Rotanimation

Rotanimation (often shortened as Rotan) is an early computer animation technique. It was created in 1986 by Stainton Labs, a company based in Chicago, and was marketed as a more advanced alternative to Scanimate. It was originally intended for the production of station idents, but was also used to make several animated TV shows from the late-1980s to early-2000s, especially by Argosy Media.

Rotanimation could be considered the “missing link” between Scanimate and modern computer animation programs such as Flash and ToonBoom. Cartoons made using Rotanimation have a distinct “limited-animation” look, due to the technology originally being intended for station idents.

Rotanimation is not a portmanteau of “rotation” and “animation”, as is commonly believed, but an abbreviation of “Right-on-Time Animation” - in early promotional material, it was capitalized as “RoTAnimation”.

History
Rotanimation was created by Robert Stainton, who would later work at Argosy Media as an animator. Rotanimation was used to make some companies’ station idents and vanity plates in the 1980s, but most companies preferred the simpler, and cheaper, Scanimate system.

When Stainton was hired by Argosy Media in 1991, he reportedly specifically advised the company against using his Rotanimation, as “it was meant for these doohickeys at the end of the show that tell you which company made the damn thing”. However, this was the first time the executives had ever heard of Rotanimation, and once Ellen Peck learned that it produced decent-quality animation in less time than “traditional” animation techniques, she mandated that it be used for her upcoming TV show, known as The Aaron Show.

Stainton was initially displeased by Peck’s decision, but by the time the show was ready to premiere in 1993, his heart warmed to the “charming” animation techniques. By 1995, he had started trying to sell it to companies like DiC, Hanna-Barbera, and Nelvana. However, none of them wanted to use an animation technique which, by that point, had become associated with rival Argosy.

In 1998, Stainton Labs was acquired outright by Argosy Media. The Aaron Show continued to use Rotanimation up to its last episode in 2006. Argosy would later move on to other, more advanced, software; one of the programs used by Argosy today, OpenRotan, is an open-source program, created in the early-2000s by Argosy fans to simulate the ”quirks” of Rotanimation.

Technical specifications
Rotanimation required a special Unix box to draw cels, in a pixelated graphic style similar to Atari 2600 or NES games or European teletext systems, which were later “upscaled” into smooth images, and overlaid on each other using the Rotanimation machine. To render human, anthropomorphic, or animal characters, each body part was required to be drawn as a separate cel; to make the process easier, cels were allowed to be grouped, and cels and groups could be re-used between “projects”. Each cel was limited to 6 colours (7 colours if transparency wasn’t enabled for a cel). Backgrounds (drawn using a separate Unix box) were limited to a maximum of 10 colours, but transparent layers could be used to add more details or objects to a background, with the downside of the transparency costing a colour slot (therefore, transparent background layers were limited to 9 colours). Like Scanimate, Rotanimation allows for several effects to be applied to cels and groups, and uses the NTSC upper limits of 60fps, rather than the “traditional” 24fps.

The Rotanimation machine was often sold together with a Vidifont machine, originally created by CBS for the 1968 election, and licensed out to Stainton Labs in 1984. Vidifont was an early character generator. Later versions, such as these used by Argosy, came with a more advanced version, Vidifont-MK2, which could be used to generate simple opening and closing credits, sometimes against an animated (or static) background.

Legacy
Rotanimation inspired more advanced computer animation systems, such as Flash and Toon Boom. Due to Argosy’s shows having a quite large fanbase, several programs have been made to simulate (and sometimes extend) some of the limits of Rotanimation, such as OpenRotan, which is heavily-customizable and allows colour limits to be changed for each “project”.