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Wow that was a major slip up on my part, you're totally right, I meant Arcsys.
I deeply miss cel animation, sadder yet is even during this nostalgia boom it seems like no one is even trying to keep that look/feel alive.
- Thread starter Zutrax
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This effect is the best when it's used to show reflecting water.There's quite a lot honestly, one of my favorite things about cel is just how "bright" and "glowy" lights look due to light effects just being a straight up real life glow of a lamp instead of emulated lighting. You get some really amazing effects like this:
But there's plenty of other stuff, like frames wobbling slightly, sharper line art, painted backgrouns, sometimes you get shadows under separate cel layers.
Another notable thing is just the tactile feel, you can see some grain, and sometimes even dust and hairs that get into the machinery. Some modern releases will try and "degrain" these sorts of effects from the transfers, so you may not see it and it kind of looks off in blu-ray releases for older stuff. I prefer to keep it as original as possible.
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This holographic/shimmer effect that so many old shows used instantly sends my brain onto another transcendent plane of nostalgic comfort. It's one of my favorite things I see when watching old stuff.
To be fair, Hanna Barbera stuff made up like 75% of what most kids considered "older cartoons" growing up, and that stuff was truly awful looking.
From all the examples mentioned in the OP, i feel like only shooting movies in a "strange" format can be close to what the use of celluloids implies in a production sense, i.e. the use of a specific technological tool to create and process. Even then, film processing is still fairly common and film cameras are easy to find in good, professional condition (if perhaps not cheaply).
Apparently Cruella was initially supposed to be the villain in the Rescuers but since it's been over 40 years and Disney has always been secretive I'm not sure if this was ever confirmed. There are some initial sketches floating around the Internet which are supposedly to be of Cruella when she was still the villain for the Rescuers. When I first watched The Rescuers I definitely felt the resemblance tbh.
I think that part of the huge backlash is because the xerox era started immediately after Sleeping Beauty, which is oh so gorgeous and will basically be never matched.
This holographic/shimmer effect that so many old shows used instantly sends my brain onto another transcendent plane of nostalgic comfort. It's one of my favorite things I see when watching old stuff.
The glow just feels so right.
No one quite dug into the dirt and grit and wobble of cel animation like Mike Judge. His work definitely lost some heart with the move to digital.
Man, I want a second season of Land of the Lustrous so bad. Studio Orange really knows how to approach 3D animation and how to mix it with 2D at the right time, like for closeups, even if it's just a split second
What FLCL had going for it is that it was a "blue sky" project for Gainax where they specifically set out to learn and experiment in a variety of digital techniques. It was a crash course, and they wanted to make it look as good as possible as a proof of concept. The series itself was secondary to that objective, but they knocked it out of the park anyway.
Now the shame is it's stuck at 480 resolution, since it was mastered that way. Upscaling can only go so far.
Uh no.
King of the Hill was a very different show and had an animation style guide that reflected that. It was a stylistic choice and had nothing to do with the medium.
I wonder what was the last anime produced using cells? The latest one I can think of was Noir from 2001 which by that time most anime's had already moved on to digital.
With so much advancements in technology, machine learning and all of that, it's a bit sad that no one has figure out a way to exactly emulate that cell look in digital form, or sadly maybe not enough people care to purse it.
With so much advancements in technology, machine learning and all of that, it's a bit sad that no one has figure out a way to exactly emulate that cell look in digital form, or sadly maybe not enough people care to purse it.
It's because the animator's started ignoring Yamamuro's reference design which everyone hates.
See:
Shintani was the character designer for the new Broly movie.
Yamamuro was the character designer for Dragon Ball Super and effectively the animation 'boss' . All the animators are meant to stick to the character designer's reference designs.
I had heard about that rumor too, I always thought it was more early draft stuff that was floated around but never had any effort put towards it when it came to the movie.
Ya the shift from Cinderella on 70mm film to 101 dalmatians is a pretty stark contrast in terms of animation style and art, it also doesn't help that walt died like 5 years after 101 dalmatians and ushered in the make it like Walt would have wanted era of disney not knowing really what to do. Honestly out of all the Xeroxed films by disney I would say the best examples are Winnie the Pooh and 101 dalmations. The rest of the films at that time though nostalgic for me ar objectively not that great.
Though the biggest issue with the xeroxed films isn't to do with art so much as budgetary and story issues.
Uh yeah.
I've seen this guide. And Brad Bird's story guide to boarding on the show. That's a style guide like any show, east or western would have, just rules for acting and drawing for the board and layout teams.
My post was pointing out how Mike Judge's style was really enhanced by the use of cels. Notice how in a lot of his earlier work he would animate the whole head or body just for mouth movements. These are deliberate choices that sought to highlight the variance in the cel ink and paint from frame to frame. Even the slight ripple in color from the cel to cel from the paint enhanced this "grittier" look. As I pointed out, the switch to digital saw a loss in these nuances that complimented Judge's style well.
It's because the animator's started ignoring Yamamuro's reference design which everyone hates.
See:
Shintani was the character designer for the new Broly movie.
Yamamuro was the character designer for Dragon Ball Super and effectively the animation 'boss' . All the animators are meant to stick to the character designer's reference designs.
Shintani's designs are so much better. That said - the animators definitely weren't ignoring Yamamuro's designs - Yuya Takahashi spent the whole movie channeling classic Yamamuro.
I don't know that much about the production side of Bevis and Butthead but the gritty dancing of the paint on the cels definitely works in its favour. That said King of the Hill wasn't exactly going for the same grungy look at feel - especially since King of the Hill started with cel animation and didn't switch to digital until midway through season 5.
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I feel you man, there's something about animation produced on cels. It may be nostalgia talking but... as much as I absolutely love some modern shows, nothing reaches that level of physicality that cel production brings to the table. Digital animation feels sterile by comparison.
but yea that ship has sailed. It's just too convenient and so much cheaper to do it digitally.
but yea that ship has sailed. It's just too convenient and so much cheaper to do it digitally.
I had never considered the "glow" effects of animation with backlighting or what have you. That's pretty awesome to think about and I feel really stupid for never having thought much about it lol.
Yeah - it's actually hard to find information on. My understanding is there were two main types; the first where a blacked out cel was lit from underneath and those effects later composited and the second type was where front lit luminescent or reflective paints that bounced the light back into the camera.
I'd kill for a detailed look at those amazing practical effects from cel animation. Because I still don't really understand it.
King of the Hill wasn't looking to illicit the same level of "grunge" as Beavis and Butthead, but there were still strokes of that Mike Judge feel in the animation, especially in the earlier run of the show (which is why posted a clip from the pilot). In that pilot clip I posted at 1:23 for Hank's "Detroit" line for example, notice the extreme wobble on Hank's head even when it's holding "still" and only his mouth is moving. Same thing for the tail end of Boomhaur's line at 1:12. These little moments really went a long way to keep that enhanced wobbly cel look that Mike went for. Even before the switch to digital, the show was already losing some of this remaining "grunge" however.Shintani's designs are so much better. That said - the animators definitely weren't ignoring Yamamuro's designs - Yuya Takahashi spent the whole movie channeling classic Yamamuro.
I don't know that much about the production side of Bevis and Butthead but the gritty dancing of the paint on the cels definitely works in its favour. That said King of the Hill wasn't exactly going for the same grungy look at feel - especially since King of the Hill started with cel animation and didn't switch to digital until midway through season 5.
It's a digital creation. No cels were used. Nobody was inking or painting anything by hand.
Princess and the Frog was animated with Toon Boom software.
It's been a while since I've watched it but was also pretty common in late cel animated shows shot on film but assembled on tape to often hold on the tape master than shoot the plate again. It took a lot of the dynamism out of the animation as you'd have these really awkward holds that just looked like they hit pause on a VCR (which I guess more or less they were). It did open up a lot more timing options in the edit but it never felt right.
Anyway my point was the idosyncracies that were present in Bevis and Butthead but not in King of the Hill weren't to do with the switch to digital.
This thread is about cel animation. There's still plenty of digital 2D animation being produced.
I mean I get you, there's a tactile feel to cel animation you can't get otherwise. It just doesn't make any sense to do it on any level lol.
There is a certain niche modern hobbyist-industry that revolves around doing things the hard way. It is curious there isn't one for cel animation. I suppose animating on cels is just too hard for independent businesses and the talent left over from its heydey are all in other higher paying fields.
This animation... I feel like this is based on something? But I have trouble finding it on Google. I feel like I've seen a lot of these "really trippy, super colorful, very sexualized, extra gross and edgy" animations before in music videos, maybe?
I getcha, the cel process felt more organic which you rarely see nowadays.
I feel that the closest thing that tries to replicate that look and feel are possibly the new Looney Tunes cartoons, the ones that aren't flash animated I mean.
According to Wikipedia, Sazae-san switched over to digital in 2015. Considering the rest of the industry switched over pretty much right at the turn of the millenium that's pretty crazy considering animation cels have to be manufactured.
There's quite a lot honestly, one of my favorite things about cel is just how "bright" and "glowy" lights look due to light effects just being a straight up real life glow of a lamp instead of emulated lighting. You get some really amazing effects like this:
But there's plenty of other stuff, like frames wobbling slightly, sharper line art, painted backgrouns, sometimes you get shadows under separate cel layers.
Another notable thing is just the tactile feel, you can see some grain, and sometimes even dust and hairs that get into the machinery. Some modern releases will try and "degrain" these sorts of effects from the transfers, so you may not see it and it kind of looks off in blu-ray releases for older stuff. I prefer to keep it as original as possible.
The best part is that these types of effects were used somewhat sparsely. When the process switched over to digital productions would start to throw bloom lighting at every single shot. A lot of shows in the 00s had a rather pale and washed out look as a result, like everything was filmed inside a sauna.
Akira had a massive budget as well.It's a bit unfair to compare modern tv digital animation to stuff like Akira. A lot of 80s tv anime looked like this:
EDIT: Not really responding to anything in particular, just I think we tend to remember mostly the cream of the crop.
The remaster they did for the bluray is glorious. None of these gifs do it justice.
Fuck yeah. I love how they went all-out on the glowing laser blasts and explosions in this movie. And the animation holds up to how you remember Transformers, while the cartoon... doesn't 😬
I know there are digital techniques that can replicate the physicality of photographed cel, but from what I've seen they might slow down production. It's the problem of spending time to replicate elements that photographing a cel got you for free.
I always felt Trigger tries really hard to preserve the warm and organic look of 90s cel animation, and it feels like their techniques are a direct continuation of how FLCL was made.
What I do find interesting is that Japanese cel animation production still somehow looks physically different from some notable western cel work, like classic Disney. There seems to be more florescence, making me wonder if the camera systems or paint used was sometimes different.
I always felt Trigger tries really hard to preserve the warm and organic look of 90s cel animation, and it feels like their techniques are a direct continuation of how FLCL was made.
What I do find interesting is that Japanese cel animation production still somehow looks physically different from some notable western cel work, like classic Disney. There seems to be more florescence, making me wonder if the camera systems or paint used was sometimes different.
You lot posting Akira, when it should be The Thief and the Cobbler that should be the technological yardstick for animation.
https://web.archive.org/web/2017070...e.edu/~carlson/history/PDFs/hanna-barbera.pdf
And while we're on the topic of digital animation, we can even go back further to the 1970s when we started to see the foundations of such a technique.
"A Color Animation System Based on the Multiplane Technique -SIGGRAPH '77"
"Merging and Transformation of Raster Images for Cartoon Animation -SIGGRAPH '81"
And a little further back, we see Hunger, which used a computer to interpolate the keyframes in the short film, and a technical follow up on their earlier short "Metadata" which used static images, but with none of the animation you would see in the later short.
https://vimeo.com/38238456
By the time we hit the 1980s, we're starting to see experiments on digital colouring come into fruition, with examples like New York IT's colour test, and that famous John Lasseter Where the Wild Thing's Are test pitch which took advantage of the inherent nature of digital animation by putting 2D digitally coloured models with 3D environments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV_JzaO9hIQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIkTC37iN4g
Which eventually leads us to the Hanna Barbera example from above, which likely were the first to utilise digital ink and paint on a commercial level (examples of the technique used would be found here), of which they would continue to use up until around the early '90s when they transitioned back to traditional cels (one of the reasons why Scooby Doo on Zombie Island looks the way it does (and all the better for it, I think)), the main reason likely being not bothering to upgrade the hardware.
Well, this took a turn for me. I expected just a brief shoutout towards a legendary unfinished movie, and instead gave a brief throughline from experimenral usage of digital animation to its early commercial usage. Either way, I hope I educated at least a few of you.
Funnily enough, Hanna Barbera were probably the very first studio to have adopted digital colouring for its animation way back in the mid '80s.
https://web.archive.org/web/2017070...e.edu/~carlson/history/PDFs/hanna-barbera.pdf
And while we're on the topic of digital animation, we can even go back further to the 1970s when we started to see the foundations of such a technique.
"A Color Animation System Based on the Multiplane Technique -SIGGRAPH '77"
"Merging and Transformation of Raster Images for Cartoon Animation -SIGGRAPH '81"
And a little further back, we see Hunger, which used a computer to interpolate the keyframes in the short film, and a technical follow up on their earlier short "Metadata" which used static images, but with none of the animation you would see in the later short.
https://vimeo.com/38238456
By the time we hit the 1980s, we're starting to see experiments on digital colouring come into fruition, with examples like New York IT's colour test, and that famous John Lasseter Where the Wild Thing's Are test pitch which took advantage of the inherent nature of digital animation by putting 2D digitally coloured models with 3D environments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV_JzaO9hIQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIkTC37iN4g
Which eventually leads us to the Hanna Barbera example from above, which likely were the first to utilise digital ink and paint on a commercial level (examples of the technique used would be found here), of which they would continue to use up until around the early '90s when they transitioned back to traditional cels (one of the reasons why Scooby Doo on Zombie Island looks the way it does (and all the better for it, I think)), the main reason likely being not bothering to upgrade the hardware.
Well, this took a turn for me. I expected just a brief shoutout towards a legendary unfinished movie, and instead gave a brief throughline from experimenral usage of digital animation to its early commercial usage. Either way, I hope I educated at least a few of you.
Yo this video literally popped in my YT feed the other day, will also happily recommend everyone watch this, he pointed out a TON of stuff going on that I've never noticed before.
Fuck yeah. I love how they went all-out on the glowing laser blasts and explosions in this movie. And the animation holds up to how you remember Transformers, while the cartoon... doesn't 😬
It's too bad the movie has some distractingly bad in-betweening
Yeah i miss cel animattion too, but digital, when used correctly, can do some truly amazing thing that was never achievable back then!
Good thing you posted megalobox, that was the first one that came to mind!
As for something recent that looks a bit like back then, osomatsu-san looks pretty good (it helps that the artstyle is an old one)... it's still digital as fuck, but it looks pretty good imo :
Good thing you posted megalobox, that was the first one that came to mind!
As for something recent that looks a bit like back then, osomatsu-san looks pretty good (it helps that the artstyle is an old one)... it's still digital as fuck, but it looks pretty good imo :
A bit off topic, but cel animation media that get re-released in blu-ray sometimes get cleaned up and doctored in a way that a lot of detail gets lots from the original version.
Case to point: Sailor Moon. (DVD on the left, Blu-ray on the right)
You can see the texture of the paper and the rain drops in the DVD version. The Blu Ray version smooths everything out so much that you lose that some of the details in the BG, including the rain.
Original Source
Case to point: Sailor Moon. (DVD on the left, Blu-ray on the right)
You can see the texture of the paper and the rain drops in the DVD version. The Blu Ray version smooths everything out so much that you lose that some of the details in the BG, including the rain.
Original Source
This is something I think it subtle, but important, for image quality for most anime styles. The grain gives the images a slight texturing effect which prevents the large swaths of solid color from being overly gaudy. It's sort of like how artists will sometimes use different grains of paper, especially for sketch drawings. Give's an element of "fake detail" which pleases the eye and blends everything into a coherent image. In fact, the blending effect itself is important as it makes everything "feel" like it's in the same setting, similar to how lighting in photography is important in making photos not looked shop'ed.There's quite a lot honestly, one of my favorite things about cel is just how "bright" and "glowy" lights look due to light effects just being a straight up real life glow of a lamp instead of emulated lighting. You get some really amazing effects like this:
But there's plenty of other stuff, like frames wobbling slightly, sharper line art, painted backgrouns, sometimes you get shadows under separate cel layers.
Another notable thing is just the tactile feel, you can see some grain, and sometimes even dust and hairs that get into the machinery. Some modern releases will try and "degrain" these sorts of effects from the transfers, so you may not see it and it kind of looks off in blu-ray releases for older stuff. I prefer to keep it as original as possible.
The glow just feels so right.
This is a good example of older animation with a healthy amount of grain. There's really not that many colors going on, but it still looks fantastic because the grain makes it feel more detailed than it really is.
...why? What do they have against paper grain? The blu-ray version looks blurrier and less detailed than the DVD version!A bit off topic, but cel animation media that get re-released in blu-ray sometimes get cleaned up and doctored in a way that a lot of detail gets lots from the original version.
Case to point: Sailor Moon. (DVD on the left, Blu-ray on the right)
You can see the texture of the paper and the rain drops in the DVD version. The Blu Ray version smooths everything out so much that you lose that some of the details in the BG, including the rain.
Original Source
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I've honestly taken this sort of thing as the kind of action that is made in the interest of thinking people would prefer something that looks "newer and cleaner", but in reality the people who buy the blu-rays for the sake of quality preservation care about the exact opposite thing.
It reminds me a bit of TV makers continuing to force the idea/tech behind frame interpolation and motion smoothing. People who don't know any better will, on a shallow surface level, find it "better looking", but not truly understand that it actually looks so, so much worse.
I thought the whole point of the digital stuff was to make it easier and efficient to animate? I personally don't mind the CG stuff because I know that if the animators had time these animations would look much better. Citing DB super as an example. Quality doesn't compare to the classic stuff but it definitely had big moments.
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You should skim the thread a bit, some of the questions you asked are answered. But mostly it's not about animation quality in of itself, it's about the feel of the end product due to the way it was produced. Think of it like Vinyl records, doesn't matter if it's bad music, good music, or what genre, it all has that "warm crackle" feeling. That's what I'm talking about, the feel of cel isn't about how good or bad the art/animation is, it's about the grain, tactile feeling, the painted colors, the bloom/lighting, the way it comes out in the way it's produced as opposed to the techniques of the artists themselves.
I must have missed that. I do agree that those grains and textures are missed though. Kind of like classic hand drawn fighting games. Sf3 to 4 was such an awful transition and experience. Using an anime as a reference; The original Berserk OVA as compared to the CG trash we got a few years ago.
Also I do believe(know) the technology is capable of reproducing these effects. However I think they simply don't want to. Perhaps the studios believe the smoother look is better 🤷🏿♂️. Or maybe not worth the effort.
The Ghibli stuff only got better imo over time. Sure ,I prefer the old cell animated style but, their newer stuff is definitely no slouch in terms of quality.
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I don't understand how they messed this up so badly.A bit off topic, but cel animation media that get re-released in blu-ray sometimes get cleaned up and doctored in a way that a lot of detail gets lots from the original version.
Case to point: Sailor Moon. (DVD on the left, Blu-ray on the right)
You can see the texture of the paper and the rain drops in the DVD version. The Blu Ray version smooths everything out so much that you lose that some of the details in the BG, including the rain.
Original Source
Meanwhile, Revolutionary Girl Utena got a beautiful blu-ray (click to enlarge and fall in love with that gorgeous soft film grain)
