Style bake off / 002

Three crews, one handshake

Same action in all three: the octopus and the detective meet centre stage and shake. Same brief, same 12 fps, same yellow disc. What differs is whether the drawings actually change shape between frames, which is the whole difference between a cartoon and a puppet. Scrub each one. The verdicts below are mine and they are not diplomatic.

All three Step frame by frame to judge honestly

Classic Rubber-Hose

READS AS A CARTOON

1930s inkwell slapstick. Noodle limbs, no joints, a world made entirely of rubber.

01/30

SPEED 1.00x

Drawings: 30
Frame rate: 12 fps
Loop: 2.50s
Weight: 964 KB

VERDICT

The only one of the three that survives a frame-by-frame flip: the octopus swings from squashed wide to stretched tall and back while holding its volume, the hat leaves her head on impact, and no two drawings share a silhouette.

Frame-level notes

Measured squash and stretch, not claimed. The octopus body box goes from 148 wide by 156 tall on the f06 skid to 111 wide by 206 tall on the f17 rebound. That is an aspect ratio swing of 1.76 to 1, and its ink area stays inside 6 percent the whole way, which means the volume is conserved. That is the textbook definition and it is the only entry that does it.
The gag lands. The hat launches on f17, tumbles through f18 to f23, lands squashed wide on f24, bounces once, and seats on f26. Secondary action arriving after the body has already stopped is the exact thing that separates animation from movement.
Faces carry it. Eyes blow out on impact and the pupils shrink to dots. It is the only entry where you can read intent off a single still, which matters enormously if these end up as small UI states.
Weakest drawing is f13. The reaching tentacle is a thin squiggle crossing the mantle and it reads as noise rather than a limb. It flashes past at 12 fps but it is the one frame that would fail a poster crop, and it is the drawing to redo first.

Modern Flat-Motion

READS AS PUPPETRY

Contemporary vector brand animation. Clean silhouettes, restrained easing, agency polish.

01/30

SPEED 1.00x

Drawings: 30
Frame rate: 12 fps
Loop: 2.50s
Weight: 765 KB

VERDICT

Beautifully drawn and nearly inert: the bodies hold the same proportions all the way through, the detective is a paper doll with one hinged arm, and the contact frame does not react at all, so it reads as tasteful motion graphics rather than a cartoon.

Frame-level notes

The bodies barely deform, and the numbers say so. Across the whole shot the octopus box moves 5 percent in width and 7 percent in height, and almost all of that is tentacle tips curling rather than the body itself. Rubber-hose swings 1.76 to 1 on the same measure. This is roughly a fifth of the deformation for the same thirty drawings.
Frames 03 through 13 are effectively one drawing. Step them one at a time: the mantle outline holds, the coat holds, and only the tentacle tips curl while the arm rotates about a shoulder pin. Whatever the build script does internally, on screen that is a rig.
The contact frame does not react. f15 draws a thin impact ring between the two hands, then f16 and f17 carry on with the same bodies. No squash, no recoil, no overshoot. The ring is a sticker placed over a pose that did not move.
No faces at all. Both characters are solid fills with no eyes, so there is nothing to read on a single frame and no moment of recognition when they meet. Both other entries give you eyes, and both are better for it.
It is genuinely the most elegant still of the three, and at 48 pixels it would still look expensive. If the brief were a logo animation this wins easily. The brief was a cartoon.

Noir Cartoon

CARTOON ONLY AT THE END

Detective-picture staging. Hard raking light, long cast shadows, one white flash on contact.

01/32

SPEED 1.00x

Drawings: 32
Frame rate: 12 fps
Loop: 2.67s
Weight: 1008 KB

VERDICT

Best staging and the single best drawing in the bake off, but the acting is crammed into about four drawings at the end while twenty are spent getting the two of them into position, so it buys rubber-hose quality at rubber-hose prices and only for the last third.

Frame-level notes

f21 is the best drawing anyone delivered. The entire disc inverts to white for exactly one frame on contact. That is a real theatrical cartoon device, it costs one drawing, and it is worth stealing whichever style wins.
The middle of the approach is nearly a hold. Between f14 and f17 only about 2 percent of the frame changes per step, the flattest stretch anywhere in the bake off, and there is no dramatic reason for the pause. It reads as the animation running out of ideas rather than holding for effect.
It spends its budget in the wrong places. Six drawings on a cold open tentacle before both characters are even on stage, fourteen more on the walk, and only f19 through f23 on the meeting itself. That is four drawings of cartoon inside a thirty-two drawing shot.
When it does act it is excellent. f19 crouches into anticipation, f20 lunges with the coat trailing two frames behind the body, f21 flashes white, f22 settles with real weight. The coat is the best piece of drawing in the bake off after the flash.
One correction against myself. On the first flip I read the characters as shrinking through the approach, which would have been a staging bug. Measured, they do not: the detective holds between 357 and 375 pixels tall while the disc stays at a constant 523 wide. The impression came from her pose and her flaring coat, not from a scale error. Flagging it because you will probably see the same illusion.

What each one costs to finish

You are picking a production path, not a look. A full set of six states means authoring every drawing again, six times over. None of these styles can be tweened cheaply afterwards, because in all three the frames are baked geometry rather than a rig you can re-pose. Here is the honest arithmetic.

Style	Drawings per state	Six states	Inline weight	Why
Classic Rubber-Hose	26 to 34	160 to 200	5.5 to 6.5 MB	Every drawing is unique by construction. Nothing carries over between states, so the sixth state costs the same as the first.
Modern Flat-Motion	14 to 20	90 to 120	2.5 to 3.0 MB	The identical silhouettes that make it inert also make it cheap. One body library, six arm and tentacle passes over it.
Noir Cartoon	28 to 36	170 to 215	5.5 to 7.0 MB	Same per-state count as rubber-hose plus a re-derived light shaft and cast shadow on every single drawing.

The trade in one line: flat-motion is roughly half the drawings and half the bytes, and the reason it is cheap is exactly the reason it failed the flip test. Its silhouettes repeat, so the work repeats. Rubber-hose costs double because every drawing is genuinely new, which is the same fact stated as a bill. Noir costs rubber-hose money and delivers rubber-hose quality in only about four of its thirty-two drawings, so it is the worst value of the three as delivered, even though it contains the single best frame.

One thing all three share: each is staged as a shot with an entrance, so the loop point pops. The last drawing cuts straight back to a near empty stage, and it is the single biggest jump in all three films. For a six-state set you want each state to loop invisibly, which means dropping the entrances entirely and ending on a settle that returns to the opening pose. Budget three to five extra drawings per state for that, in whichever style you pick.

How these were judged: every frame was rendered to PNG and flipped by hand, then all three pages were loaded in Chromium and sampled across the loop. Where a claim above is about shape it was also measured: character bounding boxes and ink area per frame, and per-frame pixel delta to find the holds. One of my first impressions did not survive that check and has been corrected in the noir notes rather than quietly dropped.

Recommendation

Build the full set in

Classic Rubber-Hose

Build it in rubber-hose, because it is the only entry of the three where the drawings deform, and deformation is not a stylistic flourish here, it is the entire difference between a character acting and a shape being relocated.

Flat-motion has already shown you what the cheap path buys: thirty immaculate drawings of a logo holding still, with no faces, no anticipation, and an impact ring stuck over a pose that does not react, and noir spends fourteen drawings walking before it remembers to animate.

Yes rubber-hose costs roughly twice what flat-motion costs across six states, but you are buying the only crew that demonstrated it can hit a squash frame, a stretch frame, and a piece of secondary action that arrives late, and that discipline is what will still be legible at 48 pixels in a product UI.

One thing to steal Take noir's frame 21 with you. Inverting the whole disc to white for exactly one frame on contact is the cheapest piece of real cartooning in the entire bake off, it costs one drawing, and it will work just as well inside rubber-hose.