I'm with you. the old style was a labor of love, with each hand-painted cell. Now with all this computer-colored and animated stuff, it's just not the same. Stuff like Macross-style missile trails look way cooler when hand-drawn than when computer-rendered too. There seems to be more detail in the older animation to boot. The new stuff looks so stark and sterile, and it does not have the same attention to detail, on average.
I think it all depends on how they do it. I do like the old stuff a lot. I also like it when they go back and clean them up. The DVD rerelease of Yamato is great(not the new redo one - haven't seen it yet). They clean up the video really well. Though Shima still walks through the hatch panel on Mars when they go to investigate Starsha's sisters ship that crashed. Legend of the Galactic Heroes did a great job of this as well. Even added a few scenes.
But I like the new stuff just as much.
Now one that I really dislike that is the new Lupin series that is trying to look retro. It looks atrocious.
There's good and bad in every TV season and every decade's worth of films and OAVs, and at any rate, personal taste is always going to dictate what's aesthetically pleasing to every individual viewer.
I used to dislike the look of the 70s Nippon Sunrise shows like the original Gundam or Raideen - the sketchy look of the characters always seemed "off" to me somehow - but either I got used to it or saw what they were going after and now I really like the way it looks. The design of Gundam Unicorn, with Yas finally back in the mix, is just about perfect.
There are a whole slew of shows from the 90s that to my eye have really unattractive character designs, but they went on to become huge hits, so go figure. The popularity of Tenchi Muyou, for instance, will remain a complete mystery to me. I can recall watching one episode on CN that basically contained zero animation in the first ten minutes - it was all stills, slow digital pans, slow digital zooms, people talking with their mouths covered. Clutch Cargo had more technical accomplishment than that one episode.
I'm a fan of Toriyama's manga work, but it looks to me when Dragonball moved into the "Z" era they completely dropped whatever made his work charming. Obviously that's a minority view, but it's all mine.
The new Yamato series is doing a great job of walking the tightrope between devotion to the original and presenting the show with an original look. The Resurrection film had completely different character designs, a total departure from the faux-Matsumoto character work that has dominated the franchise, and initially I wasn't sure how well they were going to fit, but the designs, and the film as a whole, were really entertaining.
I am lovin' every minute of the new Lupin III series. 3 and 4 haven't been as distinctive as the first two but that first episode is all kinds of Monkey Punch crazy. It looks like nothing else on television.
I don't even follow any Anime releases from the last 5-6 years.
What I can say is the style of animation and storytelling changed around the 2000s era. Sure, there was some lame ducks in the 80s and 90s, but alot of Anime just seem to be all style and no substance.
A perfect example of this is Hellsing. I bought the first volume of the tv series and thought it was horrid. The animation was filled with that lens-flare adobe photoshop washed out color. Is it just me or are modern action scenes just hard to follow, I get ADD while watching them as opposed to the organic-looking hand drawn animation. The story, ugh. Okay, I like vapid stuff like some of those early 90s "ultraviolence" releases, but the new stuff takes itself seriously, wheras the older stuff follows that Riki-Oh formula.
Just my opinion, its the large reason I'm not into new Anime. It isn't like I have a intense hate for it, its just not for me.
Boy, I HATED Hellsing. I had to review the first DVD for the old AnimeJump website. There was about five minutes worth of genuinely interesting visuals buried in 100 minutes of junk, Victoria Seras' mysteriously changing breast sizes and everything. I've read some of the manga, and that at least was visually interesting, but the anime series was not. At all.
Got a lot of interesting comments from that review.
davemerrill wrote:Boy, I HATED Hellsing. I had to review the first DVD for the old AnimeJump website. There was about five minutes worth of genuinely interesting visuals buried in 100 minutes of junk, Victoria Seras' mysteriously changing breast sizes and everything. I've read some of the manga, and that at least was visually interesting, but the anime series was not. At all.
Got a lot of interesting comments from that review.
I'd love to read the review if you could link it. Seras was just a plot device, the token chick in a short skirt. I think I turned it off during the episode where the women gives the fellow a blow job while he kills someone, its kind of like the director was thinking "oh, that would be cool, we'll do it just to say we did it!". From what I remember, there was little plot in the episode and that's the only memorable moment.
Fanboys and girls of the show always defend it to the nth degree. Weather its the boring a predictable lead alucard, the androgynous cliche integra for the yuri fans, the previously mentioned token seras, its what embodies whats wrong with anime today. All style, zero substance.
I also wasn't a big fan of "Angel Sanctuary", "Maetel Legend", "Melty Lancer", or "Magical Meow Meow Taruto", which itself should be classified as a crime against humanity.
I also wasn't a big fan of "Angel Sanctuary", "Maetel Legend", "Melty Lancer", or "Magical Meow Meow Taruto", which itself should be classified as a crime against humanity.
LOL that made me chuckle reading that.
Haven't seen the others mentioned but Angel Sanctuary SUCKED. When a friend told me the plot of that OAV was a guy wanted to have sex with his sister, I laughed, then I got a strange odd look like he was being serious. Well, he was
Ok, lets take a look at this on the flip side and find something that sucked with old anime. If we're saying anything pre 2000s is old anime, well its not "technically" anime, but Apollo Smile sucked. She was a real annoying poser that somehow got famous when anime was just starting to get popular. For some reason, SciFi thought it would be a good idea for her to host several specials from 97-99' on their network containing anime marathons. I heard she was real nice at the several conventions she showed up to during the mid to late 90s, but the whole persona she put on as the "live action anime girl" was just plain silly.
Darn it, I had a big reply that just got eaten. I can't get that Wayback Machine link to work at all for me, I might have to screen-cap the thing when I get home and post it as an image or something.
Looking back on the whole Apollo Smile thing, I can't help but think she was a few years ahead of her time. If she'd come on the scene in, say, 2002 rather than 1995, she would have had a larger audience of newer, younger anime fans ready to accept her as one of them, rather than the crowd who saw her take the stage at Anime East after Mio and felt it was disrespectful, who always saw her thing as opportunistic. Certainly her act as the sci-fi fandom performer who embraces the geeky side of things is something I see people doing all the time these days.
I met her at Animazement one year and she was friendly and down to earth, not at all the diva I was expecting. Also: shorter than you'd think.
