Understanding: The TV Age of Animation

As the Golden Age came to an end the Television age began to rise with cinemas wanting to run double bills and matinees to compete with TV. With TV becoming more popular by the minute, broadcasters were demanding large quantities of programming on low budgets, which proved to be extremely difficult within animation and demanded some changes to be made to previous methods.

This lead to animation studios recycling things such as walk cycles and reusing backgrounds, which slowly lead to the quality of animations decreasing dramatically and feature animations being replaced by much cheaper mass produced animations by companies such as Hanna-Barbera.

There were many short animations that were created in mass for TV use such as The Flintstones, a Hanna-Barbera production. programmes like this were extremely popular and were watched by many throughout it's production and would later be turned into live action film.

The Flintstones

During this period, due to time restrictions and budget limits animation found itself returning to a more experimental form and being used in combination with other methods such as live film for example, Ray Harryhausen's Jason and The Argonauts, is notably recognised for its use of stop motion creatures, in particular its skeleton characters. during this period other stop motion animations were created that had a very big impact on society and the animation world. For example, during this period Jiri Trnka created a masterpiece, The Hand, which demonstrated the repression of the Czech Republic in 1965. 

Also throughout this period, the UK were creating more animations in the form of stop motion that were very successful and were popular among families and children throughout the TV age. During this period the production of Star Wars had also begun and sadly, Walt Disney died in 1966. Towards the end of the TV age people had also begun to experiment with digital animation for example, Roger Mainwood's Autobahn music video. 

Towards the ed of the TV age digital animation was becoming something that was being explored more.