Reader Question What Is Cutout Animation

Ray writes:

"Hey, so, I was wondering, what do you call the kind of animation they do on South Park? It's not like Disney, is it, where they draw all the pages and everything? It looks different, I was wondering what it was because it's kind of cool."

Well, technically everything South Park does is mostly 3D animation at this point, but the style remains consistent with the early days when the show first started - and they used a technique called cutout animation to produce and animate everything, only to later duplicate that style first in digital 2D and then in 2D-rendered 3D.