Art Evolution / Web Animation

• A Day With Bowser Jr. The series began with sloppy Flash videos before slowly improving in quality. Today, the videos are animated in crisp 3D animation.
• DEATH BATTLE! initially started off rather cheaply, with fights limited to rather stiff sprite animations using pre-existing sprites and both Wiz and Boomstick being not being depicted in the flesh. Over time and as the budget increased, the sprite animations began becoming much more fluid and willing to use tailor-made sprites, and other styles such as 3D animation (e.g. "Link vs. Cloud"), cartoon animation (e.g. "Omni-Man vs. Homelander") and even live action (e.g. "Winter Soldier vs. Red Hood") were introduced, alongside both Wiz and Boomstick being shown during in-between segments.
• Hazbin Hotel: The designs of the main characters have changed a lot since their original conception. Originally Vivienne Medrano drew them in the Zoophobia art style with very wavy and fluid linework, since they were originally intended to appear in an arc of that comic, before distinctualizing their designs for the release of the pilot. In the series proper, the characters received some minor revisions to their designs and the artstyle of the show was tweaked to be slightly simplified^note An easily pointed out aspect of this is the definition on Alastor's teeth in the pilot which is not present in the show proper. Additionally, a prototypical Blitzo can be seen in the background of one shot and looks entirely different from both the pilot and actual series, due to him and Moxxie originally being conceived as recurring Hazbin side characters.
  • Its sister show Helluva Boss also has one. The pilot already had some pretty good animation but vastly improved by the release of the official first episode, being a lot more fluid and clean by comparison.
• Homestar Runner. This is lampshaded in the eponymous flashback in the Strong Bad Email flashback; it features crudely-animated art based on that in The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest, a children's book made by the series' creator before their website was established. In the Email lady...ing, Strong Bad presents a clip parodying the crude animation style and personalities of the very, very early Homestar Runner short Marshmallow's Last Stand.
  • The Homestar wiki even has articles about it.
• Eddsworld. Just compare one of Edd's first flashes to the last he finished before his death.
• Fairy Foxes has gone under Art Evolution throughout its 6 episodes. The foxes started out as cute little chibis. However, their designs changed to an anthro look and stayed that way since episode 3.
  • And since episode 7 came out, StickFreeks (the creator of Fairy Foxes) has switched from MS Paint to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0.
• Much like the Fairy Foxes example above, Wolf Dragons also started out different than it is today. Here are examples of the pilot episode: Before and after. Additionally, voices didn't appear in the first version until around episode 3, while in the better version, there were voices from the start.
• Banana-nana-Ninja! has improved in both art and audio quality from this to this.
• Madness Combat started with the characters looking identical aside from one or two accessories and cartoonish-looking blood. Over the course of the series, the character designs became increasingly more elaborate and the violence more visceral.
• Alex Crish, creator of Minecraft For Noobs has greatly changed his drawing, voice acting, and animation abilities, having smother drawn characters, and a less harsh voice. a comparison of the original and remastered versions of the 1st episode shows that drastically.
• OverSimplified: The characters in his earlier videos are mostly just Palette Swaps of his own avatar or any variant thereof, with males and females used to sharing the same body type and having relatively limited, simplistic animations. Starting with World War II however, many important characters began receiving increasingly detailed heads and varied body shapes that visually correspond to how they looked in real life, and their animation quality had been vastly improved as well. By the point of the Prohibition video, it's escalated so much that the intro itself has been changed to fit the escalating animation quality.
• Red vs. Blue had a unique form of evolution: through the first few seasons, the voice acting and video quality improved somewhat, from the low-quality early episodes to much better sound and video by Season 4 or 5. In addition to progress with equipment, though, the series gained significant upgrades with the release of each new Halo game, and by Revelation, also features extensive CGI thanks to Monty Oum joining the crew. It comes full circle with the release of remakes of the first 5 seasons, re-filmed in HD.
  • It was stated at one panel that as their sound equipment gradually became better, fans started to complain that the voices sounded "too good" and the team decided to work the audio a bit to maintain the low quality feel. Somewhat justified in that the characters are supposed to be speaking either through communicators inside their helmets or through their helmets, so sounding crystal clear comes across as rather odd, given the convention of voices through communicators being slightly distorted.
  • Another panel had one of season 17's co-directors saying the season revisiting old events made them consider just using the original footage. But the image quality improved so much since the Xbox and Xbox 360 that the footage "looked like it was smeared with vaseline", hence they just recreated using the Halo remasters from The Master Chief Collection.
• Nameless (2005) progressed from relatively crappy quality to quality rivaling that of some professionally-made cartoons in a few episodes.
• The BIONICLE Flash episodes (which consisted of cutscenes from the Mata Nui On-Line Game and a short series of non-game animations) went through some degree of evolution:
  • At first, both the animations and the game blended rough 3D graphics with crude 2D Flash animation. Some of the movements had many individually rendered frames showing off bodyparts/machinery from slightly different angles. The characters had a lot of shading, and the backgrounds were immensely detailed, though some of the textures were low-quality jpeg images. Characters were also often Off-Model, since their sprites were based on bad quality photos of LEGO pieces and primitive 3D models. As the game progressed, the visuals changed to standard 2D imagery, with simplistic Clip-Art Animation. The characters only had a few basic angles and barely any shading that matched their environment, which also became less detailed but more stylized and "uniform". So when you went back to the first areas of the game, characters suddenly looked out of place.
  • The Kanohi Pakari, the type of mask worn in the game by Onua, Kapura, Hafu and Onepu. When Onua first appeared, his mask looked really close to the real piece. By the end of the game, he and all other Pakari-wearers were outfitted with a completely Off-Model-looking mask that barely resembled the original. This is due to the game designers confusing the Pakari with the Ruru (mask of Whenua and Taipu), and created an odd mix of the two. They even switched the masks of Hafu and Taipu, and incorrectly gave Kapura a Pakari. Faulty reference images and miscommunication with LEGO are likely to blame. Beginning with the second episode of the web animations, the animators thankfully settled on a new design that looked exactly like the Pakari.
• An Akatsuki's Life. From its somewhat crudely animated and muffled-sounding beginnings, it eventually evolved into this. The latest episodes contain a handful high frame-rate shots that (aside from the obvious pixels) wouldn't look too out of place in an actual cartoon show.
• One could say the art style for Neurotically Yours went through this, starting from very rough design and animation and it now a lot smoother.
• The Castle Series. Just look at the first part versus the second part.
• The art in Happy Tree Friends became less stiff and more "cute" over time, mainly by making the eponymous Tree Friends overall a little rounder and cartoonish. The overall animation quality also improved, thanks to technological advancements in the show's usage of Flash animation. A more specific example is the appearance of Flippy's evil Split Personality. In his very first episode, he looked exactly like normal Flippy. After that, he gained greenish-yellow eyes, Creepy Shadowed Undereyes, and crooked teeth. This would remain for a few episode before the crooked teeth were replaced by fangs in late season 2, finalising the design.
• Ashley in The Crazy Kids of Grade 5 has went through a character redesign. Compare this◊ to this ◊.
• Cow of the Wild has gone through this over three years. In the first episodes, the feet were large in comparison to the rest of the body, several wolves had a lot of facial hair (i.e. Alari's bangs), eyes were one color with white highlights, and cat characters were frequently mistaken for wolves, or vice versa. In the more recent episodes, the feet have gotten a bit smaller, the eyes are multicolored, and there's a distinct difference in the basic character design of different species. The lineart and shading have also become much more refined.
• In Da Amazin OT Advenchr, most characters were drawn as obese until around Appisote 5, when they became stickmen as a result of art changes. Of course, due to the nature of the show itself, none of the art in the show is very good anyways.
• DSBT InsaniT: While it still keeps its simplistic style, there is a BIG jump in quality from episode 1 to episode 2.
  • Starting from Episode 4, the characters became more expressive and gained Four-Fingered Hands, both of which had been implimented from the start in Dreamscape.
  • Starting from Episode 6, the art style for the characters gets a complete overhaul by being designed in Adobe Illustrator. The same goes for Dreamscape.
  • Starting from Episode 7, the art makes the biggest jump yet with the character models being created in Anime Studio, allowing for much better movement and expressions. The same goes for Dreamscape.
• The music videos for Savlonic, a fictional band created by "Weebl" Picking, have undergone this—the third and fourth videos, created by another animator, are far more advanced graphically and no longer depict the characters in borderline Super-Deformed style.
• Turnabout Storm's art and animation quality saw a few improvements after the fist two episodes for different reasons:
  • Ace Attorney characters, who use their in-game sprites, went from the pixely sprites of the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS releases to the much smoother artwork of the iPad's HD re-release whenever they are compatible. Besides that, the dialogue box's font was changed to the same one used in Ace Attorney.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Original Characters, who use vectors, had an overall improvement after some skilled vector artists and animators lend a hand to the author. This is very noticeable during the animated courtroom sessions.
• While the Ducktales characters still look as crappy as they did in the first Ducktalez, Vegeta has seen an incredible improvement between Episodes 3 (fairly well animated for a Flash cartoon in that age) and Episode 7 (professional-quality CG animation).
• GEOWeasel goes from very Flash-influenced animation with same-width pencil outlines to a very messy but more varied style in episode 9 that eventually evens out through the rest of the series.
• Many Garry's Mod users tend to do this as time goes by and they learn the craft more. Notable examples include RubberFruit, Dr. Face, and Eltorro64Rus, all of whom started off with standard sketchy animation and eventually worked their way up to something you'd expect from a big budget stop-motion film.
• HTF +: At the beginning the series seems to be amateur but as it progresses the animation becomes smoother.
• Due to their initial inexperience and steadily growing skill overtime, RWBY undergoes a pretty steady evolution in its art style, to the point that the first three volumes are drastically different in appearance and animation compared to later seasons.
  • The original trailers, primarily made by series creator Monty Oum, featured stark, stylized environments and enjoyed extremely fluid animation due to being released months apart.
  • Season 1 proper switched to more generic, somewhat simplistic backgrounds and generally rougher animation. This was especially noticeable with non-combat related scenes, since they hadn't figured out how to make a number of more nuanced elements (like walking) look consistently good due to the limitations of Poser at the time. It was also the only season to make liberal use of shadow figures to compensate for the lack of other character models at the time.
  • Season 2 began utilizing a darker and more futuristic look for the backgrounds and featured generally better animation due to new and improved character models.
  • Season 3, the first produced following Oum's premature passing, uses the same models but with higher polygon counts.
  • Season 4 onwards features a very evolved art style for everyone, with far more nuanced and complex body movement and generally more grounded animations. However, the combat animations was somewhat erratic during this time, being slower and more focused on realistic feeling fights, or at times feeling somewhat floaty due to the team having to essentially change how to design fights after Monty's passing. Season 5 would suffer the worst from this, especially the infamous Haven fight. It isn't until Season 6 that the fights managed to find a consistent style that differentiated itself from the Monty era of fighting that could stand on its own.
  • Season 9 is possibly the best looking that RWBY has been yet, with the locations of the Ever After being the most vibrant and colorful that the series has ever been, with a number of unique creature models and designs that all manage to be interesting and complex.
• Later seasons of Sonic for Hire began adding more frames to the character models, not only smoothing up the animation to a degree but also increasing the range of angles and expressions the characters appear in.
  • This was actually deliberately invoked in Season 7. The end of the previous season had Sonic resetting a Sega Genesis and, essentially, all of existence. The only thing that remains of the characters are a couple of singular moving pixels. Halfway through the episode, the characters start to rebuild their life, and the art style resembles that of an Atari 2600 game. Come episode 2, and the art style is back to normal. It did take a whole week for this to happen, though.
• While the Animated Adaptation of The Bedfellows has always been rather stiff and limited, more recent episodes have had the occasional Animation Bump, full-body shots and more expressive Flash puppets.
• The animation of HoneyWorks's Confession Executive Committee ~Love Series~ have significantly improved over the years. Compare the rough, sketch-like quality of the "First Love Picture Book" (the series' first installment), to the gorgeous, fully-animated video they released for "Tokyo Autumn Session".
• Power Star: In addition to the fight scenes becoming more elaborately choreographed as the series goes on, the design for the titular power-ups switches from the 3-dimensional models used in Super Mario 64 to the 2-dimensional sprites from Super Mario All-Stars in part 3.
• SCP Animated - Tales from the Foundation: Very, very noticeable. The earliest shorts were basically sound over still pictures. The later shorts are a big step-up.
• SagaTheYoungin's earlier videos had cruder character designs, not-so-detailed backgrounds, and stiff animation. His later videos have his characters looking less cartoonish, his backgrounds and objects have more detail, and the animation became much smoother.
• Glitchtale has slowly gone from a simplistic Flash-animation style to a fully detailed Animesque.

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