I'm struggling to find the right words for this, but I've been watching Superman (1996) and Justice League (2001) and it's fucking insane to me how they're like night and day in terms of animation quality.

In Superman, everyone is beautiful, even the nothing side characters.

In Justice League, it's not enough that all the background characters and uglier, they even made Superman's face uglier. It's almost like they thought it was very important to... what? Age him up 5 years? When I was much younger, I vaguely remember Superman showing up in the futuristic Batman Beyond era (not sure what actual show it was an episode of, since I know Justice League and maybe others had its share of time travel episodes to that era), not through time travel, but just by continuing to exist without aging.

Drawing quality is different from animation quality, and both of those things are different from color quality, but they all just seem so much worse in Justice League.

AND IT'S A FUCKING FIVE YEAR DIFFERENCE.

Justice League probably isn't as bad as Young Justice, but it's incredible how early we can already see the rot of capeshit.

Superman is so relentlessly beautiful and well animated in even the most banal and worthless filler episodes, but Justice League couldn't pull it together and WOW me with it's first episode.

Does anyone know any actual DC business history here? One day did Warner Brothers look at their profit margins, and get some computers and were sufficiently impressed, they fired off 90% of their animation staff and hired a bunch of overworked teenagers to replace them or something?

What in the fuck happened IN FIVE YEARS?

Even the soundtrack. Superman TAS is so good it's actually displaced the John Williams score in my mind, I find it difficult to remember how it goes, and when I try to hum it, I just get derailed into humming Superman TAS's theme.

Justice League sounds like a discount royalty free ripoff of the National Anthem.(cont'd)