Animation : The future of 2d by Rama Rengan

2D is often cheaper to produce than CG and there will always be an audience for the aesthetic, no matter how it is produced.

What Bob said.

Look at the success of Legend of Vox Machina on Amazon or just about ANY of the 2D Anime projects being rolled out by Netflix-Arcane, chief among them.

Audiences will watch so long as you have characters and a story they can get into.

It's certainly not the easiest way for spec writers to break into animation. But I think established showrunners and writers who like the style will always be able to get the budget for 2D.

2D animation ain't going nowhere.

Interesting that 2D is cheaper than 3D, Bob Harper. I would think there wouldn't be much difference. 2D would seem to be more labor intensive per se and 3 D more expensive, but faster. If you could please enlighten me on that.

Someone once shared this price guide: https://getwrightonit.com/animation-price-guide/

I'm not sure how accurate it is, but by category, it seems 3D is more expensive, as is a one-off like film instead of a series like television.

I think Big City Greens, season 2, episode 54, "Animation Abomination," answers this question best. As long as it can be farmed out to non-union shops, 2D will be here for a long, long time.

Martin Reese SImple 2D shows that can be done in Toon Boom or Flash are way cheaper than traditional 2D shows and for CG. South Park for instance is technically a CG show but a 2D style and often an entire episode is done within a week. Most quotes I get from studios place CG at almost double the cost of 2D. It is usually more intensive when you are dealing with all of the aspects of CG and the computers needed to execute the renders and so forth.

Traditional 2D's expense comes in the time, not the process. It also takes a highly artistic skill in life drawing if you are trying for a 2d film in the style of classic 2d Disney films. Those artists are great proponents of keeping the style alive, and even the last few features from Sony have gone to great lengths to mimic the style in MITCHELLS V. THE MACHINES and INTO THE SPIDERVERSE.

There is also a new initiative at Disney https://www.indiewire.com/2022/04/sketchbook-disney-animation-1234717825/

And before that some artists that were trained in the 2d form did their own doc. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv9JxlJ75YsZbP_NRtOWbYA?app=desktop

Plus with the surge in animation series the simpler 2d styles are less expensive and more interesting for creators.

So the short of it is, it's not going anywhere.