Artistic Evolution of Attack On Titan

in this video we're going to break down every single Improvement in attack on tittis art from the shading at detail to anatomy and paneling and to give you a heads up this is probably the most drastic change we've ever seen in this series and I'm not the only one to say this unlike the culture War which was sparked by Attack on Titan's ending dividing the fan base into skitso and copium addicts the community overall agrees that the art used to be kind of mid whil it did eventually become a spectacle Masterpiece it took isayama many many years to reach that point to be fair it does make sense Attack on Titan was in publication for 10 years and has 139 chapters to boot so the real question is how did it evolve exactly Attack on Titan differs from art Evolutions as isama basically tore out the foundations of Attack on Titan to make something actually good unlike the unlike the Final Chapter he is also one of the very few people we've discussed along with Fujimoto who just wasn't born with absurd amounts of talent one glance at his one shot says all you need to know about that let's just jump right into this by discussing the anatomy as it is probably the biggest eyesore in any art style but speaking of art style what is it exactly in layman's terms art style is the culmination of artist personal tastes techniques and avoidance of other techniques hing's mangaka hated drawing the left eye so much he just didn't he just did it nice argument Senator why don't you back it up with a source my source is that I made it it is generally very hard to make her own original style but there are two rules to it firstly you got to be consistent and secondly you cannot mix and match different anatomical elements and then just say it just arsty bro berserk would feel odd if guts looked like HK the same way Thorin would have been an iore in this abom of an anime my friend just doesn't let me rest look at this it just doesn't end these R Styles differ in every single way so you have to stick to a certain Spectrum so if you're going with a traditional humanoid but cat-faced anime characters you have to commit to that it was not giving the characters alien isolation foreheads needless to say attack on T's proportions were very off for that be with the oversized heads stubby limbs misplaced limbs or all of the above this panels out to me the most when researching for this video because I just wasn't able to understand what was happening with this skeleton I tried to connect the rough skeletal lines and well it still doesn't make any sense well yes Force shortening is in full swing here if you overlay the rough skeleton it just doesn't even align with the alterations the left shoulder which is further away is bigger than the right arm the fundamental law of force shortening is that whatever is closer is bigger this shows a lack of anatom iCal understanding on isayama's part in cases when he doesn't intend to alter anatomy and in cases when he does intend to but thankfully over time he does get a grasp on it and so this is the final product every single character is anatomically Flawless whether that be in stationary positions or in Dynamic camera angles this coupled with isayama's new found understanding of human body language makes these characters feel almost alive aside from the bodies another major part of anatomy that changed is the faces they used to be very flat cartoon and honestly stiff there wasn't any Nuance or subtlety in these expressions and often times this just resulted in exaggerated faces this is good type of exaggeration where the expression is clear and Loud while it is formed around the character design not the other way around also um I have a pretty big Revelation to tell you I don't know if you're read you probably need to sit down for this one faces in anime were never meant to look human across anime and manga faces are usually drawn to be cute and as a result they're Illustrated in the image of a cat yes a cat huh if you look at most anime characters in a profile they have muzzles I frankly just never understood why this was there but now I've been enlightened you may be asking yourself now what does this have to do with Attack on Titan and uh frankly nothing actually and that's exactly the point because Attack on Titan is one of the very few mangas where faces were drawn in an anatomically cohesive standpoint at least as correct as big eyes can be despite isayama leaning towards a far more realistic style and this exploding in his face at one point this style eventually became very well-rounded and frankly realistic to a degree these faces now capture so much Nuance so much emotion and honestly I feel like Attack on Titan is one of the very few mangas where a lot of the characters have very different faces speaking of realistic one more thing that became realistic is the shading shading is by far the most agonizing thing about early Attack on Titan as it has no cohesive Direction no Dynamic no Clarity or consistency I know it may seem like I'm dogging on it a bit too much but can you really blame me after what isayama did he fumbled the tumbling That was supposed to be the rumbling not once not twice but three times I'll never [ __ ] how how is that possible PTSD is a [ __ ] um back to shading shading at the beginning had no cohesiveness the hatching was sometimes used for shading other times for detail and other times for particle effects frankly it was all over the place what makes this technique so good is the fact that is a concentrated cohesive piece of raw detail only reason why berserk is not consumed by it is because kentor rira knew when to use it and what its purpose was he never relied on it for fundamental detail and only use it as a complimentary piece isayama on the other hand uses similar details for massive Fields speed lines smoke character details and everything in between this just makes everything a soulless mess when is sayama wasn't drawing lopsided Fields he drew shading without it really acting like shading it never really morphed around the characters and it never really portrayed a proper geometric shape it just was a filter on top of everything was the shading had many of its faults it did have one positive something I can't say about the ending though this shading definitively made the Titans a lot lot scarier the abundance of shading and rough Line work naturally gave these creatures a sense of mystery Terror and uneasiness it is ironic though as soon as I discovered the singular plus side to isayama's early shading it got removed in favor of Grey tones grey tones became a major part of Attack on Titan style and to say it gave everything a lot more clarity and style would be an understatement things look a lot more alive as the Shadows actually behave like Shadows unlike this furball thing it also started to get used as the preferred method of shading so hatching finally became a complimentary piece now its usage is usually isolated around the eyes a issue arrives from this however what about the grittiness of the Titans did it also get lost and the answer is so clear it is almost as clear as my segue to our sponsor this video is brought to you by me so please subscribe as for the shading eama would often just dim the Shadows to near pitch black levels and this made the style lose zero grittiness while also being a lot clearer so far you would get the idea that isama was just a random tentless dweeb who started scratching away at the paper and learned to draw through brute force of him smashing his head against the wall and you would be kind of correct he was never really talented as an illustrator as his Attack on Titan one shot was shoty to say the least it was messy sketchy and unrefined I'm mentioning this because I was planning to have a segment for paneling where I would just defend his eye for perspective but then I soon realized it wasn't the best either don't get me wrong the way eama Force's perspective to convey scale of these Titans at times is magical but it simply doesn't come close to his later iterations take these panels for example they convey the exact same series of stories but one is drawn with multiple panels was the other one is a singular full page spread is captures so much momentum so many sequences of events in just a single page spread it's frankly Spectacular Now compare that to this I think this goes to show just how much information a single snapshot can capture if an artist thinks at the box and utilizes every single technique he has at his disposal this panel is frankly a [Music] masterpiece

Channel: Leo Armada

Views: 11,063

Keywords: Shinkei no Kyojin, Manga, Ending, AOT, art

Id: GzQeO7NzSxc

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023