Gallery

South Park Cutout (1997)

ProMax

South Park's cutout look is what happens when two guys assemble a cartoon from torn construction paper on a photocopier and refuse to hide the seams. Everything is a flat opaque shape — circle heads, rectangle bodies, snap-jointed limbs — pasted onto a snowbound mountain town under a pale robin's-egg sky. The charm lives in the wrongness: visible paper edges, slightly-off registration, a hard seam where kelly-green grass meets white snow. It is deliberately, gleefully crude, the anti-Disney. A fourth-grader's diorama that learned to swear.

Learn more about the South Park Cutout (1997) style

  • OriginUnited States (Colorado setting; produced in Los Angeles)
  • Period1992 (Spirit of Christmas shorts) → 1997 series premiere → ongoing
  • DesignerTrey Parker · Matt Stone · Brian Graden
  • Movementscutout animation · DIY/lo-fi aesthetics · adult animation · construction-paper collage

Web examples

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Slide examples

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