I wish the article explained why this style became popular in the early days of animation. Did it have some aspect that made it particularly easy? Is something about it particularly intuitive such that it was the first thing that artists tried? Does it somehow use similar techniques to still cartoons in a way that later styles do not?
The issue was simplicity, time and avoiding uncanny valley. Before "The Goddess of Spring", every attempt at animating a realism style produced a high degree of uncanny valley, at least with human characters.
Traditional hand-drawn animation is also a very time consuming process. If your animated characters have more structure to their anatomy, you have more things to have to worry about when it comes to maintaining consistency of proportions and the "physics" of what your characters can/can't do. A rubber hose doesn't have a joint that can only bend in one direction, for example. When time is of the essence, and in an era where animation studies were small struggling companies trying to sell their shorts, you need to find ways to reduce the amount of work.
I always wondered (and unfortunately the wiki-entry doesn't clarify it): is it called rubber hose animation because of how the limbs were drawn or the fact that the animation comes across as bouncy?
Yeah, I wish there was like a diagram or a marked up version of a comic to show the curving/bounciness. I can recognize the style (e.g. Cuphead, and old cartoons), but I'm having having trouble understanding the specific characteristics of said style.
I’m interested to know if the curvy thing was just an aesthetic style that viewers enjoyed, or if it came out of some technical constraint. Like did sharp/straight-edged shapes tend to look more janky/jarring when animated?
Adobe has a great resource, but it was an aesthetically pleasing solution for needing to churn out a lot of footage. Rubber hose is extremely forgiving as there is no viewer expectation of the limb range/mobility, and this feature was often exploited to turn limbs into other objects as needed.
It definitely started as a way to draw things quickly that don't look bad, but it ended up developing its own aesthetic.
It's hard to imagine something like The Fox Chase[1] in a different style; the lack of distinct joints and extreme flexibility make for things that wouldn't be believable in a more realistic style.
It was not a technical limitation, in that the same equipment could display more realistic animation. It was, however, the best way the artists of the day knew how to animate quickly.
One feature that is what I consider part of the style of the era but not essential to the rubber hose-ness is the use of many repeating elements often background elements which loop or cycle with a bouncy cadence that seems to be in time with the music.
The video in wiki doesn't really show it but if you watch any old cartoons (can find many youtube) you can immediately notice many characters moving arms in a wavy motion as if they are made of rubber. Calling them rubber hose motion makes so much sense.
There are some better resources for rubber hose animation as it is studied by designers and animators along with other popular styles/movements. (1)
Your answer is largely correct, rubber hose refers to the limbs which are thick black lines that lack obvious joints, instead they have the rubbery(bouncy) movement you've described.
