If you don’t want to draw, by all means, use flash. Just STOP HARPING on actual artists because they think you have no sense of design, volume or spacing.

Flash animation is great but does it have the illusion of life—I DON’T THINK SO.

http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php

But as far as acting, timing, movement it’s all the same, like Aaron and others said, it depends on the artists, s/he decides the quality of the animation. I’ve seen animation done with Sketchbook Pro, Photoshop, Painter, Macromedia Director, and even FutureSplash (from 10 years ago), and it looked great because a skilled traditionally-trained animator spent a lot of time doing it well.

Flash has been both very good and very bad for the industry at the same time (in my opinion anyways).
On the plus side; It’s brought alot of work back to North America. Hundreds of students that graduate in North America now have the chance to get a job actually animating thanks to Flash, whether it’s big-budget, smooth-moving, high-quality series… or low-budget, 12fps, mediocre stuff, traditionally tranined animators can find work actually animating, while before 2001, it nearly ALL went to Korea, China, India for animation.

As a fresh and new animation graduate you had the very slim chance of finding a job in design, storyboarding, BG layout, or key posing. Thanks to Flash SOOOO much work has been generated because of its cost-effectiveness, easy changes/revisions, very economical in design management, time management and its versatility in doing high-def TV, internet cartoons, and e-cards (which keeps many freelancers busy during down time).

On the down side (as mentioned above) it’s easy accessibility and false sense that any producer things ANY retakes can be done in the blink of an eye (“Cause it’s all done on computers now right?”), has given Flash a bad name that has only recently begun to be lifted.

Not there wasn’t any bad animation before Flash, but thanks to Flash it makes it easy to see lots of bad animation. Television execs that control all things that go on TV see Flash as the cheap way out, but by slashing costs of animated series by 50% or more (compared to budgets of 10 years ago) it can’t help but create mediocre animation, so Flash is seen as a sucky 2D tool, that can’t match the quality of the old classics. Un-true, it’s just that no one wants to pay money to make a good cartoon anymore (as someone said above). Flash has made some of the processes easier… “making” cartoons hasn’t gotten any easier, the competition is fierce and thanks to changing times in the industry of television in general, in fact I think it’s harder now then 10-15 years ago. Flash aids in the fact that you need noe paint on Xerox, paint on cels, photograph or scan every single frame. I’m not denying the charm and elegance often achieved in that the results of that method, but man how much easier it is now to not have to do that, it’s amazing. Inflation and thos cost of making cartoons has doubled since 10-20 years ago, but the budgets are at an all time low. It’s unfortunate that Flash has made the Quantity over Quality concept all too possible for television exec to take advantage of.

Flash came around at exactly the right time. I am very convinced that it saved the industry because the costs were running too high to create quality animation. It’s just too bad that it got a bad rap because by saving it it came at a cost. Quality was sacrificed for pumping out lots of cartoons to raise the producers’ fees, make bigger profit, flood the market with more cartoons, overload the television universe with mass quantity.

And for those who DO have the money to spend, there’s those rare gems like Justice League and Airbender, have you seen those types of shows? Wow! I drool over Feature-Quality backgrounds and their mind-blowing effects animation.

Flash has given employment to hundereds if not thousands of animators who would have simply not been able to find work otherwise (unless they moved overseas).

Especially Canada… Wow, the amount of 2D character animators in this country now is staggering compared to 12 years ago, I wish I knew the percentage of how much that community has grown. Animation has returned to us, yes, maybe sometimes Korea, India, China, Japan – based studios did better stuff then we have in the past 5 years using Flash for North American programming, but the fault is in the low budgets and the producers, developers, executives, funders in TV land that don’t want to give talented creators, designers, animators the time and funds they need to create good quality stuff.

El Tigre, Fosters, and several others seem to slowly break away from that bad-Flash-mold.

I’m really sorry about the long rant.

Good article Aaron!

I consider myself a traditional animator, but flash has made my life so much easier on several occasions. The animation community shouldn’t get torn in half because of the “digital revolution”. Instead, we should embrace the fact that new mediums are developing and work with each other to create these new mediums.

On the other hand, those 3-d animators are taking over, and they must be stopped immediately. We must band together with our pencils and wacom tablets and destroy them…

and just so no one gets confused, that was a joke, a bad one.

I look at traditional animation for inspiration when I work on my digital animation.
It’s similar to the reasons I like both anime and disney animation. Each has qualities the other lacks.

This is the asshole who left the 3-page comment. I think it’s safe to say I overreacted — a lot. I apologize. I only realized your intent after I spouted off, and I should’ve given myself more time. Things have been rough for me the past couple years, I let my aggression out on you, and that was wrong. I think you run a great site here. This won’t happen again.