I bet you've had it happen that when you turn on some cult anime from the early 2000s, you find that something seems to be wrong with it. Here it is all sort of soapy, fuzzy, dull, and the animation itself is very poor in places. And this is all the more not to mention the shamefully low resolution, which is extremely common. And then you turn on the anime, which came out a few decades earlier, and in contrast to the previous one, you are simply surprised at how detailed the picture is in it, how many rich colors and various effects, what smooth animation, and most importantly, modern HD resolution . Moreover, a similar situation occurs even in far from the most popular or high-budget works, but among niche titles that few people would just watch now. In contrast, there are a whole bunch of anime titles from the early 00s, which many viewers still love with all their hearts and revisit with a fair amount of frequency. For example, Cool Teacher Onizuka is a truly cult anime that always gets into all sorts of collections and recommendation lists, but nevertheless it can still be watched exclusively in 480p resolution. And this is not to mention the fact that the animation itself in it is very lame in places. But at the same time, there is an anime Slam Dunk, which in terms of its atmosphere is approximately in the same plane, only now it came out a full six years earlier, and in terms of animation it looks two heads higher, and for some reason now you can easily watch in modern HD resolution. But in this case, you can still argue that these are projects of different scale, behind which are different studios with different budgets, and Slam Dunk itself is much more successful than Cool Teacher Onizuka. Then I'll explain using the example of one very specific ambitious studio, about which I just have a separate very cool video, and I'm talking about the GAINAX studio. Just for comparison, here are the anime that the studio released in the late 80s, when they literally had no money for large-scale projects. And this is how the anime that came out in the early 00s, after the worldwide success of Evangelion, that is, at a time when the studio could afford to implement all the craziest ideas, looks like. But what happened in the mid-90s that all talented animators seemed to have died out in an instant because of which all Japanese had to learn to draw and animate again? And about this strange but amazing phenomenon that happened at the turn of two eras, when the old anime turned out to be literally better than most of the new one, in this video I will tell. To begin with, it’s worth pointing out that there are two very specific anime eras that rely directly on the very method of creating animation, whose junction happened plus or minus in the mid-nineties. This is a traditional, that is, a classical method and not a traditional, namely a digital method. The traditional way of creating animation is to work mainly with celluloid film, which is a sheet of transparent dense plastic, which in its properties is somewhat reminiscent of paper. Roughly speaking, it was on a sheet of celluloid that the contours of heroes or objects were applied, after which a team of colorists manually filled them with paint, then sent them to dry. And when all the work was done, a sheet of celluloid was placed on top of the background image, photographed, then the next sheet was placed, photographed again, and so on. As a result, the changing sequence of photographs created the illusion of movement, which we call the word "animation". And there could be four, eight or twelve such unique frames per time second, and the more there were, the smoother and clearer the very movement of characters or objects in the scene seemed. In words, it sounds easy and simple, but in reality this process was much more dreary, as it was carried out on a huge metal colossus with a bunch of add-ons and light filters that allow you to add a lot of interesting effects to the scene, such as glare from the sun, as if the anime was filmed on a real camera, or shimmering against the background of sea waves, which appeared in almost every second anime from the 80s and 90s . Moreover, in many old animes, this very celluloid film is very clearly visible due to the fact that celluloid as a material easily gets dirty, scratched and attracts all kinds of dust. Moreover, in order to save money, large studios often used the same celluloid sheets in different contexts and situations. So, for example, the cult scene of Sailor Moon's transformation appeared, which appears literally in every episode without any changes , but at the same time, it allows the animators to redirect their efforts to create other original, no less spectacular scenes. And in fact, all these dust particles, paint that has not dried up in places, as well as repeating moments in order to save money , should knock us out of the story, giving our brain a signal that everything we see now on the screen is nothing more than a simple sequence of pictures, which for several people voiced the frame, not even really trying to get into the lips of their heroes. But in the case of the traditional way of creating animation , some amazing magic happens, because along with all this comes the realization that everything you see on the screen is created by someone completely by hand, which makes every frame, every scene, every object and every background a complete work of art. But the craziness itself begins when it turns out that for one frame you may need not even one or two sheets of celluloid, or even all five. After all, the more objects, actors, and emotions they experience in the scene, the more layers will be needed to create one frame. And if you add explosions, blood splatter, camera spans, parallax effect and other crazy, but unrealistically spectacular solutions, then the number of final sheets for just one scene can increase tenfold. So for this reason, high-budget full-length anime like Akira could have a total number of celluloid sheets in the tens of thousands, and each of them was created by a team of animators completely by hand. Just think about how much work it was. So the transition to the digital space, where everything is simpler, easier and faster, and any mistake can be corrected with a simple keyboard shortcut CTRL + Z, was only a matter of time. Moreover, attempts to integrate a digital image into classical two-dimensional animation were made back in the early 80s, during the golden era of Japanese animation. So, for example, in the anime “Golgo 13”, released in 1983, in the initial screen saver one could see real three-dimensional models, and towards the end of the film, a scene created entirely with the help of computer graphics appears. And a year later, in the 84th year, an anime called “Lensman” was released, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri himself, and here the mixture of digital and traditional images turned out to be much more interesting and diverse, since it was the main feature of the whole work. But, given that all this was created using massive prehistoric computers, whose total computing power was still weaker than any modern phone, at that time it was not a simplification of life for the animators themselves, but rather the opposite - it threw them many new extraordinary problems. So at first, using a digital image, and indeed a computer in general, to create animation was something of an interesting experiment, but by no means a widespread practice. And if you suddenly want a separate video of a similar format about how exactly 3D animation developed in anime, then you should like and comment under this video, and then I will understand that this topic definitely deserves my attention. And now, by the middle of the 90s, computers and software are becoming more accessible, understandable and friendlier, so it turns out to be a natural step for all studios to work on animation not only as it was accepted completely physically, but also to spice up the whole thing a little with new ones. technology at the time. This is how attempts to make friends between the traditional way of creating animation and the digital environment begin , only this period will last just a few years. And here we can recall such anime as Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop or Young Revolutionary Utena, for which the main animation was traditionally created using celluloid sheets, after which objects and visual effects created using a computer were added on top. But it was done so gracefully, organically and not pretentiously that the presence of three-dimensional models was not at all conspicuous, and I think that many viewers did not pay any attention to it at all before. But if it was all just from the category of such a small show off, they say, look, but we also do not stand still and slowly learn how to use a computer, then the 2001 anime called “Metropolis” in its ideological basis was created precisely as a synthesis classics and future, eventually becoming the final transition from one to another. And this anime is truly a unique example of how the juxtaposition of tradition and future technology can work on multiple levels of storytelling at once. First, like I said, this anime is made up of both traditional animation and digital imagery in equal measure. And secondly, the manga that formed the basis of this anime was written back in the distant 50s by the father himself, the founder of all Japanese animation, whose name is Osamu Tezuka. Only now the anime film adaptation was taken up by his then still young and ambitious heirs: directors Katsuhiro Otomo and Rintaro. And, thirdly, the content of the story itself, from the plot in which the robots of the old generation oppose the robots of the new generation, and to the visual design, which combines the architecture of the 30s and high-tech inventions of the future - all this non-verbally tells us about the opposition of the old and new. And the way Akira once brought traditional animation to a completely new level of skill, showing the whole world what Japanese animators are really capable of, so after more than a decade, Metropolis became the final chord for her. And it is interesting that the same person is behind both of these works. And by the beginning of the 2000s, literally all major studios had almost completely switched to an exclusively digital way of creating animation, since it was much cheaper, more progressive and provided a huge range of previously unseen opportunities. But if at that time this approach fully justified itself, as it kept pace with progress, then after years for us viewers, it played a very cruel joke. After all, as I said in the video about the GAINAX studio, at that time for all studios, animators and directors, these were completely new technologies, to which everyone, even the most experienced masters of their craft, had yet to get used to and feel some especially subtle moments . So, for obvious reasons, the anime of the beginning of the 2000s, having the technologies of the future, could not offer anything new globally, and even looked somehow crooked and askew in places, because the fact that the animators were just learning to use the new software did not mean at all that they didn't have to work anymore. Because here and there some small visual jambs began to crawl out. But most of all, as I said, the ubiquitous fading of the picture is striking , since literally no matter what anime you turn on, everyone lacks some kind of saturation and brightness, they all look like fifty shades of gray. And if before I thought that then it was just like that fashion for gray and nondescript colors, then later I found information that, having switched to the digital space, the Japanese at that time had not yet learned how to color a picture normally . Indeed, before this process was carried out according to a completely different principle, since most of the anime was created with the expectation that it would be watched on an old television screen, and therefore all colors had to be saturated and bright, without merging into a single mess. But here the animators had yet to find such a balance of colors so that the anime could be comfortably watched on absolutely any device. And I even found such information that the first anime that had no problems with color correction and looked exactly as it should have turned out to be The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which was released already in 2006. And I would not trust this information at least a little if the anime released after 2006 did not really look much brighter and juicier than what came out at the beginning of the 2000s. But it's really not that scary, as the dull color palette adds a certain aesthetic to the anime of that era , which I think a lot of people will like. Another thing is that the digital method has simply simplified the process of creating animation, as it required much less artistic skills and practical experience, which is why the threshold for entering the industry has become much lower. And on a global level, this meant that the average level of animation quality in popular works dipped a lot, because now, with a computer and software installed on it, literally everyone could create anime . And that's not to mention the fact that it has become much easier to outsource some of the work to people who are rarely sincerely interested in making the final product cool. Therefore , a huge number of Korean and French animators began to work on this original Japanese anime . I've been rewatching the first season of Naruto not so long ago and was just surprised at how many frankly hacky scenes there are. And the point here is not even the Pierrot studio itself, which has become a symbol of the terrible animation of the 2000s, but the fact that, as I already said, the quality threshold has dropped significantly. Yes, Naruto has very cool fight scenes that would be simply impossible to create without the use of a computer. But there are also moments that, on the contrary, would be impossible to create in a traditional era, as they look simply disgusting. But since then even professionals in their field were forced to retrain, any experience, even not the most successful one, was valuable. But even this did not become the main problem of digital animation, but the fact that it actually turned out to be limited by the resolution in which it was created. And therefore, the maximum quality limit for most titles of that time is 480p, because at that time such a resolution was more than enough, and computers of that time could hardly offer more. Only now, since then, quality standards have grown several times, and therefore watching old titles on a wide screen, in places, to put it mildly, is uncomfortable. Of course, some enthusiasts improve old anime with the help of neural networks, and sometimes they are even very good at it . But in order to bring the old titles up to modern standards on a professional level, it is necessary to find the source materials, somehow restore the original projects, rebuild and re-render it all, which, according to one idea, fluctuates somewhere between an inexpedient idea and absolute madness. Therefore , we are unlikely to watch such anime as the same "Cool Teacher Onizuka", "Hellsing" from the 90s or "Beck: Eastern Strike Force" in real HD resolution. Here, by the way, not so long ago, the anime "Oban" released an updated remaster, which was diligently engaged in for several years, because for him it was necessary to manually improve literally every frame. But even that is not to say that the image has become many times better, since for this, as I already said, the project had to be assembled from scratch. But with traditional animation, everything is much simpler, because it was originally transferred to analog film, which itself has a very high image resolution, so improving the quality of titles made before the transition to digital space is a much more feasible task. In this way, in 2001, Akira was transferred from analog to digital, although there he had to sweat a lot in order to remove all visual defects, work with color correction so that the digital version fully corresponded to the original and all that. So it's not as easy as it sounds, but it's still a hundred times easier than improving the quality of titles that originally had very low image resolution. And even if some kind of misfortune suddenly occurred and for some reason it is not possible to overtake the film into digital, then if the studio has kept all the source materials, which happens not so rarely, the anime can be simply recompiled. So, for example, it happened with the Dragon Ball Kai anime, which is a remaster of the Dragon Ball Z anime. And to create it, the animators collected the original sources, threw out all the fillers from the story, remounted the contents of the episodes, making the plot as close as possible to the original manga, corrected the color correction and corrected other small jambs, and also re-recorded the entire soundtrack from scratch, adding new openings and endings. Thus, we got, as it were, a new anime, which, at the same time, is entirely based on the materials of the original version. Of course, this is an extremely unique phenomenon and I have not seen anything like it anywhere else, so if you know more examples of how the anime was re-compiled, then again write about it in the comments. But speaking in general, there is definitely a tendency that old and even very old titles are brought up to modern quality standards with an enviable frequency, while many cult anime from the early zeros can still be watched only in 480p resolution, and this situation unlikely to ever change. Fortunately, neural networks are already really able to fix all this, albeit fake, but it will take another couple of years and a button will appear in any online player that allows you to pull up any video up to 4K. But in fairness, I will say the obvious thing that the rejection of the traditional method and the complete transition to the digital space was an inevitable stage of development, and the general decline in the quality of animation in the industry was a forced price for it. Moreover, traditional animation, including, did not immediately become so outstanding, since before that, for another twenty years, it looked very even so-so. But during this time, several generations of animators and directors managed to appear , who, relying on the experience of the past, tried to bring something new to their craft. So digital animation began to develop very quickly and actively after the middle of the 2000s, thanks to which we got dozens of juicy, spectacular and beautiful titles, looking at which it’s not exactly possible to complain about the quality of animation or the saturation of colors. And even more so, at what level Japanese animation is now, here only a real madman will be able to complain. Of course, this is not to mention the content of these very anime, since here there is just the same thing to talk about. And yet, if you were interested in hearing about the history of Japanese animation, and you want more, then put likes, subscribe to the channel, write comments, because I still have a lot to tell, but only on the condition that you will be interested in it listen. And the measure of how this idea will be expedient serves, of course, your activity under this very video. Separately, I send greetings to all the boosters who support me with a coin and help my channel continue to exist. And that's all for me, but for now - for now!
