Cel Shading: the Unsung Hero of Animation?

Left: a computer graphics render with soft shadows. Right: a cel shader (also known as a toon shader) and border detection. This creates hard edged shadows with lines drawn around the model. Illustration from Hash Animation Master manual.

This is a guest post by Olivia Lennox.

As you’ll well know, there are far more animation techniques out there than the average movie-goer or TV watcher knows about. You can’t blame them for only really knowing about stop-motion animation, CGI animation, and what goes into shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy. These techniques are what ‘make it big’, and what can be seen on screens, both big and small, all over the world. But there are plenty of other forms of animation that don’t get the credit they deserve.

Take cel shading for example. This lends animation a ‘cartoony’ look which can be very effective in certain media. This form of animation has actually only been adopted by a handful of film and television productions; however it has been used extensively in video games. Perhaps the reason for this is that cel shading is easier on the graphics processor, so games can look great even on less powerful hardware. When cel shaded animation does make its way into film and television, it’s usually used conservatively, but there are exceptions as we’ll see. There’s an important distinction to make before we get into the cel shaded world: whilst there are plenty of techniques that use block colours, cel shading refers specifically to the cartoony rendering of light and shadow.

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Dale Hemenway then and now

Dale Hemenway wrote an article in Animator number 24 telling how some of his cartoon sequences came to be shown on the BBC programme ‘Hartbeat’. The programme was hosted by Tony Hart, who had a unique approach to art. He featured many different styles of animation produced by young, freelance or independent animators. Dale wrote … Read more

Paul Thomas of Tiger Trax animation then and now

Paul Thomas was interviewed in Animator Issue number 11 in 1984. At the time he was running the Tiger Trax animation studio, situated in a block of flats just off the Old Kent Road.

Paul began his animation career at Bob Godfrey’s studio and at the time of the interview, was doing sequences for Tony Hart’s BBC TV programme “Take Hart” and design work for the Kate Bush fan club magazine. He also contributed a regular cartoon strip to Animator mag under the pen name of Dr Scratch, featuring a rather droll dog called Scratch.

Paul recently discovered the Animator mag web site whilst searching the Internet and dropped me an email with his latest news.

He has left the concrete jungle of London for the green and pleasant land of Salisbury, Wiltshire. Paul is now the director and writer for a children’s puppet performance group called Tin Harlequin. He told me that forming the group “was a dream come true”.