I spent some time watching Nickelodeon yesterday. The default animation style is: Matte painted backgrounds and foregrounds in watercolor (graduated shading), with the animated characters strictly in two-tone flat shaded. However, I spotted another trend, which is basically an upgrade from South Park Style. On the new show "6teen," they use "cels" but with no border lines at all; the color boundaries of props are the 'lines'. The feature demarcation of mouth, eyes, eyebrows and ears are highly minimalist solid lines. But....the tinting of SOME of the 'cels' was graduated shading. The audio dialoge and emotive animation was top notch. Interesting and effective. ::::: Opera :::::