2D Computer Animation: Character design analysis of The Powerpuff Girls

First Sketch:

The Powerpuff Girls were created accidentally by the now-legendary animator Craig McCracken as he was making a birthday card for his brother.
The girls’ designs took inspiration from many different sources: UPA cartoons, Paul Rudish’s art style, Margaret Keane’s paintings of big eyed subjects, etc.
The three girls were drawn as a unit, so McCracken focused on making the girls contrast with each other, mainly by giving them different hair colours and styles.
McCracken wasn’t able to add any noses, fingers or details of the sort to the girls due to the drawing being just a small thumbnail sketch and he believes it was for the best because the designs just happened to work well that way.
“Mickey Mouse doesn’t look like a mouse, but he represents a mouse”, says McCracken. “I’ve always liked that type of symbolic design”.
Craig McCracken found in these three girls the perfect protagonists for the student film he was working on at the time and, after refining their original designs a little, “The Whoopass Girls” were born.

The Whoopass Girls:

Here is where the main appeal of the girls is introduced: the contrast between their cuteness and their toughness.
These redesigns are closer to the final versions of the girls, including their representative colours, but they’re still not quite there yet. Compared to The Powerpuff Girls, McCracken thinks The Whoopass Girls are “a little more freakish and stretched out and not as cute”.
They may not be as angular as they were before, but they still seem a little too stiff to me.

The Powerpuff Girls Pilot Episode:

Their designs were adjusted once again for the pilot episode of The Powerpuff Girls.
They’ve become more elastic and curved, and their design is overall more dynamic. They have thicker limbs and their arms function more like they did in the first thumbnail sketch.
I think that, in a quest to make them more dynamic, the girls have lost their original charm as symbols.

Redesign Attempts:

Unfortunately, the pilot episode tested poorly and McCracken tried desperately to redesign the girls, almost abandoning their original designs completely.
Had the redesigns been approved, there wouldn’t have been such a notable difference between The Powerpuff Girls and other children in the show. To me, the fact that the girls didn’t have some basic human characteristics like fingers and noses, and had big, circular heads was just as important as the fact that they could fly and had superpowers. It made them special and more than human.
Although the redesigns went nowhere in the end, they were used in an episode of the show where the three girls, average human versions of the original Powerpuffs, were called “The Run-of-the-Mill Girls”.

Final Version (1998 Designs):

Even though the pilot episode did badly, Cartoon Network still liked McCracken’s idea for the show and his original designs, and gave him the green light.
By this time, McCracken had been working on Dexter’s Laboratory and had acquired more knowledge and experience.
He created the final designs for the three Powerpuff Girls himself and, as is shown in the picture above, he thought carefully about the design of each of their characteristics, from head to toe. He might have designed the girls thoughtlessly and by accident all those years ago, but he certainly did end up putting a lot of thought into their designs following their creation.
When working on the design of every character on the show, McCracken says he “tried to define all the characters as iconic images”.
I think a massively important decision was made in terms of line. Their thick outlines cemented them as icons.
Children are the masters of drawing symbols and I think The Powerpuff Girls were created in that child-like way of drawing, just in a more sophisticated manner.
In the first thumbnail sketch McCracken made of the girls, they look too stiff to be superheroes, and in the pilot episode, they are too elongated and stretchy and have lost their original cute, little kindergartener charm. I think these final designs are the perfect balance between these elements.

Sources:

valeria's animation blog