I had a rare chance in 2017 to meet Hiromi Matsushita, one of Minky Momo’s most prominent animators. Matsushita is still active in the industry, and when I entered the room he was focused on drawing a scene, which he finished in around 10 minutes. I think he didn’t lose his skills yet. I asked him for a drawing, of Momo of course, a request he found too hard even with the help of an image of Momo from google. More than 10 minutes passed, a lot of drawing and redrawing on the same paper, he handed me the illustration saying: “I’m sorry, this isn’t the real Momo.”Now, I’m not saying he couldn’t draw her correctly because he got used to the radically different anime drawings of today, it may be because he just forgot how to draw Momo, or any other reason for all I know. Whatever the reason was, anime drawings and character designs had changed radically, evolved if you will, through recent Japanese animation history. The common answer to the reason behind this change always seemed funny to me, which is “because technology.” It’s not enough to just deny this claim, so I’d like to elaborate more on why and how anime drawings change over time. This is obviously a big topic, so what I’ll say here would be more of my (personal) perspective on the matter. Take it however you like.I should start with defining what I mean with drawings. I’m not talking here about coloring, effects or the like, I mean the bare drawings themselves. This is literally the key drawings (frames), and to a lesser degree the in-betweens. Character designs are their own thing as well. This means that advancements in image quality and related technologies don’t count, since remastering a movie from the ‘70s in HD doesn’t mean the drawings themselves changed at all, forget about improved. Another point is the difference between the drawings on their own and how they move, i.e. the difference between animating and drawing, still there’s a direct influence between these two I’d like to talk about as well.Sometimes, I feel like people look at the animation industry the same way they look at the gaming industry in this regard, not helped by the fact that mainstream high-budget animation productions in the US adopted the same technology for animating (CG). As for the Japanese industry though, it’s and has always been the pencil and paper. I’m not denying all the technological advancements that happened, but they weren’t fundamental changes that improved the quality of a drawing on paper. Even then, there were mostly only two new major technologies used introduced in anime production in the last decade: Digital coloring in the late ‘90s, and Xerography in the late ‘60s. Xerography is basically a technique to copy drawings from normal paper to cels for coloring. Cels obviously can’t be drawn on due to their fragile nature, I believe. I rarely saw anyone talk about this technology before (in anime) so I’ll try to do a simple and short introduction. It was first introduced to Japanese companies through Disney’s Delmants 101, which caught the attention of Toei Douga (Toei Animation now). Toei took the device and modified it, most importantly adding an extra camera used for tracking perspective. Mainly to make drawings larger/smaller as they moved towards/away from the horizon. This device first saw use in Toei’s “Ken and Wolves” TV show early ‘60s. It wasn’t cheap nor easy, so Toei sought a better alternative, one of which was a device called “Trace Machine - ツレースマシン”, first used in “Sasuke” late ‘60s. It’s hard for me to point out how these two devices differed, but one advantage of the Trace Machine was conveying the original delicacy and feeling of the traced drawings better, something Disney’s machine didn’t manage to do quite well. Sasuke was praised for capturing the original soul of the manga, and it wasn’t Sasuke alone, Gekiga adaptations saw a rise in that era due to this machine making capturing the roughness of Gekiga drawings possible. Just look at Tiger Mask or Samurai Giants. I’m not sure here, but it seems like Xerography didn’t saw mainstream use until later in the ‘80s, probably because of costs. Anyway, here’s a Japanese article for more info.As well-known it may be, we need a quick review: Astro Boy. Toei was aiming for a “Disney of the east” status, and really the idea of periodically producing anime was so strange back then, in Japan at least. The ~2 hours movies of the time needed years, so 20 minutes weekly was just insane. And insanely different were those TV productions from the quality movies of the time. You may have heard this before, but really watching clips of Astro Boy is the only way to understand how primitive it was. Nonetheless, it succeeded in becoming the standard for TV anime, and TV anime becoming the standard for anime in general later on even for movies. All the downgrade in quality of animation and everything.This is where most people would start bashing the TV industry, yet I have a different perspective on the matter. The huge output of the Japanese industry is the main reason it reached its current international success and behind Japan’s status as the animation capital of the world. TV in America may have had a catastrophic effect on the industry, and wasn’t without negatives in Japan, but the way TV was handled and evolved is vastly different between the two countries and in turn the two vastly different outcomes we have now. TV in Japan presented a steady stream of relatively quick and flexible projects for Japanese creators to learn and experiment, a stream that only grew further increasing the variety of works and styles, the best thing the Japanese industry is known for now. Almost all well-known Japanese creators today had their start learning and experimenting in TV. The huge amount of works produced was pretty useful for training creators in an environment that relies on learning by doing and still, to this day, mostly lacks any effective prior training system. Look no further than Tomonori Kogawa, who had a degree in fine arts, to see the important addition for properly studying and learning art. Kogawa kinda reminds me of Akino Sugino, not that their styles are similar or anything, it’s just that both care a lot about drawings quality. Ashita no Joe, which he supervised, had probably the best drawings quality of its decade.When it comes to animation though, Toei Douga movies followed a similar realistic approach to Disney in treating characters as if they are actors on a stage. After TV anime emerged the principle remained the same, so creators just tried to replicate life in a working condition much more limited and restrained than that of Toei. Quality improved generally after some adapting and experimenting in this new landscape, but the focus mainly wasn’t on animation quality anyway. It was stories and direction that counted, Tomino and Gundam as a prime example. Even the “anime boom”, initiated by Yamato’s movie in ‘76, didn’t change that. The real change in that regard only came after treating animation in a more free way, free from the obligation of imitating real life I mean, which was the way Yoshinori Kanada treated it.I won’t get into Kanada and his style, sources on him are enough anyway, what we need here is just the result of his wild popularity in the early ‘80s: Changing people’s view to anime. Before Kanada came, the only industry celebrities were directors, while animators stayed unknown. Not anymore. Kanada was maybe, for a time at least, number one in the industry, and this just goes to show the change in mindset: Animation is at the forefront now. And how did Kanada animate? Pretty unrealistically.Let me detour a bit to talk about realism first. I remember some saying that Akira ushered in the age of realism in anime, a claim certainly far from the truth. Akira is rather the pinnacle of this long going approach. Pinpointing a start isn’t of much use in this discussion anyhow, and if not for my appreciation of documenting such info I wouldn’t have brought this up at all, but my argument is that the start of realism in animation is the start of animation itself. Yet an important question must be addressed here: What realism are we talking about? If you think of it as just replicating life, then you’re oversimplifying animation as a whole. There’s only one way for things to move in real life, restrained by physics and all, but animation offers a multitude of approaches to represent movement, ways that imply realism nonetheless. And different approaches were popular at different times throughout anime history. Take Utsunomiya for example, who wasn’t sure about joining the industry at first. He knew how the situation was, and how hard it would be to create anime in the same or similar to Disney and early Toei movies’ style that he so admired. I personally always found it weird how people held Utsunomiya’s style for realistic. His style is maybe considered as the epitome of what Toei’s theatrical realism aspired to achieve, and the main characteristics of that are exaggerated acting and theatrical movements, which is maybe not strictly realistic or natural. Nonetheless, as for weight and spacing, there’s no denying his accuracy and fine execution. Akira, and to a lesser extent Gosenzosama-banbanzai, are the embodiment of his and Takashi Nakamura’s approach in animating.See this scene from Utsunomiya I don’t know much about 70’s and 60’s realism, but the main description I read at least was, again, the theatrical realism influenced by Disney. The Kanada “revolution” was more of an abnormality, since realism returned to be the dominant style of anime after a while, and its evolution didn’t stop anyway. A lot of the pioneers of the next realism wave started or matured under the Kanada age, such as Takashi Nakamura or Utsunomiya. There are different aspects to realism as well. One of Takashi Nakamura’s famous scenes, his scene in Gold Lightan, is considered to be a very realistic depiction of debris and stones in his time at least. Others depict effects and liquids realistically and so on. I feel like this is just a matter of approach and perspective. Utsunomiya for example saw the characters as actors on a stage, Ohira saw them a lot of times as gelatinous almost liquidy shapes, but all those approaches and depictions induce a realistic feeling in a sense, and are finely (and realistically) timed and weighed in their movement.See this scene from Takashi Nakamrua. Notice hand and mouth movement. Of course not all animators can do realistic movement well. Miyazaki and others complained about every other animator in the early 80s’ being a Kanada knock-off, a bad knock-offs in a lot of cases, yet Kanada’s style wasn’t hard to imitate, maybe not perfectly but definitely to a “good enough” degree. Realism on the other hand is hard, even harder in shows that lack talents such as Utsunomiya or time and budget. It was obvious after Akira, or even a while before Akira, which style the industry (or the audience) will prefer. And at that point the industry took a different approach to realism, not the realistic movement approach seen in Akira and movies that established this style in Japan to begin with, but an approach that gives the feel of realism in different ways, first being character designs and increasing the lines and details in drawings generally. If we go back to the ‘60s and some of the ‘70s we can see many shows with designs rich in lines or styles close to realism, but it was mainly the exception and didn’t represent the main trend, some of which being caused by things like Gekiga or personal styles such as Sugino’s or Osamu Dezaki’s. Late ‘70s and early ‘80s mainly had simplistic designs which really helped Kanada’s style grow and spread. Simplicity contradicts realism by nature, and adding more lines or details to a drawing makes it harder to draw/animate. Straightforward, and this is just what happened after the demise of Kanada’s style, more realistic designs that barely move. Just look at any OVA from that period and compare it to any OVA from the Kanada wave. Amazing what 5 years could do!Vampire Sensou in 1990. Interesting character designs, not much movement though.Difficulty of drawing isn’t the sole problem here. Kanada’s style, despite its energetic nature, doesn’t require a lot of frames, actually the low number of frames is one of its strong characteristics. It’s a style born from the constraints of the Japanese industry to begin with, and if you think about it probably no other industry would have given born to such a style but the Japanese one. While you need a substantial number of frames to achieve a convincingly real movement. Maybe I’m over exaggerating here, but the Japanese TV industry tried two decades to achieve realism in an environment not suited for it and found Kanada’s style that embodied the sole of this industry, just to abandon it for an unconvincing realism. Kanada’s OVA “Birth” in 1984 is probably the important turning point. Maybe you could say that the story of OVAs is also the story of Japanese anime, as OVAs reflected the state of the industry in general in each period. Maybe because OVAs were the direct way to reach the audience without the need for a TV channel or a distributor or even a high budget, in turn being a demonstration of the audience’s preference. It was definitely the free expression window for creators, young independent ones especially, free from any obligations for any big company. Obviously big companies were there, even more so in the late ‘80s after OVAs matured, but all in all it was the will of the creators that shined through. OVAs also played a decisive role in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when anime (TV especially) was facing a hard time due to different reason beyond the scope of this article. This led to OVAs influencing the development of the industry in interesting ways, hard to imagine if you look at the state of OVAs now. The Japanese industry relied heavily on TV since pretty early on, so any problem facing TV anime is a problem for the industry as a whole. Middle/Late ‘80s wasn’t the best time for TV, a long story with multiple causes such as the change in demographics and emergence of video games, but our concern here is the paradigm shift that happened. For the most part and up to that point anime revenue came from games or manga or something else, a separate product. Not the show itself, meaning that its quality wasn’t a concern as long as it supported the primary product well. This obviously didn’t hold Ichiro Itano back from doing his wonderful circus scenes, or Tomino from executing his different depiction of mecha anime, but those again were creative acts on the personal level not the project as a whole, and in the end it wasn’t Tomino’s direction and vision that saved Gundam, it was the Gunpla.It’s a fine system as long as the audience keeps on buying your primary product, something a lot of companies struggled with later on, reaching the OVA system where you just sell the show itself rather than a separate product. A similar system to movies, but simpler, safer and with less parties involved. We take internet for granted today, but in the ‘80s OVAs were the only choice for creators wanting to self-publish something weird or radically different, something that obviously won’t be backed by big companies.Anyway, selling the show itself is completely different approach with completely different focus points. Quality comes first now, and first of all is drawings and animation quality, since anime is a visual medium after all. Without constraints or demands from distributors or any tight schedules, and with making less episodes, you’re able to raise quality considerably, the main selling point of OVAs. Patlabor, Gunbuster or Gundam 0083 all had high quality and were big successes, not only setting the standards for visual quality in anime, but also showing how important visual quality in anime is, both for companies and audiences. After this model matured, attempts to replicate this success in TV anime started, where the potential is much bigger due to the wider reach, which led to the contemporary late-night model we have now, maybe the most successful anime model till quite recently. Evangelion is considered to have played an active role in establishing this model, and in increasing visual quality in TV anime generally, and Ryusuke Hikawa claims that what he calls the “Quality Revolution” in the anime industry started in the ‘90s. I also think that Evangelion played no small part in establishing the production committee system we have now in every show, but I’m not quite sure. Before I end this I want to link two nice resources for further reading. The mecha history research and an article that came in Akira’s Animation Archive, both by Ryusuke Hikawa.
Jun 5, 2019 • Subscribe
Vampire Wars, Akira, Tomorrow's Joe, Gunbuster, Samurai Giants
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