Adventure Time

I decided to watch and make notes about how animation is used within the popular cartoon Adventure Time.

I am already very familiar with Adventure Time, it is one of my favourite animated TV shows, and already I feel that I has had some influence on my own animation style, and fits well with my style of drawing.

I decided to watch one of the most recent episodes of Adventure Time: Ghost Fly, which can be viewed at http://www.watchcartoononline.com/adventure-time-season-6-episode-17-ghost-fly 

The overall visual style of Adventure Time is made up of bold lines and colours, giving it a simplicity as a whole, which makes it easy to understand and enjoy.

It's animation style is often minimal, with many scenes including just a few animated movements, for example just an arm moving, or simple facial features moving.

One thing I noticed regarding the facial expressions of a lot of characters was that their emotions are mostly conveyed through their eyes more than anything else. Simply changing the shape of a characters eyes slightly can have a large effect on their facial expression as a whole.

The characters in Adventure Time are often made up of simple shapes, such as circles, ovals and squares. This not only adds to the simplicity of the style but also makes the characters easier to animate, as their bodies stay the same simple shapes throughout, and so their limbs are simply attached on to these and can be animated easily, without affecting the rest of the body.

Adventure Time seems to use a fair amount of techniques which require as little animation as possible, but still do not effect the story. For example in this episode:

• The use of the repeated wide angle shot of the tree house, but with different weather, to show the passing of time
• The mid shot of Finn and Jake running, which does not show their legs
• The use of flying characters
• A shot of the characters backs while they are talking: as their faces are not shown in the shot no animation is present at all while they speak
• The use of repeated backgrounds throughout, for example the interior of the tree house

I think techniques such as these are useful within animation because they are shortcuts which make the animators work a lot easier and less time consuming, yet still produce a good outcome.

Sound is also use effectively in Adventure Time. Most of the characters do have voices, but background music is also sometimes used to enhance dramatic or tense moments, as well as sound effects such as footsteps, or the fly buzzing.