What style of animation is South Park designed to resemble?

South Park is designed to resemble cutout animation. The series’ visual style was inspired by Terry Gilliam’s paper cutout cartoons for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which Trey Parker and Matt Stone admired.

The original South Park shorts and the 1997 pilot used construction paper and traditional stop-motion cutout techniques. For the regular series, the production switched to computer animation because it was much faster, but the artists deliberately preserved the crude, jerky, collage-like appearance of physical cutouts.

This is why “cel animation” is not the best answer: cel animation refers to the traditional process of painting images on transparent sheets, not the specific paper-cutout look South Park imitates. The show later moved from PowerAnimator to Maya, while still retaining its intentionally homemade aesthetic.