Understanding: The Television Age of Animation

The 'Television Era' of animation took over the golden age, because of this phenomenon in television. Therefore this meant production companies had to stop making big budget films and focus on the economic privileges of producing animated tv series for children. The key aspect about this era is that is solely concentrated on children. Waking up on a saturday morning and getting children to watch cartoons became a ritual and a very important factor. Animation was marketed to a younger audience only and it was seen less of a norm for adults to watch cartoons. This era lasted from early 1950's to the early 1980's.

But television animation is completely different to feature film animation both economically and technically. There is a limited time frame in consecutive production, and animation was to have seasons and series which were to be produced fast. In order to do this then came about a process named 'Limited Animation'. This consisted of reusing reoccurring parts of frames and only redrawing certain parts that need changing, in order to produce a great deal of frames quickly and more efficiently. Though this may seem like cheating, this was a shortcut technique that was necessary to speed up the production process. 'Cambria Pictures' were well known to have done this is their animated series. And just because this is at an economic advantage, it does not mean aesthetically it looks good. This was mainly done for characters speaking, and only changing their mouth movements, however 'Cambria Pictures' slowly went out of business because their view count declined quite a bit.

During this era, Disney's main goal was to keep their characters and their company in the public consciousness. Especially after the death of Walt in 1966. A training programme was introduced for new animators to help with the company, and post-Walt, all the films produced got mixed reviews and Disney entered the 1980's not entirely sure of where their future would take them.

Funnily enough, the feature films being produced during this time period, were targeted towards an older, more mature audience, which is the complete opposite to what television animation was intended for. And these weren't unsuccessful, taking Pink Floy's 'The Wall' for example.

Overall the television age of animation was great for companies like 'Hana-Barbara' who produced 'The Flintstones', 'Scooby Doo' and 'The Smurfs'. Out of everyone, these were without a doubt the most successful and are still shown on the television today. However for others it was a real struggle and left many people unsure of what was held for animation in the future as there were a real decline and even some companies like MGM had to close down their studios. But it was still influential, there are even sections on broadbands like 'Sky' now, which have a whole television section dedicated towards cartoons and animation tv series, so without a doubt, has some positive affect on the art.