Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends

Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends was made by the creator of the Powerpuff Girls for Cartoon Network, Craig McKraken. He wanted to take a step away from the 'graphics style' thick black lines of the PPG cartoon and try something completely new. He also wanted a universe where he could always design and invent new characters without them necessarily having to be a bad guy, like in PPG. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends uses a lot less cartoon violence and action than the Powerpuff Girls, instead relying on characters and dialogue, meaning that the scripts are created before the storyboards, as opposed to starting with storyboards on the Powerpuff Girls.

The background and character artwork starts off hand drawn, which is then scanned and made into vectors in Illustrator which allows them to be resized whenever needed. The characters are then animated in Flash and then composited in After Effects to create the finished animation. This means that they can reuse walk cycles or simple movements/poses that would need to be animated more than once, to save time and money. This show, from 2004, was one of the first shows to use a combination on hand drawn animation, Illustrator Flash and After Effects, and the outcome works very well. I love the style and how it differentiates from a lot of cartoons around at that time, and it is something I would like to try out at some point. The method would also be interesting to try out for a future character based animation.