Limited animation is a process of making animated cartoons that does not follow a "realistic" approach. "Limited" animation creates an image that uses abstract art, symbolism, and limited movement to create the same effect, but at a much lower production cost. This style of animation depends more upon suspension of disbelief to tell a story; the story exists more in the viewer's imagination. It also encourages the animators to indulge in artistic styles that are not necessarily bound to the limits of the real world. The result is a new artistic style that could not have developed if animation was solely devoted to producing simulations of reality.

The process of limited animation mainly aims at reducing the overall number of drawings. Film is projected at 24 frames per second (fps), but no animation studio would ever produce that many drawings. For movements in normal speed, most animation in general is done "on twos", meaning 12 drawings per second are recorded in a way that each drawing is on two frames of film. Faster movements may demand animation "on ones", while characters which do not move may be done with a single drawing (a "hold") for a certain amount of time. Limited animation mainly reduces the number of inbetweens, the drawings between the keyframes which define a movement, thus reducing the smoothness of a movement.

The cost-cutting techniques used to mass-produce cartoons on a low budget included:

• cells and sequences of cells were re-used over and over again -- animators only had to draw a character walking one time.
• characters are split up into different levels: only portions of a character, such as the mouth or an arm, would be animated on top of a static cel.
• clever choice of camera angles and editing
• use of camera techniques such as panning to suggest movement
• cell reversal (simply using a mirror image of the cell to represent the opposite angle). Many cartoon characters are drawn symmetrically to expedite this technique.
• the visual elements were made subsidiary to audio elements, so that verbal humor and voice talent became more important factors for success ("talking heads").

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