Motorcity

Motorcity is a 2012 animation made for Disney XD that I love the style of. The mix of 2D and 3D animation is a lot more pronounced than many mixed animations now and the contrast of the smooth CG cars and very angular style of the character design really makes it stand out, in my opinion. The character design is done by Richard Valley, and immediately it reminded me of some of the Gorillaz music videos, which he was an animator on. I love how his style translates to a Disney cartoon, and how separate it is at the same time from Jamie Hewlett's original Gorillaz designs.

For the 2D elements, Titmouse created a Flash plug in for the animation of the faces of the characters, which is noticable in the show, since it doesn't look like usual 2D animation with a lot of the head movements.



This is a plug in I think would be fun and very useful to use on Flash.



The above video shows the stages of animation, with the expressions of the characters' faces animated first in Flash with their plug in, and then composited into ToonBoom for 2D animation, and later added to the 3D vehicles made in Maya, with the special effects are added last. I love how much of their animation process Titmouse puts online; it's really interesting to see all of the steps they take (and terrifying!) I think I would definitely want to have a part in the 2D animation over anything else, before the animation gets too complicated and all added together.

I would love to see these techniques used in a lot more animations for TV. More and more cartoons continue to be made with 3D graphics, but I think there's just a certain quality about 2D characters that can't quite be reproduced otherwise, and I don't want to see that go.