Rubber Hose Limbs: Difference between revisions

This'''Rubber Hose Limbs''' is when a cartoon character moves without any visible elbows or knees, but his limbs aren't stiff, but rather bendy like rubber hoses. For examples, see pretty much any black-and-white cartoon. In cartoons made before [[The Golden Age of Animation|1930]] or so, this was an intentional style, started by [[Felix the Cat]] animator [[Otto Messmer]] and [[Bill Nolan]], which was meant to prevent the motion of the limbs in question from looking like they were drawn through a strobe light and flickering - the idea was that if you didn't draw joints, you could make absolutely sure that the limbs in one frame overlapped with where the frames were in the last frame. Higher frame rates, the development of [[The Twelve Principles of Animation|Squash And Stretch]], and an awareness of camera blur reduced the need for this as time went on, and cartoon characters all of a sudden had ''joints''. These days, this is a deliberate decision on the part of the animator, probably to ''creep you out'' ... but early on, it was just how things were done.

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Happens quite a bit in ''[[Yotsubato|Yotsuba&!]]''.