Character and Narrative - Aesthetics

Traditional animation has possibly the most scope of all animation techniques in terms of aesthetics. Essentially the term "traditional animation" covers all forms of drawn or painted animation, and is therefore open to any style or aesthetic that can be physically produced in a 2D format and photographed. This can range from very simple black and white stick cartoons like the work of Don Hertzfeldt, to the incredible oil-painted production of Loving Vincent in the style of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. Traditional animation might be the most versatile in terms of aesthetics, and compared to the last 25 years or so of mainstream 3D animation the range of different art styles in traditional animation is vast.
When you look through the history of traditional animation the aesthetics are often linked closely to a social or artistic movement of the time. The very early commercially produced animations such as Flesicher Studio's PopEye the Sailor and Betty Boop films strongly resembled, and were often based on, the newspaper cartoon strips of the time. This aesthetic style was later developed on by Warner and Disney in their shorts, and when Snow White was released in 1937, Disney's aesthetic became the go to for fairy tale type stories for the next 30 years. Later in the 60s counterculture style infiltrated animations such as Fritz the Cat, based on Robert Crumb's pulp comic strips, and Yellow Submarine which drew heavily on the hippie movement aesthetic of the work of Milton Glaser and Heinz Edelmann.
These days we have the ability to look back on and borrow from the entire history of animation thanks to the internet and the instant accessibility we now have. This has allowed animators these days to imitate and reference, and broaden the aesthetic possibilities further.