I have noticed how you could quickly guess the era of a manga or anime just by looking at the way characters are drawn (outside of the Shonen/Seinen/Shojo categories that also had shifting styles).
And maybe it's me being a "classicist" but from 2008 onwards everything looks the same to me (must be the HD era)
I agree that everything looks kind of same-same now. A lot of media is becoming the same because that's the formula that 'works'. Unfortunately, risks and ingenuity aren't really rewarded anymore. It's about what sells.
I have noticed how you could quickly guess the era of a manga or anime just by looking at the way characters are drawn (outside of the Shonen/Seinen/Shojo categories that also had shifting styles).
And maybe it's me being a "classicist" but from 2008 onwards everything looks the same to me (must be the HD era) View attachment 48234
That's why you see when you see to different character in two different anime with same clothes and body shape you think they are same! This happens a lot in this age. I think the one of reason I don't like to watch anime some time is that!
Artists copied other popular artists and series. Like in the 60's, everyone was trying to be like Osamu Tezuka, than Golgo 13 came, and everyone tried to be like Saito, than Orange Road, than Fist of the North Star, etc...
I'm not much of an anime guy, but while artstyles and stylistic preferences definitely do naturally evolve over time, I would not be surprised if this sameness you mention might be the result of production costs.
That used to be a formative influence on Western animation back in the 70s to 90s at least.
Even in the age of digital animation, if your style is too detailed, it'll exponentially increase the workload of any animation studio and from what I've read over the years, making meaningful profit off of animation these days is... a challenge, to say the least.
So maybe that look has slowly become more and more prevalent as an implicit cost-saving measure?
Again though, I know next to nothing about modern anime - at least in part because most modern anime I've seen looks offputting to me - so I'm just theorizing.
I'd mostly chalk it up to the prolonged, challenging introduction of digital coloring and effects. Anime in general looked "off" during the span the industry ditched traditional cels en masse.
The 2000s look is my favorite. We certainly got some absolute monsters back then, but when the designs were good, they were unbelievably detailed and appealing. So much linework was put into defining the characters’ eyes, hair, and facial structure that it really did make them look beautiful, mature, and premium-quality. The #1 thing I miss about anime is when they used to define the characters’ lips in 2000s-era animation — remember that!? It made them look more like paintings or sculptures than simple doodles.
That said, I’d take any decade’s style over what we’re getting in the 2020s. Modern anime characters (and anime-influenced characters in games and VTubers and Twitter art and whatever) look like absolute GORILLA DUNG. They have uncannily flat, simple, infantile faces, and wide, chubby, flabby bodies, especially at their limbs and waists. They look fat — you know, FAT!? Like, put down the donuts my darling, you’re going to break the scale? I guess that’s what people like, now. I couldn’t imagine why.
I also like how the OP image shows very clearly how the colouring has changed on 2020s characters to be much brighter and more pastel, which is another thing I truly abhor. Modern anime visuals make my eyes water just looking at screenshots (for the ultimate example of this, see the Ranma 1/2 reboot) — I couldn’t imagine watching whole 22-minute episodes of this slop without my retinas melting down my cheeks. I guess they do this so the characters pop more on iPhone screens? Sickening.
I know that the modern look is popular because it’s easy to replicate for fan artists on Twitter, which is a big part of what anime is these days, and that the new audience doesn’t really like any of the pre-mid-2010s stuff aside from Cowboy Bebop and Akira, but fuck me am I not into it. “Infantile” is a great word for it — new anime characters look like pudgy babies or rabbits or something, not adult humans. I suppose that makes them non-threatening and safe for the current audience. YUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It changes and fluctuates. People don't seem to look at the manga portion, art styles are crazy different in that category. In the Anime Industry its just easier to animate that is why it looks somewhat the same. Depends if the Director and Producer will actually go the extra mile and make the art style close to the original source as possible.
I mean there are slight changes but you can show me an anime from today, if you told me it came in the 2010's I would've believed you because of how post-HD/post-Digital animation has that same "texture" compared to an anime the 80's having a radically different style from the 70's.
I do agree that the 2010's saw the "beanface" (colloquially called the "CalArt" art style although not every cartoons from the era looked like that).
I'd probably call the 2010's more like the ("smoothened edges era" like modern UI switching to square to rounded square to round profile pics in Social networks like Facebook and Twitter)
But I miss that 80-90 "edge" and "wilderness". The mid-00's already started that trend of "standardising" things.
Mostly just shifting trends, for good or bad depending on what you like.
Like @Nebulon_Galaxy said, it's much more obvious in anime and anime adaptations. You'd be hard pressed to compare two popular contemporary manga artists and claim they look the same.
It also depends a lot on what techniques the studios are pushing at the time, since they're the ones making the anime adaptations, not the manga authors their work is so often based on. Naturally a lot of similarities will occur that way. I like pastel color schemes (I like all color schemes when they're done well) and I like flat design, but I think it's boring when so much is looking so similar, in our current era or any era (though it's often easier to look back at old stuff and see charm in it). I like the colors in the Ranma remake a lot. I always assumed that flat design was also a sort of cost-cutting method.
One of my main gripes with anime was always how cels were super detailed, but they just stood still and their mouths moved, which is a simplification of course but I'd rather have something look alive and expressive over detailed but stiff, generally. I was flabbergasted at how abysmally ugly the cutscenes in the Persona games I tried last year were. They were probably the stiffest anime segments I've ever seen, and just looked plain ugly.
Out of what I've watched, I think the mid-to-late 90s has the best coloring (Usually pretty dark with high contrast and a lot of depth, stuff like Bebop, Berserk and Lodoss War for example) along with the 70s which had a lot of varying color profiles that gave many shows unique personalities, and they experimented alot with painted "postcards" in that era, but I think the early 2020s has been very good for the animation part of things. In the 2010s there was a lot of weird cost-cutting measures which led to awful shit that looked ultra cheap, but I think that the current wildly explosive "sketchy" dynamic animation techniques are really fun to look at.
Out of the examples in the pic I kinda like 00s the least but that's mainly because they tend to feel pretty dated now with their 480p resolution and early attempts at digital coloring, so it's kind of a weird limbo for me and more of a format issue. It feels easier to handwave technical limitations from the 70s and 80s because there really weren't any other techniques to go for other than "color this cel and make sure it looks good". GTO is one of my all-time favorite animes, but it really looks like washed out shit and kind of makes it feel cheaper than it is. Especially compared to the gorgeous manga. My favorite anime from that era when it comes to looks is probably Afro Samurai.
Same here.
I really don't mind the "calarts" style at all though, which I think is a pretty reductive term in general. American animation is collapsing and eating itself because of a million reasons, like incestuous hiring practices (good luck being hired if you're new talent nowadays) and the higher-ups just slashing budgets like crazy, so a lot of those beanface artstyles come from doing what you can with limited resources, that's why so many designs are so "basic" compared to stuff from like 1998. Because they're easy to work with. But if it works as a sort of self-preservation method I think it's good in the long run.
It's a shame because it's an industry that runs on passion so much, so people settle with being shafted so that they can work their "dream job" of drawing inbetweens for peanuts.
Yes, that's the one concession I'm forced to grant modern anime: The movement's currently the best it's ever been. They're clearly cracking the whip on these fuckers, because anime moves way, way smoother than it ever has before. Or maybe it's because they have Americans working on it now? I dunno, but it does move very well.
But, really, was the motion between keyframes during fight scenes or dance scenes or whatever really what people liked about this stuff? I can think of a certain example of a scene that doesn't have very good motion, but that's pretty goshdarned iconic:
You'd be surprised.
Almost every time I get curious and look up a new show that has fight scenes in it, there are always lots of comments about how "the fights suck and are ugly, don't watch it" as if it's the only value the show has. Last time I heard it was Sakamoto Days, which clearly has a kind of tight budget, but it's definitely not the show you'd exclusively watch for its fight scenes. It's a comedy, with occasional action, after all.
Maybe that's just the typical shonen-fan mindset or something, but I've never ever watched a show just because it had good looking fights or whatever.
It's like people watching The Sopranos and skipping over the Dr. Melfi parts.
Is this considered ugly? I think this looks pretty good for what it is! I get the feeling it's most likely rotoscoped to a fair degree, but I think it translated pretty well to the proportions of them being cartoons.
At the end of the day, I'd say it's the expression that counts the most, but high-quality animation is often capable of conveying a greater sense of expression which is only logical.
I don't think it's ugly at all (and it was definitely rotoscoped), but I do think the motion is technically inferior, by a pretty significant margin, than what they'd do today. (Certainly than what that studio, Kyoto Animation, would do today.) But watching that video back (and I've probably seen it a million times in my life), I can immediately glean aspects of each character's personality and role on the show just by looking at 'em. Nobody needs to do a massive kickflip through the air or a picture-perfect ballerina dance for it to be appealing and effective.
Obviously, if we lived in a perfect world, everything about animation – the character designs, the colouring, the movement, the voice acting, the writing – would be excellent and high-quality. BUT WE DON'T
I don't think it's ugly at all (and it was definitely rotoscoped), but I do think the motion is technically inferior, by a pretty significant margin, than what they'd do today. (Certainly than what that studio, Kyoto Animation, would do today.) But watching that video back (and I've probably seen it a million times in my life), I can immediately glean aspects of each character's personality and role on the show just by looking at 'em. Nobody needs to do a massive kickflip through the air or a picture-perfect ballerina dance for it to be appealing and effective.
Obviously, if we lived in a perfect world, everything about animation – the character designs, the colouring, the movement, the voice acting, the writing – would be excellent and high-quality. BUT WE DON'T
I'm still convinced that this scene is actually ugly and not "creative freedom" mode, because it feels so blatantly out of place. The entire fight looks like this, not just inbetweens!
It's fun as hell, but I dunno. Pierrot made insanely good looking fight scenes in Naruto before, and iirc they hired some legendary director to make that scene, but to me it always kind of felt like they rushed it (I haven't watched the series up to that point, just seen the fight as-is).
This looks like those "epic anime 60fps remastered" videos you'd find on Youtube.
Slightly OT, but when it comes to adapting an existing IP, my favorite Japanese animation director is Mamoru Hosoda by a gorillion miles. I think he's just amazing.
(I kind of prefer the shitty 4kids version of the Digimon movies purely for nostalgia, but I'll post the origial here since that's what he actually directed lol)
I'm still convinced that this scene is actually ugly and not "creative freedom" mode, because it feels so blatantly out of place. The entire fight looks like this, not just inbetweens!
It's fun as hell, but I dunno. Pierrot made insanely good looking fight scenes in Naruto before, and iirc they hired some legendary director to make that scene, but to me it always kind of felt like they rushed it (I haven't watched the series up to that point, just seen the fight as-is).
This looks like those "epic anime 60fps remastered" videos you'd find on Youtube.
Slightly OT, but when it comes to adapting an existing IP, my favorite Japanese animation director is Mamoru Hosoda by a gorillion miles. I think he's just amazing.
(I kind of prefer the shitty 4kids version of Digimon, but I'll post the origial here since that's what he actually directed lol)
A bit of context, it's from a slice of life comedy anime called Joshiraku, one of the main characters was wondering why an anime mostly comprised of people talking should be animated at all, cue that scene after they talked for a shortwhile about their source material doesn't have any action scene whatsoever (they do later on actually).
I also read somewhere that one scene alone took about 5 to 6 times more effort and manpower of that single episode to work on.
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