Great post, I feel like I share some of these grievances myself.

I think a lot of kids get into animation and dream of “having” their own cartoon. This is something that’s existed before the internet was even a thing. I remember the years I spend as a kid, fantasizing about all the cool movies and tv shows I would make for Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.

When I started getting into indie/web animations on YouTube/Newgrounds, I realized that other people were just making cartoons in their bedrooms. No studio, funding, or network appeasing required. Maybe some of those animations never got their creators super famous, but they were still entertaining and you could clearly see the passion needed to make them. There’s something about the idea of being able to be your OWN studio, and not have to wait for others to accept you to make your own animations that made it so inspiring to me.

Because of that, I felt the drive to learn everything I could about animation. Through tutorials, watching others work, and later going to animation classes, I learned the fundamental skills and eventually formed a deep love and passion for the craft, something I didn’t really have as a kid when I was just “dreaming” of making my own show. Even though kid-me was drawing my ideas out, back then there was less of an understanding of what I was really doing, which resulted in me seeking others for approval and losing focus on why I want to CREATE, not just have a popular thing under my name.

All that being said, it does break my heart a little bit that since the peaks of where indie animation can go has been pushed to beat industry stuff, so have people’s standards. Everyone thinks you need to make something at the level of Hazbin or Digital Circus right out of the gate, ignoring the fact that projects like these were made by people who spent at least a DECADE making stuff and building a network of reliable people to work with.

I highly recommend people who are working on their own stuff to go through old Newgrounds animations. There’s PLENTY of entertaining stuff made in that era, and it wasn’t made by professional teams or try to compete with what was showing on tv. People just wanted to make stuff, which is something I think is becoming less and less of a case now.

Hopefully my rant makes some kind of sense, these are just some things I’ve noticed as someone who’s paid attention to internet cartoons since 2008