@BJay @matana @beardalaxy @fugger Cool story bro but even his original blog post just coined the term, what he meant as CalArts style was something entirely different. His post was complaining about the art style of the Iron Giant, that CalArts grads of the era were trying to emulate Disney/similar animators at the end of their careers with massive amounts of talent without knowing what made it good.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101227090204/http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/01/cal-arts-style.html

The modern day definition of CalArts style is often interchangeable with Tumblr style. It's well known for the bean-mouth style of character design, googly eyes, and whatnot. While Gumball and some of the older shows with that style weren't too hated or had their own cult fanbases (gravity falls comes to mind, I had a coworker with that triangle sticker on his car), there are so many cookie cutter copy and paste shows on CN/Nick/etc with that same exact art style, or shows for manchildren with that same style. It's to cartoons what the "globohomo style" is to corporate art and marketing.