But our gameplay is at 60 frames per second. That totally makes sense, and that’s why we purposely run all of the animation at 24 frames per second. It starts to look like you and your friends got together and made a movie in your backyard with your home video camera. As you approach the higher frame rates and it looks closer to real life, in our minds it takes away that magic. It feels more cinematic to watch 24 frames per second, like the picture’s removed from the world. We’re also of the belief that 24 frames per second adds to the surrealism and the fantasy of movies. It’s a little like the historical cinematic 24 frames per second ceiling, where that’s how slow you could go before the audio started to stutter, all to save money on the cost of film. That’s the heyday of having way too much money for hand-drawn projects. I always find it funny when I think that the art director on The Little Mermaid demanded that all of the bubbles had to be hand-drawn, and they didn’t use digital techniques to replicate them. It was only in later Disney years that they didn’t reuse as many things. The reason they had a ton of loops was just as you said, budget and time. But it just happens to coincide that the style of retro game that we want and 1930s cartoons, the looping lends itself beautifully and fits the era perfectly. Almost every game has looping animation, and modern games try to hide it by having multiple paths to choose different loops and animations, so it seems much more natural. We didn’t 100% think of looping when we began preproduction on visuals, but as we studied the cartoons, we saw it kind of synced up with how video games work. Was it a budgetary thing? I notice you’re doing it in Cuphead, where it’s synchronized with the music and the gameplay. There’s a lot of sequence looping in these older animated shorts. Like in Bimbo’s Initiation, where there’s a knife coming out of the wall and suddenly it has a mouth and teeth… Having eyes and mouths on almost every object doesn’t help. Why would a character go from super happy to just insane and showing his gums like a wild dog because he wants a piece of candy? It’s only for two or three seconds, and then it cuts back to “Oh, the guy’s 100% normal.” It almost has a David Lynch vibe to the whole idea and flow of the animation of the time, and you can’t quite put your finger on why it’s disturbing, but it’s all the small pieces coming together to give it that feel. But then when you watch it, it doesn’t make sense, it actually reads wrong. So if they felt like this character should do something funny with his face and that was 100% out of character, they did it. We’ve pondered that for a while, like why are so many ‘30s cartoons so creepy? And it probably has to do with the fact that the animators were free to do whatever they wanted. There’s something creepier and more subversive about the surrealism of the sort of 1930s animation you’re channeling in Cuphead. Sleeping Beauty and all the Disney stuff scared me as a kid, but in a way that was comprehensible. Mickey Mania’s probably the only true attempt, but the technology wasn’t there, so as cool as it was, it wasn’t an exact replica of what the ‘30s had. It’s going to be amazing when someone tries to do a cartoon game like the ’30s style. So that had been in the back of our minds, and even as we saw the technology change in gaming, we thought hey, eventually people are going to be doing cartoon games. And since a lot of stuff is, I don’t want to say outside of the box, but very crazy, we found that more interesting than a perfectly set plot of “bad guy has captured this crystal, and now you must watch the good guy get the crystal.” All the old ‘30s cartoons had really cracked out ideas that were fun to watch.Įven in our friends group growing up, they always said “Hey, these ‘30s cartoons are kind of funny, but we like this and this.” We always stood out as the weirdos who liked watching the ‘30s cartoons. We just had always gravitated towards it, and I think it’s because the 1930s cartoons are very unique. So when we wanted cartoons, it was always perfectly acceptable to go rent or buy a bunch of Silly Symphonies cartoons, or any of the early Betty Boop, as opposed to the typical He-Man or any of the popular cartoons at the time. It’s just perfect coincidence that our parents probably both believed that the cartoons they grew up with were the best.
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