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Anonymous08/23/26, 22:04No.8024110Why is "artistic ugliness" such a lost art now?
Like when a cartoon or comic has an artstyle that is "ugly" but in an appealing and funny to look at way.
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Anon08/23/26, 22:12No.8024116
In the west at least, a unique style like anything on the left is usually attributed to one artist. That means the artist has the power and is partly responsible for the fate of the show or comic. Corporations dont want that, they want their IPs to be like formless thinsg that any cheap artist they hire can do. The concept of needing skilled humans to make art is already a huge pain point for companies.
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Anon08/23/26, 22:12No.8024117
Interesting. I feel like this has something to do with the lesser popularity of pure cartoony cartoons. As in, animation that is supposed to be funny and entertaining because the drawings themselves are funny and entertaining. Trying to make a funny drawing naturally leads an artist to making something ugly in a funny way. Meanwhile, modern animation, even for kids, seems to be more dialogue driven.
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Anon08/23/26, 22:31No.8024134
the styles on the left are very expressive and are probably harder / takes longer to animate because there is more detail in the display of ugliness
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Anon08/23/26, 22:37No.8024138
If something similar to something on the left was released today you’d get weebs on Twitter bitching about how ugly western animation is or something.
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Anon08/23/26, 22:43No.8024142
Well, given that everything on the right is animation, I'm guessing it's because they're all (except family guy) probably puppet animated/tweened animated shows, whilst all the animated shows on the left were frame-by-frame.
Why puppet animation seems to necessitate having absolute dogshit 2D models is beyond me, especially when the earliest example I can think of, "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends", had a pretty great and distinct art style.
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Anon08/23/26, 23:16No.8024154
>CIA cultural warfare program art, then
>CIA cultural warfare program art, now
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Anon08/23/26, 23:18No.8024155
The ones on the right look stale and safe
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Anon08/23/26, 23:54No.8024166
Maybe we Millenials just got tired of your grotesque boomer humor?
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Anon08/24/26, 00:56No.8024192
We need more younger artists that can appreciate shit looking grotesque and funny, like me.
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Anon08/24/26, 00:58No.8024194
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRPxao3e_jY
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Anon08/24/26, 02:24No.8024232
I don’t find anything on the left to be ugly at all, everything on the right feels less 'ugly' and more 'bland'.A cartoon that looks actually ugly would be something that has those bland corporate stylistic sensibilities combined with intentionally ugly designs, like Big Mouth. Problem Solverz is another ugly cartoon for how it not only has cheap animation and hideous designs but is also an aesthetic mess in general.
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Anon08/24/26, 02:48No.8024246
Both are corporate goyslop, it all has been since Walt Disney and his banalization of European fairytales, just that the standards have gradually lowered.
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Anon08/24/26, 13:00No.8024513
Caricature artists have become offensive in the industry. Good for artists to practice but most likely ignored as a skill these days, because someone can take it the wrong way.
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Anon08/24/26, 14:50No.8024586
I have a theory that many of those shows use that ugly style to make it clear that they're aimed at adults. I imagine some executive insists that every sitcom aimed at adults should look like Family Guy or The Simpsons, so that little Timmy's mum knows her son shouldn't watch it. If so, it's yet another example of how bad parenting is ruining everything.
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Anon08/24/26, 17:27No.8024726
certainly something to be said for an overall shift in perceived appeal of "ugly" art, but largely id say it has to do with the decrease in animation quality. most of the ones on the left are simply better cartoon artists, the right are just animation slop workers. despite cartooning being a simpler art style, its not like it doesnt have its own skill levels.
also bear in mind the large teams involved in modern animation and the work crunch, an easier (technically) to draw style that also is barely different from the last show they worked on is easy to make quickly and look cohesive between artists.
i also think the general shapes have a lot to do with using high smoothing and line correction but i have nothing to back that up
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Anon08/24/26, 20:49No.8024890
the pipeline for it got streamlined. They looked at family guy or rick and morty and started aping either art style. Istg I'm not going to watch a majority of these shows on the right, safe and bland art styles all around
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Anon08/24/26, 22:31No.8024951
Your show's artstyle serves a purpose, it doesn't just look like that because you happen to have hired the guy who draws like that. Take the common trope in comedy shows where everything looks like Baki or a Liefeld comic for a few seconds, they didn't outsource it to some specialis, your crew could draw the whole thing that way if they wanted and if you paid them to.Recent cartoons depend far more on the writing than older ones, most of the stuff on the right could have been live action and apart from being crazy expensive and everyone involved with Big Month getting instantly jailed or shot
It'd work. As such they need simpler styles not to detract from the dialogue while EEnE needs its style because the jokes are mid on their own but the character imploding makes them funny.
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Anon08/25/26, 06:44No.8025265
Crumb. Crumb started drawing ugly with a surgial precision and it went downhill from there. Other artists have a goofy charm to them but his his stiff and calculated.
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Anon08/25/26, 10:48No.8025365
Honestly? Less straight white men in the industry most likely has something to do with it.
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Anon08/25/26, 21:54No.8025813
It made a small comeback thanks to Pizza Tower, which blends oekaki with weird French comics like Le Concombre Masqué (the creator is a Quebecer).
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Anon08/26/26, 14:37No.8026389
I love guys like Don Martin, David Feiss, and Gary Larson. Big nosed fat guys are the peak of funny character design for me.
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Anon08/28/26, 17:30No.8028283
Does my artwork count as ugly? Ugly but still good? Or just ugly? What do you think
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Anon08/30/26, 14:23No.8029785
you're just old OP
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Anon08/30/26, 14:30No.8029789
I see enough ugly people when I go out everyday. I don't need to see more of them in art too.
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Anon08/30/26, 14:44No.8029798
Rocko and Krazy Kat are cutely ugly
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Anon08/30/26, 20:37No.8030009
The ugliness from the right hand side, aside from its crude depiction of humans, comes from its stiff and intentionally sterilized character designs, that makes them easier and cheaper to animate and tween (even if they use bones and not hand drawn animation).
A lot of the cartoons on the left are slapstick-heavy and its characters are very expressive (ren and stimpy, cow and chicken, ed edd and eddy, billy and mandy, rocko; probably more, I see OG simpsons on there for example).
Thirdly, the ugliness on the left comes from artists/character designers essentially celebrating human nature by giving people large noses or the like. It's why I like western cartoons more than eastern ones, which have their own corporate ugliness. Ironically, the ones that don't (anime that's popular among jap normies and parents like shin chan) isn't popular on this side of the planet. Just goes to show that weebs have shit taste. So while the left side celebrates ugliness, right is ugly because family guy did it (though I'd argue pre-cancellation FG was artistic ugly like the simpsons)And finally, it's not a lost art, there's still plenty of people who can design like on the left (and I'm not talking about twitter zoomers pretending they're in the 00s with their gay OCs). It's just that they aren't being given jobs in the industry due to nepotism and idiotic corporations pushing out shit nobody reads/watches.
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Anon09/05/26, 03:43No.8033612
Every anon has their own little theory but really this image simply just illustrates how 2d rigging reduces animation into very rigid ranges of styles, it's a form of commodification allowing artists to not have to redraw every frame but simply tween between new poses selecting premade body parts like claymationIt was probably started for convenience, making it so the animation became less important and writing took over as priority for me it's kind of either good or bad, but the "corporate slop" shows still have a lot of good ones and people love to put nostalgia glasses on and forget that left was just the corporate slop of yesteryear, there was plenty of forced ugliness that people would call modern trash, corporate slop or woke or something but really it's just a different style i just lament the animation technique not the style because it's good that we move on even if people don't like it
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Anon09/05/26, 14:01No.8033818
Mine is more psychedelic than ugly.
