Sunday, February 11, 2024

What's the Deal with Poorly-Animated Juggling?



We've seen people juggle in real life, but we've seen it done in cartoons a lot more. Which is more impressive? I've always admired people who could juggle because I could never stay with it long enough to succeed, but I know how hard it is. But in animated scenes, you see amazing feats and beautiful patterns that could never be done in the real world. Jasper Juggles took a deep dive into juggling in animation, and brings us hundreds of examples, from the ridiculously poor attempts to the sublime, in different kinds of animated cartoons, video games, and virtual reality. We who don't juggle rarely notice whether the depiction is realistic or not. The accuracy of animated juggling varies by the method used to create it, whether it's simple drawing, layered animation, rotoscoping, stop motion, or computer-controlled physics. He started this project to call out unrealistic juggling in cartoons, but came to admire the artistry of a good-looking or interesting sequence even if it could never be accomplished in real life. Jasper is collecting more examples of animated juggling all the time, and has made his research available in a spreadsheet plus a growing archive in a gallery of YouTube shorts. (via Metafilter)

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