TV and Flash animated cartoons about to be replaced by Javascript animation ?

Robot animation architecture smallThat's what I thought when I saw Anthony Calzadilla's article "Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery" article through WebAppers. Just check the demo to see how nice this is! "This project was created by layering several empty divs over each other with transparent PNGs as background images. The backgrounds were animated at different speeds using a jQuery plug-in by Alexander Farkas. This effect simulates a faux 3-D animated background dubbed the “parallax effect” originating from old-school side scrolling video games. The robot is comprised similarly to the background animation scene by layering several DIVs together to create the different robot pieces. The final step, was animating the robot with some jQuery."

I totally agree with Chris' comment: "I think this is an extremely cool experiment. I’d say for most users, the end result is indistinguishable from Flash. Yet, the advantages over Flash are enormous. Each piece of the animation is separate and can be altered/replaced easily. Tweaks to the animation style can be done with numbers within the JavaScript file itself as opposed to having to alter an original Flash document and re-export/upload an entire new version."

Could we dream of an entire Javascript animated cartoon ? If you think about it, everything is there and smart people are already doing interesting experiments by hand. The only missing piece might be a Flash-like high level Javascript animator program !

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