Don’t get me wrong; there’s always been bad animation. Both animation where it isn’t drawn very well and animation where the actual quality of movement is bad. The two are connected but not identical. It’s just that it’s gotten very, very easy to make cartoons that are both cheaply and quickly and have enormous numbers of people see them, and I think that does a disservice to the medium. I think there’s something to be said for difficulty. It gives us appreciation.

I know. It sounds snobby. But my kid is very into watching “nursery rhyme” videos on YouTube, and so many of them are terrible. It’s not even just that there are only so many renditions of “Five Little Monkeys” adjusted to be about zombies or penguins or fruit I can listen to before my brains start leaking out my ears. Though goodness knows that’s part of it. There’s this one about the importance of being pretty and a teacher’s pet that fills me with a rage I cannot describe. But even then, I have to admit that the content is only part of my problem.

My problem is that, because the animation is so cheap and easy, the people making these dire little cartoons don’t seem to put any effort into it at all. I feel as though this is the case any time something is developed to make cartooning easier. And, yes, eventually, it’s taken as a tool and anyone who uses the cheap method in the lazy way is mocked for it, but it takes an awful lot of bad animation before we get the quality back as a given.

Take, for example, the addition of xerography to the process of animation. Its initial use was speeding up all those dots in 101 Dalmatians. But what it’s mostly known for is twofold—all those heavy lines and borrowed scenes in ’70s Disney movies. As time passed, it was just another technique that meant you didn’t routinely wait five years between Disney movies while the main focus of the entire studio was on producing a single film. It was a net good, even if there’s some shoddy work done with it, and I’ve no doubt that eventually, someone will take the cheap and easy access to animation software and make really great art that wouldn’t otherwise get made.

It’s just that there is so much demand for content. I get that. There are dozens of these versions of “The Finger Family” from the same company because they need the clicks to keep themselves in business. And children watching them keep the company in business, because children do not have much discernment. I just worry that my son will take animation so for granted that he will never fully appreciate that it is an astonishing concept—to him, animation will never be a string of drawings that use a trick of the brain to become movement. I know that a lot of people never quite internalize that, but good animation is a wonder. And it doesn’t matter if the drawings were made on a computer or with a pen or pencil; there’s magic in both.

When the magic is wasted, we get stiff movements and horrific faces and nightmarish cars singing about how they’re actually your fingers. I freely admit that the specific stuff I’ve been watching has a lot to do with how angry cheap animation makes me. I’d also note that it’s not inexpensive that bothers me, because I do believe that someone out there is going to do something breathtaking with inexpensive animation. But how will we find it, when it is buried this way?