance animation will get the super detailed on model stuff. It's mostly a communication thing, meetings over the internet, and timezone/language stuff can be really annoying. It alleviates some load off the animators, as they have to worry less about framing, timing and acting. There's less retakes as well. It changes the distribution of roles, but one way or the other isn't necessarily correct. Also some storyboarders just like to animate lol. Rigs are incredibly powerful now. Some shots work better hybrid, or hand drawn, but there's honestly nothing rigs can't do for the vast majority of shots. In my experience, most dialogue scenes are mostly shift and traced anyway lol. (tap wari for the anime nerds) There was a scene a few years ago from tangled the animated series that twitter went crazy over. A bunch of people speculated that it was a James Baxter, but it was a really well done 2d rig. nice vid pretty interesting

I miss the old style, now they use a lot of filters instead of just pure color, i know its faster, and it makes it look more modern, but idk, season 1 and 2 was dope.

I actually thought that tweet was a joke lol, lets go this is pretty cool

Please please please do a video on rise of tmnt it’s so underrated and the animation is insane 👀

So I'm working on my thesis film and was surprised with how detailed my professor wanted every board to be. It was so exhausting. Oh yeah, our film is 90% 3D.

"An animator can't draw a character off-model, if you're not asking them to draw AT ALL" lololololol

Hahaha, I was not expecting you to talk about this show! Good video man!

Yea you should make more videos about other animations outside of Anime ! It would be cool to see ur insight!

The fx at 5:08 was made by Guzzu

Fun Fact: Studio Yotta is the Animation Studio for Smiling Friends

So the reason it takes decades to get a new episode is that they do full key animation TWICE?

I had a feeling animation was difficult and that Rick and Morty was top tier but this really breaks it down. Thanks!

Great breakdown. I hope you do a video on Mercury Filmworks someday

I have the very high IQ required to understand Rick and Morty.

As far as I'm concerned, they took the easiest animation style SO THAT they could cram it with as much detail as possible, and that's what makes this animation better than a Seth McFarland show. They use the benefits of their medium to go above and beyond instead of for being lazy

i cant emphasise how much i needed this video from you lol! so excited

I believe the whole thing about those over animated storyboards and puppet animation is the low cost. I started my carreer as a puppet animator in Brazil, and today i see how easy it is for a animator without experience animate a scene (that is not a problem at all), they dont need a lot of training to do something ok, and a board with the keyposes and some in betweens makes the process even easier and it's easy to correct or reuse animation with puppets. Because of that a lot of new animators are poorly paid to animate that kinda show, I saw a lot of friends being paid around 8 to 12 dolars per second to animate rick and morty in Brazil. Rick and Morty, with that quality. I loved puppet animation because it's fast and cheap, but when the creativity is taken out the animator's hand it's a bad signal. We need to be careful with studios that tried to exploit those new and excited animators that want start their carreer.

Hey you should review a french cartoon called Wakfu, it's also animated using 2d puppets like rick & morty but the animation looks better & the art is more detailed.

Have you considered doing a video about South Park? They handle animating their show unlike any other show as far as I can tell. I assume it's all in house and they have to do it within a few days, but I've also never heard stories of animators from South Park feeling overworked or like they're crunching. I'd be really interested if that's a thing you can go into assuming that information is available. The Six Days to Air documentary didn't really get super deep into the animation part of making the show

Can you do a video on Glitch Techs, as well as Flying Bark Studios in general?

I have a quick question i see in the video that when you mention Toon Boom being used sometimes in Japan, you showed clips from Pokemon Journeys. I thought ever since OLM moved the production of the main Pokémon Anime to OLM near the end of Sun and Moon they started using Clip Studio EX for animation. Is that true, or do they still use Toon Boom. Sorry if weird question.

Awesome content. Thank you!

I imagine super detailed storyboarding and outsourcing animation to other studios go hand in hand. As long as shows are made more quickly and cheaply with outside studios, the more storyboarding like that is needed because of the distance/lack of easy communication between creatives, writers, animators, etc... Still crazy to compare. I knew storyboarding could be fairly detailed with a lot of US animation, but never would have guessed with Rick & Morty.

Fantastic coverage!

Geez seeing Homestar in the beginning... now that's a blast from the past

Great video

This might just be one of the most insightful comment sections ever on youtube.

You should have added the blue letters all your other thumbnails have, took me quite a while to figure out that this was one of your videos

hope u cover more western animation. would love a video bout rise of the tmnt

Supremely insightful

very interesting video, i actually didnt know how R&M was made, figured it was just outsourced to korea like most American cartoons

Thank you for making this video.

Do a video on What if?

I went i to this video 100% execting this to be a cop out, where youd pick on 1 detail and complain about how you didnt like the animation style, i was plesantly suprises. This video has made we wanna research the animation industry in its entirty, which i will now go do😂. Great video

it's all about the artstyle at the first place. If you want to talk about cheap or expensive, studios can replace animators with Ai this day!

stuff like this make me realize how great the looney tunes cartoons were at working smoothly i mean, i think they still have layout artists

Are you ever going to talk about Chowder?

Yooo Canipa doing American animation videos! Now could you do a video on Generation 4 of My Little Pony? And maybe Generation 5 when it comes out? Or just more American animation stuff in general

Will you do an episode about: "The Owl House" or "Amphibia"

Then the scientist turned himself into a pickle Funniest shit I've ever seen

The animation does not need to change that would ruin the show.

This video was more interesting than I thought it would be! 🤓

Very informative

anime is awesome but we cannot disregard how western animation grows too

FACTS

The argument for better pay can be made about literally can member of the non-capital class in a capital society. No worker has freedom or control in a manner that is more than an illusion. Setting that one and the credit issue aside does the animation actually matter? Like, if the shows stayed the same would you really quit watching it cause the "animation isn't good enough"? Make an argument for treating people better cause they deserve better not cause your entertainment improves.

I always thought the action scenes in this show looked werid. Like they weren't actually "animated," in the traditional sense.

These review videos are becoming too detailed, we’re talking about asset re-use now? Jesus, you’re a studio exec’s wet dream. “Why can’t we just recycle this? Don’t we have enough assets?” I do agree that Rick and Morty requires more assets than any other show normally would, I think it’s because they’re out of ideas and decide to go big instead of rely on good character humor, but I wouldn’t consider their asset count or storyboard artists to be the issue. It’s writing, these stories just suck. As for toonboom, it’s just as hard (if not harder) to find someone who is really good and creative with a rig as it is to find a great traditional animator. You basically need someone who has mastered the program and also knows how to traditionally animate and draw. You might as well just find the latter. But as TV shows turn more into epic mini films, rig technology becomes more necessary to hit deadlines. The last thing I want to hear from a fan is about “asset count” or “deadlines” though, keep your head in front of the screen and quit trying to speculate series problems. Execs want it to be cheaper and easier, artists want to push it and surprise audiences. Videos like this just prove execs’ point, everything could be re-use and we can rely on vendor studios more. They’re animators they should be able to do it justice, right? Not necessarily, and absolutely not when it comes to direction. Your pre-production crew was hand selected by the creators to fulfill the vision of the show, which develops and streamlined the stories and characters and everything else. I would never trust a vendor studio with that. Why? That’s a complete lack of communication and you’ll most certainly not get what you paid for. Retakes are divided into creative retakes (in-house error) and technical retakes (vendor studio error.) As a pre-prod company you want to control as much as you can to avoid creative retakes so that you have the ability to fix mistakes. Technical mistakes always happen and the vendor studio is provided their own budget to catch those things. If they had any creative control then it becomes a legal battle over “this is not what we want” and the vendor studio saying “well we like it.” So if you like Rick and Morty or any of these series, then understand the process is the way it is for a reason. Now you can quit speculating.

What made Rick and Morty really popular was the dark humor, it's look was just slightly more unique than the usual western shows, cos of the so many different monster designs. Too bad the quality of the writing started to fall off in the end of S3 and by now it's just a boring mess.

An animator friend told me a pretty funny story this show. A studio she used to work at was given the opportunity to work on this new show called "Rick and Morty." They sat down and watched the pilot's leica, declared it the stupidest thing they'd ever seen, and threw it in the trash. There's making bad business decisions and then there's putting the most popular modern day cartoon in the garbage.

Interesting.

comment section? more like paragraphs.

Cover bojack horseman

Sweet! Wubablubbadubdub!

If you want japanese style and quality everywhere, this is not good at all. I mean, the industry is harsh enough, and puppet animation is great in Rick and Morty and a lot of others series. If animation in the world tends to have the japanese quality and originality all the time, I'm sure this will end up by being simply HELL, like in Japan where there is more and more productions, less time, tight plannings, and always a lot of quality attended. And so overworking, unpaid hours and lots of problems will comme with it. (and there's already a lot of overwork even when using puppet animation etc) I don't want that in Europe or idk where... :/

Japanese studios treat their artists worse, yes, they were given more creative freedom, but they get even less pay in return. Japanese shows gets a fraction of a budget that western cartoons get, yet their artist work so much harder and so much longer. I'm glad that you are bringing light to the issue that animation is a masochistic job with long hours and minimal pay, just wish that you call this out on all front and not just western media where it becomes an easy target.

Well that certainly explains why most American animation is so boring to watch.

Dude Rick and Morty is my favorite anime

I've never watched the show, and the only reason is the art style. It looks so weird to me lol

Puppet animation is popularized by industries because of quicker production times but will never be as creative as hand drawn frame by frame.

the studio wants to get out of the toxic usa animation industry and focus on the anime and videogame industry, 2 industries that 100 percent not toxic and treat their workers with respect... ... ...HAHAHAHHAHHAHAHAHHA GOOD LUCK WITH THAT ONE

There is a lot asked of western storyboard artists. I have heard of near strikes because they aren't just doing boarding, but also scripting out a show based off of a couple page outline. Then on top of that making fairly clean layouts, and then almost key-framing animation in instances. The Jack-of-all writer, cinematography, editor, and animator is a heavy burden. This isn't a justification, but another part of why storyboards are animated so cleanly is that studios will ship to low bidders who will only animate what is asked of them and can't be expected to make creative or even slightly above-par choices. I hear Canada subsidizes animation, and toon-boom trained people are more found there, so that is why it is outsourced to that country. I was surprised to hear how anime might only have 1-2 story boarders. I guess like mentioned here there is a lot less asked of them. Many boards would be considered only thumbnails in the west. And in some cases if they are adapting manga, some poses and compositions are already figured out.