Fizzy the "Alicorn" - Animation Error

[Rainbowjuice]

You know I now feel obliged to customise a winged unicorn Fizzy.
DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!? *flails*

[Al-1701]

Wind Whistler was also briefly an alicorn in Crunch the Rockdog.

This was an artifact of the time and animation methods.  They would send the animation from Asia to North America for checking.  Because constant revisions were expensive and time consuming, they couldn't fix all the errors before calling it a finished product.  Remember the old Transformers cartoon and how they could never keep Starscream, Thundercracker, and Sky Warp straight?

[Malicieuse]

Oh dear... I gotta admit, I have mixed feelings towards animation errors, specifically when it comes to those cartoons based on Hasbro's toylines: to me they pretty much range from being amusing and silly to being increadibly jarring, to the point where you just wanna smack the animators on the back of their heads for how lazy slackers (this especially applies to all the animators at AKOM).

Still, this one looks pretty awesome, though it's a pity that they made her run with other earth ponies and unicorns instead of making her fly alongside Surprise.

Also, this makes me want to rewatch the original cartoon just to check what other animation errors I can find...

Well, some of those animators were probably paid very little. XP They might have been working a lot with little time (to fix things) and little pay. It seems Hasbro just got a bit cheap with these cartoons or wanted to see them produced very fast.
I have seen so many mistakes that should have been caught when the people at Hasbro reviewed them. Like a background that kept moving after the characters had stopped walking.

[hathorcat]

I thought the quality was pretty good for the 80's. Especially considering the difference in how people animated then vs now.

So true...as others have said for the time and the techniques mistakes are not just common but pretty expected - these were hardly produced on Disney budgets.

But all that being said it doesn't stop it being worth the odd little giggle! I do love how Cupcake is running on air at one point.

[Prismatic]

I love the 80s cartoons, it's really just funny spotting all the random stuff I didn't get to catch as a kid  

[NoDivision]

This was common in the 80's because cartoons would be developed by a studio here in America and then they would send the information and scene layouts to a Korean animation studio (where they worked long hours and were paid pennies per hour, much cheaper than you would have to pay an American animator) for the actual animation to be drawn.

Not just in the 80s. That's still common practice for a lot of studios.

[LadyMoondancer]

I think the animation was typical for the time period, the way things were animated then, and the budget they probably had.

I cannot in all honesty say the animation was "good", though, aside from the two specials.  "Typical" is not the same as "good."

Now, Rescue at Midnight Castle, that was superb.  It's a rare and beautiful gem considering the quality of most 80s animation.  I had the privilege of talking to one of the story-boarders for RaMC (via e-mail) and he said they used the very latest animation techniques available at the time for scenes like Firefly's "flying through the camera" effect when she first takes Megan to Dream Castle and that they very purposefully made an abrupt change in tone from the cheerful, innocent introduction to the terrifying invasion of the dragons.

[Al-1701]

That's very interesting.  It's too bad they couldn't have maintained that style and quality.  A show towards the bottom the priority list needing to churn out enough episodes to air five a day can only do so much.

[Akemi-chan]

oMG, if it were ever made into a cell I'd pay my left leg for it!!!

[keylimepony]

Why don't people like the term alicorn?

[DazzleKitty]

There were so many strange animation errors in the original MLP cartoon! I think that's part of it's charm, even if I wasn't all that crazy about it myself. Fizzy was by far my favorite pony from that show. She's just got a cute personality.

[TwistedWindSox]

Why don't people like the term alicorn?

Because the term technically means the substance that a unicorn's horn is made from, I think. I don't know how it went from that to meaning a pegasus/unicorn cross, but oh well.

I love seeing the animation errors from the 80's cartoon, although I'd probably never manage to spot them on my own.

[Ivy]

Why don't people like the term alicorn?

Because the term technically means the substance that a unicorn's horn is made from, I think. I don't know how it went from that to meaning a pegasus/unicorn cross, but oh well.

Lol. ala - is latin for wing. Corn is latin for horn. - that's where alicorn came from. As for making the term popular in that usage you can blame Piers Anthony.

[rtattles]

I want a Princess Fizzy-lestia!

[Moonracer]

Oh dear... I gotta admit, I have mixed feelings towards animation errors, specifically when it comes to those cartoons based on Hasbro's toylines: to me they pretty much range from being amusing and silly to being increadibly jarring, to the point where you just wanna smack the animators on the back of their heads for how lazy slackers (this especially applies to all the animators at AKOM).

Still, this one looks pretty awesome, though it's a pity that they made her run with other earth ponies and unicorns instead of making her fly alongside Surprise.

Also, this makes me want to rewatch the original cartoon just to check what other animation errors I can find...

Well, some of those animators were probably paid very little. XP They might have been working a lot with little time (to fix things) and little pay. It seems Hasbro just got a bit cheap with these cartoons or wanted to see them produced very fast.
I have seen so many mistakes that should have been caught when the people at Hasbro reviewed them. Like a background that kept moving after the characters had stopped walking.

Well, this may be true to some extent... after all Hasbro's intent was to have those cartoons made super cheap and super fast so the episode would come exactly at the same time the new wave of toys hit the shelves.

But then again, some of the studios, even when paid greater amount of money, still managed to produce incredibly low-quality, shoddy work filled with multiple animation errors. AKOM in particular is guilty of this. Among the animation experts and fans alike they've been known for notoriously providing crappy animation work.

I read somewhere that Warner Brothers broke their contract with AKOM, during the production of "Batman: The Animated Series", because most of the episodes produced by them had really bad, inconsistent animation work.