The TNBA charcter redesigns were okay, but what I hated was the new tech. Everything mechanical looked worse. That batmobile was uninspired trash -- looked like a real-world sportscar with a ridiculously wide wheel base. The plane stayed pretty much the same, but even the gadgets and tools all looked shoddily rendered.
The animation actually was much more consistent then in TAS, but your gut tells you that it looks worse. Why? Lighting, atmosphere, and the switch to digital coloring. TAS might have been plagued by some crummy Korean studios, but it made up for all that with something missing from most TV animation these days: dynamic lighting. It's one of the most time-consuming things to animate, requires more input from the studio to ensure quality control and it demands more pre-production work to create different color palattes for each character. But it works wonders for making 2-D characters a believable part of the scene, not to mention the background, which is painted seperately.
Lighting also establishes the mood and atmosphere of the scene. TNBA unfortunately had the cold sterility of all American TV toons, contrasted with TAS's noir-heavy influence. The pavement looks wet, the concrete looks gritty, the shadows look scary -- all due to the attention paid to the highlights painted into each scene.
Which brings us to the third mistake made by TNBA: digital coloring. When done right and coupled with some deft digital texturing, the results can be breath-taking. But when it's the flat, select-click-fill technique employed by that show (and most Saturday-morning toons), it becomes just another computerized exercise in laziness. Hence the show's bland, homogenized sameness from episode to episode.
Unique to TAS was the way it's backgrounds were painted - they started with a black canvas, and therefore the airbrushed paint would be darkly tinted in a way that is not easily duplicated in digital. It was an actual chemical reaction happening on the canvas, and shot with actual chemical film. Sorry digital photogs, but it makes a difference, especially when the subject is grim and gritty. TNBA may have had superior tools and smoother animation, but it just didn't give as much attention to the artistry of filmmaking that the old show did.
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