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Home / What Is the Name of the Art Style in Steven Universe

What Is the Name of the Art Style in Steven Universe

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[ Ed. notation: This essay originally posted when Thundercats Roar was announced every bit an upcoming series. It has been updated and refreshed to coincide with the release of the showtime episodes of Thundercats Roar on the Cartoon Network website.]

There'southward always a debate raging in the world of blitheness, whether information technology's the presence of women in the writers room or a cartoon geek'southward ramble right to Szechuan sauce (thanks to the rowdy Rick and Morty fandom). Only the announcement of Cartoon Network'due south animated parody series Thundercats Roar saw the animation fandom butting heads over a rare topic: college.

ThunderCats Roar is Cartoon Network's reboot of the classic 1980s sword-and-sorcery blithe series featuring feline humanoid aliens. Where the original show took its alien battles and good-vs.-evil disharmonize seriously, Thundercats Roar is a hyper, kid-focused take on the same characters, setting, and globe. And the initial trailer sent a number of fans to Twitter to gripe about its creative style past targeting a handful of alma maters. One school in particular, the California Institute of the Arts, was in the hot seat, every bit fans complained most how this lighter have on ThunderCats was drawn non in the muscle-rippling "realistic" style of the original show, but rather in something they derisively called "CalArts Style."

What is CalArts Manner? That depends on who you ask. Over the years, prickly blitheness buffs have come to use the term equally a catchall for what they see as a cookie-cutter mode of thin-frame blitheness that has dominated the 2010s. Pointing to shows like Disney XD's Gravity Falls and Star vs the Forces of Evil, and Drawing Network'south Steven Universe, The Amazing World of Gumball, and at present ThunderCats Roar, those fans note the similarity in the designs of the shows' characters, charging that the originality and artistic quality of cartoons from back in the day has been lost.

Nearly animators, however, agree that the characterization is total hogwash. Rob Renzetti — who created the 2000s Nickelodeon show My Life as a Teenage Robot, and who's directed on shows ranging from Dexter's Laboratory to Gravity Falls to the new DuckTales reboot — fired dorsum confronting criticisms by explaining that the use of "CalArts Style" has go utterly bled of any meaning other than "I don't similar this."

Consensus pins the proliferation of "CalArts style" as a debasing on John Kricfalusi, improve known equally John K, the disgraced creator of Ren & Stimpy who was accused of underage sexual abuse in 2018. Although Kricfalusi had been reportedly using the phrase since the early 1990s, a 2010 blog mail where he wrote nigh the manner helped the criticism take off. The post embedded a number of character designs from Disney movies and alleged that those designs had been essentially regurgitated by CalArts grads ever since.

"[Disney's] Ix Old Men had a lot of skill going for them only the animation and pattern by the time they were truly old was corrupt and formulaic," wrote Kricfalusi. "They kept doing the aforementioned things over and over again — and that's what all the animators re-create today — the corrupt stuff, rather than the skills. Unfortunately the people who abound upward inspired past copies of copies of '60s Disney animation acquire to accept these few superficial stylistic things and don't realize they are doing information technology. They unconsciously blot information technology and regurgitate information technology in their films until the next generation comes along."

CalArts and the Walt Disney Company take quite a history. Walt Disney himself substantially co-founded the schoolhouse in 1961, and since then, information technology'south adult a reputation equally a feeder school for the blitheness industry. That reputation, according to an animator and CalArts MFA graduate who asked to remain nameless, is mostly unfair:

"I reason CalArts is an piece of cake target for people similar this is the (largely perceived) idea that CalArts is a direct funnel into the large animation studios like Disney, and that alumni from the school (who tin be found in every major studio) tend to rent each other over other qualified people (the colloquial term for this is 'the CalArts mafia')," our source wrote. "Spoiler alert: it's not a funnel. It has a lot of famous alumni, and a good proper noun, and some connected connections to the industry based on its prestige and geographic location. Merely, as with any academic establishment, those things are non a guarantee of employment."

"The reality is that there is not, and has never been, a unified "'CalArts style,'" the source continues. "There are trends in blitheness, just like there are trends in whatsoever creative medium. They grow and change over time … Then 'CalArts manner' means whatsoever the current general direction of animation happens to be, based on maybe a few influencers in the industry who happen to be from CalArts. But the perception of CalArts controlling the form of blitheness is pretty overblown, and hands disproved."

That's the kicker. Categorizing all gimmicky shows as "CalArts manner" isn't simply inaccurate on an artistic level, but wrong on a technical level as well. Steven Universe's erstwhile supervising managing director, Ian Jones-Quartey — who also ran his ain show, OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes on Cartoon Network from 2017 to 2019 — has been reminding fans for years that he and his partner, creator Rebecca Saccharide, both attended the New York-based School of Visual Arts. They're part of a generation of major cartoon creators that cutting their teeth on CalArts graduate Pendleton Ward's seminal Adventure Time, and thus would accept influenced each other's styles. That generation does include CalArts alums like Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch and Over the Garden Wall's Pat McHale, but many electric current high-profile creators simply did not attend CalArts.

For instance, Kyle Carrozza, the creator of Mighty Magiswords, attended the Fine art Institute of Philadelphia. The veteran John McIntyre, who helms the blitheness on Drawing Network's Ben x reboot, went to the New York Academy Tisch Schoolhouse of the Arts. (Neither Victor Courtright nor Jeremy Polgar, the producer and managing director, respectively, of ThunderCats Roar, have their alma maters publicly listed on IMDb.)

Then again, if those fans really wanted to know what CalArts styles actually await like, maybe they should actually spotter some work from recent graduates.

Many of the fans disgruntled about this "CalArts manner" also use another word, "chibi," to derisively depict characters from shows like Steven Universe and ThunderCats Roar. The give-and-take is used to depict characters in manga, anime, or Japanese-influenced animation who accept big heads, tiny bodies, and saucer-sized optics — characteristics that the protagonists from the to a higher place shows, in addition to those from Gravity Falls, Star, and Gumball, all share. It also, as a Tofugu article from 2016 thoroughly and helpfully points out, has some offensive connotations of its own.

Thundercats 1985 vs Thundercats Roar 2018 Warner Bros. Television/Cartoon Network

The frustration, in many means, seems to stem from fans who disapprove of the "cute-ification" of characters they're used to seeing as more than realistically drawn — or at to the lowest degree with more muscles. ThunderCats Roar is nether a special sort of pressure thanks to its status, alongside young man Cartoon Network plan Teen Titans Go!, equally a remake of a beloved superhero property that drastically changed up the original's artistic mode, tone, and intent. Many of these fans were also frustrated by the Powerpuff Girls reboot for similar reasons, fifty-fifty though the major characteristics of the character models for its heroines are substantially unchanged.

The pushback against Thundercats Roar is a fair critique. Fine art is all well-nigh preference, after all! But fine art is also most evolution and personal instincts. Rebecca Sugar's designs for Steven Universe come from her own dear of video games and Bauhaus theory. The idea that Thundercats Roar'south manner is part of a monoculture produced by college educational activity fails to examine history; characters from Charles Schulz's Peanuts also share those characteristics, as does Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. In fact, in that location'south enough of proof that then-called "chibi" fashion has been prevalent in American comics and animation arts for the improve part of a century. (Marvin the Martian, anyone?) There's a piddling irony hither, too, as fans often also point to the hyper-realistic manner used in many anime as an "antidote" to these so-chosen inferior styles, while rarely noting the means in which works in that style, besides reuse certain aspects in graphic symbol blueprint — specially for women characters.

Ultimately, though, all the hubbub boils down to this: fandoms beloved to toil over the unknown, and people on the Internet drift toward the caustic. Simply wait until Dunkin' Donuts takes a page from McDonalds' Rick and Morty playbook and releases a Pinkish Lars donut as a publicity stunt. Then the real fun will begin.

John Maher is digital editor and associate news editor at Publishers Weekly and co-founder and editor of The Dot and Line. He has written for Fourth dimension Inc. Books, Esquire.com, Existent Uncomplicated, Pacific Standard, Thrillist, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Hyperallergic, among others.

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Source: https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/22/17381380/thundercats-roar-cartoon-network-style-steven-universe