Ask John: Why is CG So Popular Now?

Question:
Can you explain the appeal of CGI in anime now? Series like Zoids, Blue Sub No. 6, and the of clips Robotech 3000 (hopefully those plans have died) and others have adapted computer generated sequences over traditional art work. Isn’t creating these CG sequences a bit more difficult than drawing the scenes by hand? In some anime, the interruption of these CG sequences makes the scene feel very fake in a way. What has spawned the appeal for this new art form?

Answer:
Actually contrary to your speculation, CG is cheaper and easier to produce nowadays than traditional hand painted cel animation. A computer graphics robot or spaceship has to be “drawn” only once. Then it can be manipulated, moved and altered entirely by computer commands. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a traditional cel art robot or spaceship must be hand drawn and hand painted every time it moves or changes. It’s simply much faster and cheaper for one graphics artist to create a CG robot once than have a team of artists hand paint hundreds of cels to animate the same robot doing the same thing. And as Yuji Moriyama said in his interview on the Geobreeders 2 DVD, CG is still just another way to tell the same story and express the same art. However, with current technology, it’s still impossible for computer graphics to totally recreate the look of traditional cel animation.

But besides the obvious cost benefits of using CG, computer rendered effects sometimes have other benefits as well. The most outstanding example is Initial D. All of the cars and car racing action in the Initial D animation is fully computer generated and rendered. While this animation doesn’t exactly mesh well with the cel animation of the characters, it does create a sense of speed and weight and momentum that’s simply impossible to convey through cel animation. Contemporary anime involving car racing including eX-Driver and You’re Under Arrest may not look as artificial as Initial D, but there’s no question that the CG of Initial D evokes a real-world sense of the speed and gravity and danger of car racing better than the traditional animation eX-Driver or You’re Under Arrest do.

Like anything new, there’s also novelty in the latest technology, and anime creators are no less immune to curiosity than anyone else. Especially for people who make their lives out of creating animation, new technology would naturally be very appealing. In some cases, enthusiasm overshadows basic cinematic design. Director Katsuhito Akiyama explains in his discussion of the Armitage: Dual Matrix movie that he was highly pleased with the CG rendered car chase sequence because it captured the camera angles and suspense he was looking for. However, this scene is one of the worst looking in the film, suggesting the Akiyama’s concern with the technical flexibility of CG modeling entirely eclipsed his notice of simply how the scene actually looked on screen. But increasingly CG is being deftly integrated into anime with increasing competency. Films like the Sakura Wars movie relatively fluidly integrate CG models into the traditional 2D animation. Metropolis takes great efforts of often disguise its CG as traditional cel animation, and films like the Slayers Premium movie only use CG in darkened scenes when it’s not as noticeable.

Computer graphics in anime are really just a new addition to the medium, not an evolution of the medium. Current CG does look bad compared to the cel animation we’re used to in certain anime, and many times current CG rendering looks incongruous with traditional anime, but CG will not be replacing traditional anime any time soon. The fact that recent, current and upcoming anime including Full Metal Panic, RahXephon, G-On Riders, Gravion, and King Gainer all use traditional 2D mecha when they could have used CG signifies that traditional 2D animation and cel art are still very much alive and healthy in the anime industry.