Animated Paintings

Call me an uncultured swine, but I don't really care for animated paintings. I mean I do think it's a cool thing to do stylistically, but only for short periods of time. I don't particularly want to watch more than ten minutes of it.

I'm not sure why. It may just be that I'm used to cartoons that look more like moving pen drawings with solid colors between the lines. It's what I see all the time, so it's how I feel good animation should look. The moving-paintings style seems to be relegated mostly to short films which I pay little attention to.

Or maybe I don't like animated paintings because they tend to look a bit blurrier than I like. The image never feels crisp. While I can almost always tell what I'm looking at pretty easily, I'm mildly annoyed by the fact that I can't see it in HD. It's harder to see fine details. (This could have more to do with what I'm used to than with objective blurriness.) "Pen-drawing-animation" has dark outlines to show where a body ends and can simulate just about every detail except texture. While the backgrounds are often painted, they still tend to look crisper than the backgrounds in some of the films we watched. And the characters' outlines make them stand out against the painted backgrounds. I like Song of the Sea, which looks like a painting, because the characters have the dark outlines I've come to expect and the backgrounds still look crisp.

Now I am open-minded enough to see that blurriness sometimes works. It obviously helps in Hedgehog in the Fog, making the viewer almost as disoriented as the titular character. But I don't like being disoriented, so I want it to be over soon.

I'm not by any means trying to discourage animators from using different styles. I'm just wondering why some of the alleged best films in the world are so not-my-thing.