The Impressive Growth of Nick Animation CGI Department
The first ever computer animated show for Nickelodeon was The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, based on the 2001 movie. However, as you're aware, it was done at a studio called DNA Studios, which was located at Texas rather than Burbank. Nick won't have another of these shows until Tak and the Power of Juju, which is actually their first CGI animated show done in-house. Since then, they have mostly done CGI cartoons that are based on existing properties, and only two of them are original. In this journal, I will show you how far they came since 2007.
It was fitting that their first in-house computer animated show was based on a video game, and they had quite the rough start. Tak and the Power of Juju did not age well visually and it's the worst looking CGI Nicktoon in my opinion. Even Jimmy Neutron's CGI was better, despite also being dated. Since then, Nick’s computer animation has looked so much better and more stylized. I personally think the animation community don't give them enough credit as they automatically think all computer animation is terrible. This journal is going to contain a lot of praising, so let's hope my opinions will change your mind. As I was saying, Tak's tv budget don't do the show justice and instead it looks like I was playing a PlayStation 2 game (And the PS2 graphics are often used as an insult for bad CGI, but I'm not insulting, because this was the 2000s, when it was the normal look). Watching the end credits to see who works on the show blew my mind because some of these people are still working with Nick to this day. Tak show consists of newcomers at the time so it’s understandable they were trying to get the hang of it. By the time they got to their next couple CGI shows, they clearly improved (even though one of them is based on a Dreamworks Animation production). Fanboy & Chum Chum is when the CGI department became truly talented. Every single show since then has never looked more beautiful than the next, even the widely disliked shows like Planet Sheen. Though, like Disney and Pixar and other companies that heavily use computer animation, they stay stagnant for a while. TMNT 2012 was the only one that looked like its own thing due to comics influences. By the time we get to the Ramsey Naito era, CGI animated Nicktoons made a comeback. (If you don’t count preschool shows since they still use it as opposed to 2D animation)
This was the computer animation for Nick during the late 2000s and early 2010s
And this is a list of the earliest computer animation department that has worked on the company over the years. You can tell they came a long way.
And this is the computer animation for Nick nowadays:
