Thick Line Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Clearly not a lineart to be trifled with.

Animation style characterized by visible heavy black borders around characters and objects. This style began being used by a few animation companies in the early 1950s (mostly UPA, of Gerald McBoing-Boing and Mr. Magoo fame), and became dominant in American TV animation during the 60's and 70's, eclipsing the more naturalistic style used in most animation during earlier decades. It was phased out during the early 80s, when more naturalistic styles again became dominant in American animation, but then became the standard yet again (on television at least) during the late 90s, and so it remains to this day. Shows animated in Flash tend to look good in this style.

This is sometimes considered to be among the most defining traits of early 21st-Century American animation, mostly when contrasted with the similar "Anime=big eyes" notion to emphasize the differences between U.S. and Japanese animation.

Compare and contrast Limited Animation, Web Animation, Super-Deformed.

Examples of Thick Line Animation include:

Played straight

Anime and Manga

Film

Web Animation

Western Animation

Video Games

Inversions

Advertising

  • Esurance insurance commercials.

Web Comics

  • Ditto for later installments of the web comic Mac Hall.
  • Faye's flashbacks in Questionable Content.
  • The entire run of Garanos.
  • Cast of Homestuck is normally represented by chibi-like "sprites" with outline, but lose it and gain normal human proportions when in Hero Mode.

Western Animation

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