Tag Archives: aesthetics

Doctor Who Anime Fan-Trailer: Good Skills, But…

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Translator Paul “Otaking” Johnson, probably most famous on the internet for his criticism of fansubbers (not the illegal part but that they draw too much attention to themselves) and his particular views on how anime should look (five-tone shading), recently released a finished preview of his Doctor Who anime treatment. Taking the iconic British science fiction hero and putting him in Japan, the whole thing lasts 12 minutes. While Johnson has since taken the Doctor Who video down, I still want to give my impression of it, and you can still find previous versions around.

I’ve been critical of Johnson in the past over his adherence to “five-tone shading.”  There was never anything inherently wrong with the concept of “five-tone shading,” and my criticisms were primarily that there are a variety of ways for anime to look good, that budget inevitably plays a factor, and that if you disregard all shows that don’t use that shading style, you look down on not just current anime but also anime from before the 1980s. But it being a few years and all, I had to wonder what he’d learned since then.

Now I am not a fan of Doctor Who as much as I have never actually watched it, so I cannot judge this preview animation based on how well it captures the Doctor Who spirit. Anything I know about it is from reading the internet. I also understand that it’s more a proof of concept, not a trailer or anything that requires a storyline, so I won’t say anything about plot coherency. Having done a bit of animation in the past myself, I can tell that Johnson has talent and put a lot of work into this project.

But it still doesn’t look good, and while that doesn’t preclude an animation project from being all right overall, it is a problem for Johnson who prides himself on understanding what makes anime look good, especially because the preview is meant to be a visual showcase.

There are certainly elements of it which look impressive, bits and pieces that stand out and grab your attention, but taken as a whole, it is less than the sum of its parts. I do not mean that the characters sometimes look off or that the animation goes sour at times, because that sort of thing happens. The real issue stems not from a lack of technical skill or any minor flubs, but from an inherent flaw in Johnson’s aesthetic philosophy.

Five-tone shading is not the entirety of the problematic philosophy, but its effects are very clear in the work itself and so a good place to start. Again, there is nothing wrong with thinking five-tone animation looks better, but just about very single character and object in the animation has this in spades, to the point that it becomes overwhelming. Everything is so specifically made to have that elaborate shading scheme that it is difficult to look at. Characters are frequently as prominent as their surroundings, the foreground is often times difficult to differentiate from the background, and it just ends up as a garish mess. It’s just too much. There are plenty of anime out there which use that shading method, but they don’t overwork it into every single thing all the time to the degree that everyone and everything fights for your attention.

Another problem is that when you’re animating with five-tone shading constantly, it becomes difficult to maintain the shadows while in motion. One need only look at the original, pre-release animation from Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix to see this problem. They originally went for a similar shading style there, but it causes shadows to be inconsistent and to “pop” unnaturally unless a lot of care is taken. There are limitations to five-tone shading, among then simply time and manpower. When five-tone shading is used as an absolute rule, those limitations become even more apparent.

It’s not just shading which can create this problem, but also character design, which is why a show like Turn A Gundam has relatively simplistic ones. This is also another area where the Doctor Who anime preview runs into problems, because much like with the shading, the character designs have too many aesthetic bells and whistles as the result of a particular desire for 80s anime-level “intensity.” All of the characters look dated as a result.

I can potentially see why someone would think that I’m criticizing 80s/90s character designs as a whole for not being “new” enough, I should clarify my point. Everyone, with possibly the exception of the Doctor himself, looks like they were inspired by a 1980s version of a “How to Draw Anime” book in the sense that the characters all look like they were made with the idea that this is how anime characters are supposed to look, down to the hairstyles and the little details. This is most prominent with the character of “The Master,” whose eyes make him look like a 17 year old wearing a fake beard. Certainly there are actual anime out there which are also guilty of this, but it’s still something to be aware of.

I could touch on more aspects, but I’m not trying to nitpick little flaws as much as I’m using them as examples of how the basic approach to this project has problems. Again, the whole project is impressively made, but the overall flaw with Johnson’s animation style is that he sticks too closely to his beliefs about how anime “should” look. Because the aesthetic philosophy upon which that’s founded is underdeveloped and incomplete, it results in a work where certain elements, such as shading detail and particular character traits, have been rendered extensively but at the expense of fundamental aspects like visual clarity and not forcing characters into overt visual tropes just because that’s how things were done. There is nothing inherently wrong with the desire for elaborate visuals in everything, but it alone cannot act as a visual foundation.

Umino Chika Spikes Water at Production IG, Kimi ni Todoke the Result

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I strongly suspect that Honey and Clover creator Umino Chika, while on her way to deliver character designs for Eden of the East, decided to “spice up” the lives of the members of Production IG. How else can I explain how good Kimi ni Todoke has been?

Not to take anything away from the original creator of Kimi ni Todoke, Shiina Karuho, seeing as it’s her strong story and nice character designs that they’re working with, and certainly Production IG has always been known for its high standards of animation quality, but KnT is a beast unlike any other unleashed by the Igg (that’s how the cool people pronounce it, you know). Rather than using their expertise to make a more fleshed out and realistic-looking show, as one might expect from the studio that brought us Ghost in the Shell: SAC, what Production IG has managed to achieve is a show that truly looks shoujo in a way most anime have not, including perfectly good works such as Cardcaptor Sakura and Itazura na Kiss.

There’s a very strong understanding by the staff on this show as to when to utilize the more visually two-dimensional and emotional elements and when to incorporate a three-dimensional sense of spacing among the characters, and it, and the result is that it achieves that pastel and wispy shoujo manga feel while still making sense as an animation. In a way it reminds me of 70s-style shoujo, only with less emphasis on the melodramatic, and more technical skill on the part of the animators.

And even if you don’t care about all of that stuff I just said, note that Kimi ni Todoke is still very good, and does a good job of murdering cliches with an 80 lb. battle axe, which I will assure you is the perfect metaphor for this show. Good shoujo, from Igg to you.

The Colors of Modern Fanservice

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As part of the ritual of watching new shows at the start of a season, I decided to check out the show Kampfer. Immediately upon watching it, I got this strong feeling that I knew exactly the kind of show it was going to be (and I was right). Sure, the character designs are what you expect out of this sort of otaku-targeting fanservice show, but it was something much more fundamental than that. Then it hit me: It was the color scheme.

Lots of anime throughout the years have had bright or cheerful color schemes, but there’s something very distinct about the kinds of shows that are made in order to get otaku in a tizzy. When it comes to art, color and color theory were never my strong suit, so I cannot speak with any real authority or learned foundation, but there is a certain optimistic quality to the colors used in Kampfer and shows like Kampfer. Even if terrible things happen to the characters, it comes across as a fantasy that wants the viewer to become engrossed in, but at the same time makes it easy to remove oneself from that fantasy if one desires to do so.

kkitousen is affected by this to a lesser extent, due to the fact that it uses colors with greater saturation and contrast, but it still shares a similar fondness for bright colors combined in specific ways. These shows appear to be aiming for an ideal, trying to tap into a core color scheme that is attractive to otaku on some deeper level.

The reason, I suspect, is that they are getting very close to the colors commonly used in erotic PC games.

Here we have Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien aka Rumbling Hearts. The soft gradients seen here which are common to erogames are also pretty much impossible for any anime to achieve on a consistent basis. It looks as if the staff working on these “erogame color” shows try to achieve the same effect by choosing bright colors with a little less contrast than normal.

I also suspect that this color scheme also exudes a very negative connotation among people who dislike these sorts of shows inherently. It’s probably something which jumps out at them subconsciously and tells them that they may be in for a rough ride should they continue to watch.

Color is such a huge topic that obviously I can’t cover it all in one post. For that reason don’t be surprised if I return to the topic again at some point in the future.

Style Born out of Necessity

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In Fred Schodt’s book The Astro Boy Essays, Fred points out that many of the qualities and traits of Japanese “limited” animation (as opposed to Disney-esque “full animation”) could trace their origins back to Tezuka Osamu’s original Tetsuwan Atom anime TV series, a series which was impeded by a staggeringly low budget that all but required these sorts of animaton “shortcuts.” Critics in Japan at that time would remark that the qualities of anime described above, qualities that were born out of necessity, gave anime much of its distinctive Japanese style and that it was in certain ways better than Disney-style full animation.

Of course, not everyone agreed, and others saw the fact that the limited animation style was because of a lack of money, and could not see it as a “style.” Evidently, Tezuka himself had mixed feelings about it: he was happy that these cost-cutting measures allowed him to animate Atom in the first place, but as a loyal fan of Walt Disney it hurt him to be unable to use the full animation he loved so much to bring Atom to life.

There is a sort of latent fear that goes hand in hand with the use of limited animation, and it is the fear of limited animation gone awry: Still frames, camera pans on single images, talking heads, if a show consists of nothing but blatant animation shortcuts, how can it be called animation? From that perspective, the concept of full animation seems safer, but it too carries its own pitfalls, namely “over-animation.” This is where an animation wants to show off its use of full animation so much that everything is animated and nothing ever stays still, to the point that it is difficult to concentrate on what’s actually happening in a cartoon. That’s not to say that it is impossible to do either extreme well, but that ultimately the answer lies somewhere in the middle given the limitations.

A similar problem occurs in 3D animation. Sometimes an animator will work very hard on a scene and it will look visibly impressive and absolutely gorgeous. However, because of the ease of replication in 3D animation, where with a simple switch of the camera angle you can use the same animation or effect and make it seem like it’s entirely new, many animators become tempted. They are so proud of their work that they want to use it again, and again, and again, until it loses all meaning and impact, much like the animators who wanted everything in a frame to move in order to prove just how amazing their animation could be. At this point, the animators must choose to limit themselves, to realize that their tools while seemingly infinite will not produce an infinitely enjoyable experience.

People are boxed in by their limitations, but within those limitations they find ways to improve and to get the most out of what they have. Then, should those limitations no longer be necessary, the people who worked in that style might continue to do so, having honed their technique all those years, and from there it no longer becomes a necessary step but a stylistic choice. Among those stylistic choices are stylistic limitations, to keep a work from being overwhelmed by seemingly endless potential.

What’s amazing about this concept, style born out of necessity, is how often it occurs in art: Tezuka and Tetsuwan Atom leading to the prevalent style of the anime Industry is one example, but you also have video game music of the 80s and 90s giving birth to the “chiptunes” (electronic music made through sound chips, generally the kind found in video games and computers) scene, and even oils becoming one of the de facto forms of paint, among many others. What’s even more amazing is that when you move well beyond the era in which the artistic style was born, well beyond the memories of anyone who was alive to experience that era, you get fresh minds and fresh faces who can approach material with few preconceived notions.

A while back I attended a outdoors chiptunes concert with some friends. While I was enjoying the music myself, I also noticed that a small boy, no more than four years old, enjoying the hell out of the chiptunes. At first I thought it was cute, but then something occurred to me: this kid had been born well after the heyday of the NES and SNES, and so he wasn’t enjoying chiptunes out of some sense of nostalgia, but rather out of the aesthetics he had acquired in the little time he had been alive. It gave me hope that we would be rid of the idea that just because a style was born out of necessity that it would not be considered inherently inferior.