NYT is about as mainstream Western media as you can get, so I thought it was interesting to see their take on the use of CG within anime (and that they even thought it worth their time to write about). I think it is a fair take. From the article:
“Fans often balk at any announcement that a show will be produced in 3-D, especially when it’s from an established franchise,” May said in an interview. “The gap between good and bad C.G. anime is wide, and fans can spot mediocre 3-D animation easily thanks to having seen decades of top-range American 3-D films.”
This lines up with my experience. Often, if the CG is done well and integrated into a consistent visual style, there aren’t any as many complaints. However, bad CG that sticks out is what annoys fans the most and garners the negative connotation.
The article also goes into some of the reasons that we should expect CG to stay and expand in usage going forward:
“I feel like the large insurgence of 3-D anime comes from the dream of an easier production,” said Austin Hardwicke, a 3-D animator who specializes in anime that is heavy on digital effects. In part, that’s because it’s easier to maintain consistent quality. “Thanks to the enormous video game industry, there are hands available across the globe, making it easy to scale a team up or down at will. And it’s famously difficult for veteran 2-D animators to teach junior animators up to their level, but 3-D animation is infinitely easier to teach.”
This lines up with what industry veterans within Japan have been saying; that there is a lack of junior talent being developed to be able to fill senior roles.
Combine this lack of traditional 2D talent with an ever-growing number of productions in any given season and more CG is what we should expect.
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Are we?
Cel Anime has been digital (or at least finished digitally) for a long time, and CG Anime can be bad or good the same way hand-drawn Anime can be bad or good. The more 3D Anime that is made, the better it gets overall.
The hardest thing to do is use both styles at the same time without it being distracting. When it’s planned ahead and used for very specific things, it tends to work. When it’s a fallback because the animators are behind schedule, it ends up being terrible.
Right now, I think the worst running example of 3D Anime is the platform Netflix has been using in-house for the last ten or so years without seeing any real visual improvements. The latest example of it being Gamera Rebirth - excellent story, distractingly poor character designs against all the other visuals which do look modern and appealing. But other studios working with Netflix have done really nice 3D Anime, so even with them it depends on a combination of things.
I’m fine with the transition as long as the animators and producers care about the quality of the work they release. That what it always comes down to.
I agree with you that, in general, anime fans have more or less accepted that CG and other computer aided animation tools are unavoidable and will account for an increasingly large portion of any given production. However, I didn’t want to editorialize the title, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, a hard agree on Netflix 3D shows looking really bad. I think I could deal with bland, generic CG character models, but the actual animation on those models is usually just really poor. The characters are just not very, well, animated in their movements or expressions. Compare that with a show like Arcane and the difference is night and day.
IMO, CG’s great in backgrounds[1], and in helping compose a shot by applying to non-human set-pieces[2]. It can also be good for living things like kaiju and mechs[3].
It’s generally bad form to apply to humans though unless heavily stylized for it[4].
An exception to this is a show like Land of the Lustrous in which the people are made of minerals, and thus it makes sense for their bodies to appear more rigid and uncanny. It’s also the only reasonable way they could have gotten their hair to be consistently iradescent throughout the entire runtime of the series.[5]
pokemon xyz: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/179755 ↩︎
izetta: the last witch: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/246362 ↩︎
ssss gridman: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/239676 ↩︎
high score girl: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=3EVn5xpw6qo ↩︎
land of the lustrous: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/40496 ↩︎
I think CG animation has basically saved the mecha genre of anime. Trying to traditionally animate complex machinery would just be too expensive and there are too few animators with experience/skills to be able to do it.
We are definitely going to be seeing more and more CG used for the reasons the article goes into, but I think the important thing is that the CG be incorporated into the show in a way that meshes well with the rest of the artistic style. A great, very recent example of this was episode 1 of Metallic Rouge. There are action scenes featuring mechanized battle suits that are clearly animated with CG, but the shaders they use as well as heavy use of 2D effects composited make it feel cohesive with the rest of the artistic style of the show.
As an aside, is that a traditionally animated dance scene in a pokemon show? I would not have expected such nice animation coming from pokemon. Also, I love the footnotes in markdown thing that is possible in lemmy, but it never displays right on any mobile client. I just tried it on Jerboa and Boost and they just display inline text with the syntax. Beautiful in the browser though :)
As an aside, is that a traditionally animated dance scene in a pokemon show? I would not have expected such nice animation coming from pokemon.
Ya, Pokemon XY/XYZ had a whole bunch of really great animation, making great use of both traditional and CG animation. One particular change is that, while in Best Wishes, they used generic backdrops to indicate motion during attacks, like so:
Come XY/XYZ they used fully rendered 3D backdrops during attacks, with complex battle choreography and a consistent, full field of view as the Pokemon navigate the entire arena during attacks,. They also make a lot of use of depth and motion in the action sequences, and even 360 degree shots.
After XYZ, Pokemon Sun and Moon completely changed the art direction to be a much less modeled, restricted one. XY/XYZ was one last big hurrah for the traditional style of Ash Ketchum and Pokemon anime that we all grew up with, and the animators delivered quality in spades. It’s by far the best animated of that traditional style.
Also thanks for the note about the footnotes thing. I never use the apps, so didn’t know that they don’t handle the markdown properly.
Yeah, I hadn’t really watched past the original series (see my rant in another post about the difficulty of watching Pokemon legally). So, my expectations for Pokemon animation quality is
perhapsmost definitely a bit dated. The CG in your examples are pretty good uses of it. It is still easy to spot things like characters sliding across the ground a bit, but it isn’t intrusive, especially for a show aimed at children. It is way better than the children’s tv shows I see Netflix try to recommend me occasionally (Cocomelon, etc.)As for markdown on Lemmy, I have a rant about that too! Specifically when it comes to spoiler tag support. Definitely some teething issues for an immature platform.
