Web Animation

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Web Animation is simply animation on the World Wide Web. Actual shows are relatively uncommon compared to Web Comics, but the medium itself is pervasive in the form of commercial advertising.

Aside from Machinima and Fanime, Web cartoons are generally in Flash, as is some advertising. Animated GIFs are even easier to make and don't require special plug-ins, so they're used by much web advertising and by many forum avatars. However, some such advertising uses dynamic HTML, which just changes the position of an image on a webpage. Animated SVG (scalable vector graphics) is a new technology still in development.

The content of Web Animation often varies greatly from animation seen on television. Media classifications usually aren't a problem and the length of the work can be anything. In addition, Web Animation is also available worldwide.

Two good places to start looking for web animations are Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep, which are also two of the oldest sites to host Flash animations on the web (Newgrounds claims even to be the first site with an automated portal submission system). Note that these sites (Newgrounds in particular) have animations that are extremely NSFW.

A fairly new and rare form of (already new) Web Animation is commercial, professionally-made web shows. It's currently one of the newest medium of New Media. The earliest commercial web show has barely aged for one decade. As of this time, only animation studios from Japan have been investing in this business model, finding various distribution channels in many streaming and video networks.

Most of the tropes used in Web Animation are from Western Animation or Anime. However, there are some others that are specific to Web Animation.