Cartoons & animation
From 1930s theatrical shorts to the shows on now.
About cartoons & animation shirts
Animated characters are designed to be simplified. A character who has to be redrawn thousands of times, by many hands, needs a shape that survives being copied quickly — and that is exactly the property that makes a good screen print. Theatrical shorts, Saturday-morning television and modern feature animation all arrive at the same place from different directions: a few bold shapes, a small number of flat colours, and a silhouette you can read across a room.
Computer-animated characters are the exception, and rights holders deal with it by issuing style guides with approved flat artwork for licensees to print. That is why a shirt of a Pixar or Illumination character often looks more like a drawing than like the film. The flattening is deliberate, and a listing that tries to reproduce the soft rendered look directly usually prints muddy.
What to look for
- Flat-colour designs with a heavy outline hold up best in the wash and at small sizes.
- For a rendered CG character, prefer the flat style-guide artwork over a screenshot-style print.
- Vintage title cards and model-sheet designs are made for adults who grew up with the show, and usually come in adult sizes only.
- Classic theatrical characters have decades of approved artwork, so the same character can look very different from one listing to the next. Check the picture, not just the name.