>>391651042
>Budget != product quality in animation.
Wasn't my argument.
>Animation was recognized as a low return investment and investors were less interested in throwing money at it than now.
Ironically that was my argument, even though I wrote it with the focus on man hours and availabe tools/workflow instead of what you wrote.

Because the whole process took more man hours. To get ANY budget whatsoever you had to be 100% certain that you will get money in return. Which was hard in the 80s, because of the insane amount of work (eg. because of the things that are readily available now on and mid-range PC, which I mentioned).

So yes, in the 80s it was harder to do ainme, because budget and time was more strict than nowadays. Ergo only things that were in the pre-pre-production already considered solid were even greenlit.