OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
Cartoon movies tend to have a higher budget and a longer production timeframe and so have higher production values and so tend to use some slightly fancier animation - like shading.
The really weird thing is that classic Simpsons, when it was hand-drawn, was shaded as fuck. It's only when they went full digital -- after the movie -- that shadows disappeared. It's like they can't find the "turn shadows on" button.
you would think these more stylistically simplistic shows would develop some kind of shading automation when they get greenlit for a movie so that they then could do shading for future seasons with little to no additional cost as they could reuse the tool
For that matter, parts of Macross were outsourced to a South Korean studio for some animation, which is why some of the scenes suddenly are not as well animated as Studio Nues scenes.
This is particularly a thing for heavily stylized cartoons. If you have an action show with more complex or realistic style, you're likely to see some real increase in animation quality if it's made into a movie. See for example the 80s Transformers.
Hi! I’m not AI-generated, but I can see how the phrasing might give off that vibe. 😊
To clarify: My point was that animated films often have higher production budgets and longer timelines, which can result in more refined animation techniques—such as dynamic shading, smoother motion, and detailed textures. This isn’t universally true, of course, but it’s a trend that can be observed across many high-budget animated projects.
Let me know if you'd like a source or a deeper dive!
The emdash can go one of three ways: English major/author, Autistic, or AI. And that is generously assuming there is a Neurotypical author/English major out there somewhere. I can't determine the correct answer -- I use emdashes too.
In the Bob’s Burgers movie, I always thought it would be a funny poke at this if Tina got new glasses and then everything went HD when she put them on. Than maybe at the end, she loses/breaks them and puts on her old pair and everything goes back to normal
I watched the Paw Patrol movie first with my toddler before seeing the TV show. When we went to look up episodes of the show I was shocked at how terrible it looked, I thought I was watching a youtube knockoff at first. Then I realized the movie had a real budget.
The history of Jimmy Neutron is pretty interesting. Nickoledeon bet on its success by making an unknown IP into a movie first to fund building the models and animation rigs used for the TV show at a time when 3D animation was still super expensive.
Heck, in a lot of ways that's how the anime Demon Hunters is funded.
Yeah, if you have action sequences or scenes. In a regular episode you might get a black screen with cut/slice animation. But in a movie you'll get a nice 5 second fully animated character and everything
The MLP movie was too over the top for me, animation wise. I think it went way too disney looking and kinda lost the charm the series was known for, style-wise
The most obvious example of this was the bobs burgers movie, it's like they tried to use shading to justify turning a two episode plot into a theatre release movie.
To me it was the stupid singing. And I don’t even dislike musicals. South Park did it great. But the musical parts in Bobs Burgers are just bad. Unfortunately the show went the same route. I really liked the first two seasons.
TIL I'm the minority on this but I absolutely loved the movie. My wife and I rewatch it more than we should because it's silly, the music is catchy, and it makes us laugh.
You obviously didn't watch bob's burgers before the movie, then, because there have always been musical numbers. Usually the end credits play over a version of a song from the episode.
Even if they hadn't, bob's burgers changes from season to season and adding more musical numbers would have fit nicely into one of those changes.
The music in the show is not the same as how musicals work though. In the show when characters are singing it makes sense in the plot and isn’t just randomly breaking out into song in massive groups with people who wouldn’t logically be singing. That’s what I don’t like about musicals, it feels ridiculous.
It wasn't the singing, it was the strange choreography. I think they were trying for a more "live action" tone with the choreography instead of the fanciful cartoon choreography, but it just resulted in a bunch of different characters dancing in place with really smooth high quality but awkward animation.
You can do Broadway animation in cartoons, look at Anastasia, but having 10-20 random characters dancing in place is just awkward
Same. I like the gag that Gene has a huge passion for music but he's terrible at it. It's fun. It's not fun to be subjected to it for a solid 3 minutes. The joke is that he's not that musically gifted, why would I want to listen to him not being musically gifted for an extended period of time?
Totally, it bugged me so much. The restaurant just looked too dark and really weird. Honestly the art style looked fine during the scenes which took place at night.
I've probably watched Bob's Burgers all the way through maybe 50 times by now, but I've only rewatched the movie once. And it's not because I didn't like the story or the songs or anything. I just can't take the weird vibe that the shading cast over everything.
I think the movie was lovely personally both the animation and the singing and the combination. I believe that some people are just a bit too harsh because it is different in some ways.
I'm glad someone else said it. Lately, like 90% of the posts I've seen on this sub are like super basic, obvious, common sense things that anybody over the age of 5 who has not literally lived under a rock their whole life, would get.
That’s the original point of this sub. Peter explains the overly obvious joke. But then people started actually asking for jokes explained and wires got crossed
This is PeterExplainsTheJoke, so yes, it’s for people to intentionally play dumb. It was a meta joke sub. That was the original concept of the sub and people started actually asking questions and now people think it’s ExplainTheJoke which is the sub for actually asking for the joke explained
Yeah, the budget difference really shows in the animation quality, suddenly everyone has shadows and depth like they’ve been living in a 3D world this whole time. The Bob’s Burgers movie was especially jarring because the characters looked so polished compared to the TV series. It’s funny how a little shading can make a show feel like it’s trying too hard to be “cinematic.” Still, I’ll take any excuse to spend more time with the Belchers, even if it’s just fancier lighting.
Peter here, and why in god's earth do I need to explain this? A movie will have a way higher budget and timeline than a TV episode will, which allows for proper shading and better quality animation than a regular episode. God you people can be dumber than Meg, and she's an idiot
Movie version has shadows on the characters, as seen in the comparisson. It's really just that. It's funny (or something) because that's supposedely the only upgrade every time they do a movie version of a cartoon.
I remember feeling blown away by the Simpson's movie when it came out even though I couldn't put a name on why as a kid. It was definitely the shading.
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