To elaborate on this: in animation, every single frame is its own drawing, with its own intent. An animator sits and draws each individual frame, making sure everything is perfectly timed, that the action flows smoothly, etc. Interpolation literally destroys that linework. https://twitter.com/Crimson_Mayhem_/status/1313562730977255426

As an example, look at these smear frames. The video is low resolution, but on the 24 FPS version, you can see all the little details of the animator's drawing. You can see their linework down to the brush stroke. On the 60 FPS version, a computer smooths over all of that detail.

Motion interpolation is essentially just letting the computer analyze your footage in order to create fake frames to bridge the gap from the original framerate to the target framerate. You're not actually gaining any new visual information, it's all artificial.

Here's another example (this is pulled from a 1080p youtube upload of the same video). Look at the hands- the computer doesn't know what to put in between these quick smear frames to create a smooth motion, and so instead of visual detail, you get gross looking distortion.

Now, that's not to say that motion interpolation is useless. It has its legit benefits. A lot of TV productions with limited budgets will use it to achieve a smooth slow motion effect without the need for expensive high framerate cameras.

But applying it to existing hand drawn animation? That's just destroying the footage, plain and simple. It's scrubbing away the actual work of the animators for artificial gains.

If you want another really good example, check out this interpolated 60 FPS version of the Sonic Mania opening animation. These are frames from the original, 24 FPS version:

A Disney animation lends itself a little better to interpolation because Disney tends to animate many scenes on ones, meaning rather than the standard 2 frames for each drawing, they make a new drawing for every single frame of footage. There's more for the computer to work with.

Something like Sonic Mania, on the other hand, mimics the style of anime- meaning it's not animated on ones, there's a lot of snappy, pose-to-pose movements, often with zero in-between frames to bridge the keyframes.

When the computer has to try to figure out how to get from one keyframe to the next, without any existing in-betweens to go off of, you end up with really gnarly distortion like this:

Does it look smooth in motion? Sure, but animation isn't just about creating smooth motion- it's about creating the illusion of movement *in service of storytelling.* This intro animation packs a ton of character into a very small number of frames, and every frame counts.

Those frames I showed earlier only covered about two seconds of footage, but there's a ton of storytelling happening in those two seconds. And when you lose entire drawings in an already extremely economical sequence, you're actively damaging the storytelling.