Of any Star vs. the Forces of Evil fan, I’m one of the most observant of its art, and apparently SvTFOE’s character design went under a very drastic change between Seasons 1 and 2. My devote follower @rwinger24 saw how I observed the obvious change in character design and recommended that I should make this comparison post. This post is also inspired by @seddm​ who is conscious of the differences in design due to the animation production companies.



Now, the art direction, originally by @joshparpan & @justinparpan, in Season 1 was very graphic with the character design, visual effects and camera movements. The location design changed not so much between Seasons 1 & 2, but the character design is a change worthy of an article.



The Season 1 character designers, @cheyennecurtisart and @lynnvwang, were new character designers at the time, and they managed to design styles that are very detailed, expressive, and cartoon-y. I say the same for its Flash animation.

The expressive details of these models resemble, to me, the designs of Wander Over Yonder among Disney’s other Mercury Filmworks projects, as well as most “Cartoon Cartoons”… and even a little of The Ren & Stimpy Show when the designs go over the top (i.e. “Brittney’s Party”). @cunch did character design for some episodes too.

The episode “Match Maker”, filled with cartoon-y expressions and poses, features use of “rubbery” arms.

Yes; a fan of the more serious episodes might think that… not to mention that “Match Maker” storyboard artist Dave Stone storyboarded & directed a lot of Teen Titans GO! episodes.

The limbs are not the only part of our characters’ bodies that appear “rubbery”. The necks were occasionally also stretchy, such as in this scene from “Diaz Family Vacation”. I can imagine hearing the sound of [whatever Hacienda Post would use on Wander Over Yonder] here if it were applicable.

One kind of graphic design is the lighting for a close-up on Marco’s eyes in “School Spirit”. Notice the color, shading and line smoothness, which involve not too many colors.

Another is Marco Diaz’s graphic depiction of nausea in “Brittney’s Party”. Many details make for this (what one could call “off-model”) gross-up:

Secondary animation for his eyes, cheeks, sweat and tears. His eyes are teary and bloodshot, with red tones around the edges of his eyes. His pupils are small, surround by lines of comic exaggeration. His nostrils are visible. There is saliva (or vomit) on his lips. The ridges of his cheeks stuffed with vomit and his chin are detailed. There’re anime lines on his forehead and wrinkles around his eyes and eyebrows. Sweat and tears launch from his face.

One can see how complex this cartoonish and disgusting depiction is when one notices the many details involved. I can hear “Danse Macabre” in my head during these scenes.

The troll designs in “Interdimensional Field Trip”, a Toon City episode, also have a Disney-esq feel to their look, reminding me of Disney’s 2D movies like Atlantis: The Lost Empire (this episode’s board artist/revisionist, Aliki Theofilopoulos, worked on the aforementioned film). These models are not animated, which may be why they are more graphic than the model designs for the Toon City episodes.

Another thing to note in the Flash-animated (“puppeted”) episodes is that, in some shots, the build appears off or broken, like in the above frame from “Diaz Family Vacation”. Most of the Flash-animated episodes (perhaps excluding “Lobster Claws”, “Fortune Cookies”, “Royal Pain” and the 2017 “Interdimensional Scavenger Hunt”) were supervised in lead by @littledigits​ (Wander Over Yonder, Hilda, Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure), who continued on Season 2 of Wander Over Yonder at Boulder Media.

As for the Season 1 episodes by Toon City, the lines are thinner, and the character designs are not exactly as wacky or graphic as those of Mercury Filmworks…

…but the art direction, colors, and designs are still very nice, in addition to the animation being slow-paced and jerky (maybe called “tight” animation) in a cute, charming way compared to Mercury Filmworks’ animation. This shot from “Interdimensional Field Trip” has rich color and lining, in addition to Star’s many poses as she begins to run back to the bus.

This shot from “Mewnipendence Day” is pretty cinematic-looking due to the color styling.

That knuckle-ly hand and wild expression of Buff Frog in “Mewnipendence Day” suggests some pretty high energy of comedic reputation; despite the stylized traditional animation.

Ultimately, the graphicness of a character design depends on the storyboard artists’ visions first. Afterward, the character designers, design clean-up artists (called “Character Clean-Up” on the show’s credits), and then the animators polish the designs up.

The very first traditionally-animated episode of Star vs. the Forces of Evil, “Mewberty”, has a number of animation mistakes (Toon City’s animation is usually different from the stylized, tight approach on SvTFOE, too). The shot of lovesick Star Butterfly saying “My turn…” has a number of mistakes:

¼ of Star’s headband is missing to her right (revealing the hair and skin) Star’s purse and its thread are missing The esophagus hole in her mouth is not colored in (is the same color as the skin inside her mouth) Her eyebrows and eyelashes are missing. Her heart-shaped pupils, probably due to cartoon physics regarding infatuation, are not colored, nor are her blue irises present (though pupils tend to shrink with no iris in general design terms, like The Powerpuff Girls Season 7-9/“reboot”).

Season 1 episodes, both Mercury Filmworks and Toon City, had some richer-looking character designs and colors, with smoother lines, as compared to Rough Draft Studios…

Rough Draft Studios’ first episode was a 1-minute scene between Star and Tom outside of Echo Creek Academy, involving 21 scenes in 60 seconds worth of very good animation, in the episode “Blood Moon Ball”.

Since Rough Draft animated on Gravity Falls first, the designs bear some slight resemblance, as bear the designs in Rough Draft’s Season 2-4 episodes. This caused the character designs to appear rather soft. The lines, of course are a bit blobby, like most digital traditional animation (usually in Korea) that bases itself on hand-drawn drawings on paper.

Aside from the designs by Cheyenne & Lynn, the great animation make this scene to stand out, although I wouldn’t call it exactly “cartoon-y”. The glow from some of the fire looks very nice.

This scene, which introduces Tom’s life coach, Brian, looks like it came straight out of Season 2! Before this episode was even released, however, Sugarcube was already animating on SvTFOE since 2014. In the past I watched not this episode as much and forgot how identical it looked to later seasons.

The color design for Star and Marco’s mouth are identical in the Rough Draft shots, which is inconsistent with the color styling of Season 1′s Mercury & Toon City episodes. This equity in color design carried throughout the series. I generally wouldn’t care, but the color stylists of Disney TVA & Mercury were more diverse, so I strongly respect that.

This is the first shot that Rough Draft Korea Co., Ltd animated for the series. As I posted this shot, I realized that drawing all of that lineless, glowy fire frame-by-frame (which is probably really tough) came out beautifully none-the-less.

The last shot Rough Draft animated looks very different compared to the next shot we see of Star and Marco. It appears as though Rough Draft had their own way of altering the model designs compared to Toon City’s.

While I prefer, in terms of traditional animation (which fits the tone of Seasons 2-4), the animation of Rough Draft, I prefer how Toon City handled the model designs somewhat more than Rough Draft’s animation, which are still more detailed (and with cleaner lines) than Rough Draft’s. It’s possible that Rough Draft paid more attention to the boards than the character design for the scene’s respective poses.

The way Brian looks is different when the animation goes back to the gentle Toon City animation. His hair’s lines are colored in Toon City’s but not Rough Draft’s. The detail is somewhat simpler on him in the Toon City shots, though.

Since Season 2, most props are traditionally animated, such as this truck from “Star on Wheels”. If more effort were put into detailing the truck’s parts moving individually, it might appear more cinematic, but 2D TV Animation is often limited by a budget smaller than that of a traditionally animated, theatrically released movie. If Mercury Filmworks–or “flash” animation in general–remained on the series, they could use 3D/CGI props and buildings for more immersive panning, such as a scene rotating 360 degrees twice in “Nothing Left to Lose” from Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure episode “Cassandra’s Revenge” (Part 2).

However, Rough Draft Studios is capable of using 3D/CGI props of their own, such as in Genndy Tartakovsky’s Star Wars: Clone Wars (shown above) and Sym-Bionic Titan. This Clone Fighter and the clones within are all a 3D/CGI build, so as to animate a more detailed prop that, when drawn frame-by-frame, may have to sacrifice details in terms of budgets for television animation.

In point of fact, Oskar’s car is a 3D/CGI prop for some scenes in “Star on Wheels”! This is more scarce in Seasons 2-4, compared to Season 1. (Camera defocuses are infrequent in Seasons 2-4, too, compared to those in Season 1.)

When taking pictures of Star, I often examine multiple poses to observe differences in the shapes of the body and poses in movement. The curl of her tongue in lip-sync, the bent positions of the arms, the curve to her rib cage, and the flow of Star’s hair and bangs are elements that I would observe.

As for Season 2-4, the character design began to evolve into designs like that of Gravity Falls, since @aniramiart was the main character designer from that point onward. On some Season 2 episodes, according to Becky Dreistadt [@beckyandfrank AKA @tinykittenteeth], creator @daronnefcy was the Character Art Director (uncredited). More important, though, is that a number of the character designers and board artists in those seasons were from Gravity Falls, as were the Rough Draft animators. Those artists and animators could be the reason for its softer, Gravity Falls-esq design in mostly Seasons 1-2.

The way that the dimples were approached was that the dimples are bigger and more frequent than they were in Season 1; rwinger24 refers to this design approach as “Aaron Springer dimples”.

At least one of Young Star’s designs in “Marco Grows a Beard”, however, resemble that of Gravity Falls, even though Cheyenne Curtis & Lynn Wang were the character designers. Since Daron Nefcy was a fan of Gravity Falls, this model design (and the designs of Seasons 2-4) was likely deliberately stylized. Compare this fairly simple design of young Star, boarded by @imtylerchen​ (this was his first episode)…

… to this more complex design of very young Star from “School Spirit”, boarded by Zeus Cervas and @aaronhammersley​.

In Season 3 and 4, Cheyenne returned for few episodes. In such episodes as “Scent of a Hoodie”, “Rest in Pudding” and “Lake House Fever” (Ramirez co-designed on the latter), Star’s designs, among other characters, look more stylized than the typical of Seasons 2-4. Sugarcube, which uses completely digital traditional animation, animated those episodes, so the lines are smoother than those on the Rough Draft Korea episodes, where the animation is drawn first on paper and then scanned in and digitally colored.

Still, the cartoon-y animation and design of the traditionally animated episodes feels not as energetic in those episodes as those animated by Mercury Filmworks and @littledigits.

The Rough Draft episodes, as I said before, have soft, blobby-looking lines (probably digital inking that isn’t as smooth or vectored). This’s normal for any Rough Draft project, particularly in close-ups, but I admire Rough Draft for animating many popular “Western” animation. Also, throughout the series, highlights in any character’s eyes (as in the above picture) are used to indicate a rather poignant emotion…

…but Season 1 is the only season (so far) where the pupils of some characters, namely Star, turn into the shape of a heart (which to me is very attractive). If one looks closely, art directors Joshua & Justin Parpan can be seen on the bottom left of this shot from “School Spirit”.

Of course, Marco’s eyes with heart-shaped pupils were more detailed in “Matchmaker” than Star’s in either “School Spirit” or “Cheer Up Star”. They were on a double-pink rainbow inside his irises, which are still in the normal circle shape, pulsating audibly (in my opinion, sounding not as graphic or organic a heart beat as what Advantage’s Michael Warner used in The Fairly OddParents).

The most cartoonish depiction of infatuation was only in Season 1; Star’s infatuation in 2 early Season 2 episodes (”Star on Wheels” and “Girls Day Out”) was still pretty cartoonish–which is kind of why I fell in love with Star in the first place–but it was approached less exaggerated in animation.

In later episodes and seasons, infatuation was depicted more realistically, at least highlights in eyes and/or a blush, probably due to the tone of the show being more serious and realistic like Gravity Falls and not so much like Mickey Mouse or Wander Over Yonder.

Marco’s depiction of infatuation in “Matchmaker” is very similar to that of Lord Hater in Wander Over Yonder episode “The Battle Royal”:

Hater’s pupils and eyes are pulsating. His eyeballs are shaded and bloodshot. His heart-shaped pupils have a spotlight and highlights. A similar heartbeat (again, not as organic sounding but still realistic) accents the pulse of his eyes and/or pupils.

In a simple comparison between shots from Season 1 and Season 4, the differences can be pretty clear:

This’s what Star and Marco looked like back in early Season 1, from the 3rd episode “Matchmaker”, animated by Mercury Filmworks and designed by Cheyenne Curtis and/or Lynn V. Wang…

and here’s what Star and Marco look like in the most recent shot, from Season 4 finale “Cleaved!”, animated by Rough Draft Korea Co. Ltd. and designed by @aniramiart and Devin Taylor.

My personal dislike for the design change is that the art direction of SvTFOE Season 1 was far more unique and graphic than that of the other seasons, and it seemed like most Disney TVA shows, which seem to stick with only traditional animation, wanted to resemble Gravity Falls–perhaps due to how popular that show was. A big reason for the change in design is probably that a lot of the Season 1 SvTFOE team left to work on The Powerpuff Girls (which, at that point, was and still is nostalgically incorrect), but SvTFOE never looked better in any other season.

As I complained before, with regard for its cartoonish design and animation, the sound design by Robert Poole and Heather Olsen felt too quiet and was not as fitting for such cartoon-y animation, wherever applicable.

Hopefully, in the future, new SvTFOE content will look and animate like that of Season 1 again, and I made many posts and tweets about my desire for such (I’ll add links to ‘em later).

I’ll update this post a little more eventually, but this covers most of the basics now.

Tweet version here.