Ask John: What’s the Debate On Digital Animation?

Question:
What’s all this talk about digital animation in anime? What part is the digital part? Why don’t people like it? In my opinion, it looks pretty good (e.g. Love Hina). They say it’s stilted or unnatural?

Answer:
Digital animation has increasingly become a factor in anime in recent years as technology has gotten better, less expensive, and faster. Digital animation varies in degree, but should not be confused with the use of CG. Anime such as Panzer Dragoon, the second Pokemon movie and Queen Emeraldas include actual computer graphic (CG) rendered objects within the 2D animation. This has been done sporadically, with varying success, since the early 1980s. Films like Lensman and the original Golgo 13 anime movie used very early, very primitive CG objects and effects. Digital animation ranges from using computers to create wire frame models that animators then digitally color in order to create more fluid, realistic motion, to rough animation scanned into computers and totally painted and animated via computer. Examples of digital anime range from the very obvious and poor quality of the adult anime OAVs Rhythm and Secret Anima Series episodes 1 & 2 to very good examples, such as Love Hina and Steel Angel Kurumi, to examples in which the digital animation is virtually unnoticeable, such as Ashitaka climbing the tower at the beginning of Princess Mononoke, and the boar god tatarigami that attacks Ashitaka’s village. Some anime productions, including Blood: The Last Vampire, which was created entirely on computers, and Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor the Yamadas, which was given its watercolor painting look by computer assistance, benefit significantly from digital animation. Part of the debate over digital animation comes from the question of whether anime is the same as traditional hand-drawn and hand-painted anime when there are no cels and no paint because everything is done on computers. The more significant discussion, though, as you’ve mentioned, is the “look” of digital animation. In most cases, digital animation is noticeable to an astute viewer for two reasons. Anime colored on computers, including Love Hina and Gatekeepers, have a “softer” color, and often lack the distinct brightness typical of traditional hand painted cel art. There’s no question that this “soft” look is attractive, and in some cases, such as Lain, Boogiepop Phantom and Blood, goes a long way to establishing the visual tone and style of the animation. On the other hand, compare the “look” of Slayers, Trigun, Escaflowne or Evangelion to the “look” of Lain, Kacho Ohjii (Black Heaven), or Love Hina. Traditional, hand drawn cels often simply look brighter and more colorful than cels painted with a PC paint program.

The second characteristic common to digital animation is its movement. This is where comments of “stilted or unnatural” may come from. Computers, by their nature, are very precise, so movement, both character movement and camera pans, in digital animation tend to be sharp, precise and almost robotic. Viewers that don’t watch carefully generally won’t notice, but anime fans that are used to traditional animation made up of individual cels photographed separately then combined into film will often notice that digital animation does not have the same sort of jitteriness or “natural” smoothness that hand drafted animation does. It’s sort of difficult to describe in words, but traditional animation seems natural because it has a degree of natural human error to it. Digital animation, meaning the actual technical animation, is often slightly unnatural because it’s controlled by a machine. For good examples, in Saber Marionette J to X, the characters all move with jerky precision like machines rather than flow like humans. In the sequence in Princess Mononoke when Ashitaka climbs the tower at the beginning of the film, his movements are too smooth and flawless to seem really genuine.

To summarize, computers have been a part of anime production for years, and will become more important to anime production in the future, but at least for the foreseeable future, digital animation will not replace or marginalize traditional hand crafted anime. As Satoshi Kimura, director of the upcoming cel-art TV series Earth Defense Family stated, there are still some effects in anime that can only be achieved through traditional, hand-drawn, hand-painted manual animation. So, for at least the present time, for every digital animation Love Hina or Vandread or Sci-Fi Harry, there is a hand-drawn Trizenon or Inu-Yasha or Argent Soma. What you think of digital animation is up to you.