Rain, rain, go away. Actually, I like the rain, but the cold is annoying. It’s May, after all.
Bored out of my mind and stuck with nothing to do last night, I raided the ol’ DVD collection. As usual, I spent more time trying to decide what to watch than I did actually watching it, but eventually settled on Sentimental Journey. A few months back, I sat down to rewatch the show for the billionth time, but didn’t make it past Emiru’s episode (which I generally skip anyway). So, last night, I jumped ahead and finished off the last couple of episodes.
But this post isn’t about Sentimental Journey.
Ask me to list my three favorite titles of all time, and my response would be: Maison Ikkoku, Cardcaptor Sakura, and Patlabor. What one thing do these shows all have in common? Pretty simple, really: they’re old. And, if you take a look at some of my other favorites, more “old” titles pop up. Kodomo no Omocha, Battle Athletes, Marmalade Boy, You’re Under Arrest, Magic User’s Club…
Sure, it seems silly to label shows from the late 90s as “old”, but given that all the shows listed were produced before or around the time of the great “digital switch”, they’ll always be ghosts of anime past.
Cel vs. Digital debates are about as enjoyable as Sub vs. Dub debates (sorry folks, but I don’t think cel animation is poised for a triumphant comeback). But, I have to admit that I experience a heightened emotional response to older cel-based shows, at least compared to newer and slicker digital fare. Of course, it’s not like cel-based animation is inherently better than digital animation. Far from it, in fact. It’s amazing what studios are doing nowadays with the assistance of computers.
So, why the attachment to cel-based shows? Were they simply better shows all the way around? It seems a bit of a stretch, if you ask me.
Perhaps it’s nostalgia.
Actually, that’s probably it - nostalgia for those early days as a fan, when everything was worth watching because, dammit, it was anime!
. . .
Perhaps this isn’t such a great thing after all.
. . .
Ask me again in ten years.
I think I have a nice mix of shows from different eras that I list as favorites. Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) is my all-time favorite. Other older anime that are favorites of mine include Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985), Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (1982), Aim for the Top! Gunbuster (1988), and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990). Also in my list of favorites are Scrapped Princess (2003), MADLAX (2004), Gungrave (2003) and Eureka Seven (2005) may soon be added to that list as well. Yeah, I probably do have a small preference for older stuff for the simple fact that most of my favorites are older shows, but I have no problem with the newer shows (aside from the overload of cutesy, “moe” and fluff shows).
As for the topic of cel vs. digital, I always find myself thinking that if a digicel show was made with cel animation it’d look so much more amazing. Cel animation had a fantastic thing going and was almost perfect in every way to me and I saw no reason to go and change things by going digital. It was like a huge backslide in quality. But of course, for studios…it’s cheaper and faster, so I can see how it’s understandable for them.
There’s a certain cinematic feel that animation done with cels on film adds the digicel animation completely lacks. With all of the technology available today I’m surprised at the lack of detail most digicel animation has today. A good example would be Hisoka from Hunter x Hunter. A lot of the time he has this nice blend and shade of redness under his eyes that give him even more of a psycho/creepy look. Little details like that are almost completely devoid in digicel animation and I don’t understand it. Little details like that can also go towards shading a still object, or even an animated object. I saw a lot of that in cel animation; not so much in digicel. Little details like nicks and scratches in metal or something are also missing in most digital animation. Go look at something like Cowboy Bebop and look at the vast amount of detail in every single object on the screen. No digicel anime has even come close.
Stuff like electricity effects or laser beams are also pretty lame looking in a lot of digital animation. The amount of glare in those animations back in the cel days was so perfect looking, but in digicel they’ll draw a colored line, add a little bit of glare to it and that’s that. It looks unnatural and boring. Things like the moonlight glare on a sword or something don’t look as good as they did in cel animation most of the time. I’ve noticed that more animation studios are starting to pay attention to that detail now, especially the ones with the higher budget…so that’s a great thing. A little attention to detail is all I ask. Maybe it was just easier back in the cel-painting days because they didn’t have to screw around with a bunch of computer program features…
The colors in a lot of digicel anime are all wrong, especially noticable in mecha. I hate the way the metal color’s have this computerized look to them. Colors in digicel are much too bright and much too clean. It’s like the animation has no personality to it if that makes any sense. I also hate the lack of defined lines in digital. Simple things as dark black and defined lines in cel animation really added to the detail.
Another thing I freakin’ hate about digital is all the new animation shortcuts they are able to take. Like a car driving away, instead of animating it frame-by-frame like they should, a lot of the time they’ll just draw one frame and shrink it along a path to make it look like it’s driving away. Same thing about characters falling off cliffs or characters running away. They’ll draw a couple of frames, loop them and shrink them to create the desired effect. It’s so cheap and lame looking and I cringe every time I see it. I know that some cel-animated works did that sometimes (mostly seen as large space battleships flying away from the screen), but it happened very rarely and is not overly done with EVERYTHING like it is in digital.
I also hate the whole 30 frames per second scene pans that some digital anime have (Gundam Seed, Scryed, Gungrave, etc). Film frame rate is supposed to be 24 frames per second, anything higher looks totally weird and I can’t help but to be distracted a little when I keep seeing scene pans at 30fps. It just looks very cheap and…well…computerized.
I’m very happy that digicel animation is getting better with every year, but it still has a while before it meets the standards that cel animation set. I’m not nearly as annoyed by it now as I was when it first started coming out in 2000, but there’s still way too much about it that I disapprove of. But I find most of it acceptable now.
Uhh, yeah, that was a bit long-winded.
Ah, Sentimental Journey–I remember waiting in vain for someone to sub episodes 9-12, with my VHS fansubs of episodes 1-8 getting well-worn in the meantime. I think Sentimental Journey getting licensed surprised me even more than Kodocha getting licensed, I thought it was more likely I’d win the lottery. Taeko’s episode is probably my favorite, it was well worth the wait. A lot of people probably think it’s just another game-to-anime series, but cutting out the male lead completely (except in flashbacks) and making it 12 completely separate stories about each character was just brilliant.
The cel-to-digital conversion doesn’t bother me much–like KT Kore, I *HATE* CG effects in anime when they really stand out (like the space station in Soul Link, the train in Wind, and too many other examples to list) but there are also plenty of examples where digital looks really good. Just watching Beyond the Clouds and the reflections you see in one of the scenes on the train convinced me digital could be done right, if you have the budget and make the effort to do it. Kyoto Animation has also done an incredible job with Air and Haruhi. I do have a couple Cardcaptor Sakura cels on my wall, and it’s sad to think they’re becoming a thing of the past, but I think digitally drawn anime can look just as good as cel-based anime. What bothers me with ‘modern’ anime is when I can spot key frames where character designs look wrong, limbs are drawn out of proportion, etc.–that just didn’t seem to happen as often with 80s or 90s anime, but maybe it’s just because back then the second-tier titles just never crossed the Pacific, or with a greater volume of anime coming out now you inevitably get a lot more with questionable quality.
I agree that Beyond the Clouds is probably THE most beautiful anime I have ever seen, cel or digital. Shame such a large budget and so much time is needed to to create a work of such beauty.
What makes a good anime great is, good voice acting, appropriate use of good and diverse music, carefully planned scenes which enhances the impression the anime director wants to convey, and, most important of them all, good story plot that can sell on its own. None of these require all the high tech toys we have now for the animators, and back in old days, they had to rely on these to sell their stuff. Nowdays, many anime makers seem to be too busy playing with new gadgets they have and experimenting with them. When they finally have their heads cooled, maybe they will spend more time thinking about story plots and characters, instead of new visual elements to add to the screen. A good example I have is from Macross the movie ” Love, Remember?” When we first see the SDF-1 Macross coming out from the shadow, the visual effect was stunning and awe-inspiring, but now, most youngster will see it as corny or too old fashioned. Later on we have the famous scene when Minmay was singing and Britai and Meltron’s fleet started to line up beside Macross. Although the visual impact was less, that still is the scene I believe to hold most appeals to me because of the plot developement that led to it, the dramatic turn of emotions from despair to hope, and such awesome music. If Macross the movie sells nowdays, it will be more due to that scene compared to visual effects in the front half of the movie.
Nostalgia plays a huge part in colouring one’s perception of a medium’s “greatness”. This applies to non-anime stuff as well.
Pac-Man is considered a gaming classic, but if Pac-Man were to be released today and not in the past, I assure you with utmost certainty that it will flop, badly.
I have watched a lot of anime and cartoons from the 80s when I was a kid, and I still remember the memories of “awe” I had when doing so. When I see them now however, and compare them to newer shows( GOOD newer shows), the difference in animation quality cracks the sentiment.
Which is why I rarely bring out SOME old shows for viewing, because I have been pampered too much by better animations( in addition to the difference of mind, maturity so to speak if I may be so bold as to say). However, for the most part, I do still rewatch old shows such as Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, Slayers, Kenshin, etc…
New technology is always fun to play around with, and if used well( Gogo Kyoto) will only serve to enhance and further the development of anime. The problem comes about when studios exploit the techniques and make no attempt to bring out its’ full potential, or worse, get lazy about it. This is nothing new. Even in the days of handdrawn anime, there were plenty of badly drawn ones, it is just that we tend to retain the memories of the good ones, and choose to forget/ignore the bad ones.
A brief readthrough of AnimeNewsNetwork will show this well enough. The dozens of 80s anime that we all know, love, and constantly gush about, versus the hundreds of “best-forgotten” ones.
In conclusion, once again. Nostalgia plays a huge part in colouring one’s perceptions.
ADD] Argh, I forgot to make clear one point in my previous post.
While animation quality is a deciding factor in whether or not a series is great, it is also not the only thing that is important. The quality of the storyline and the competence of the voice actors are also factors.
I would not be surprised if most of the older shows we watched had sub-par animations. As a kid, you will most likely not have a well-developed concept of what is good animation. Nostalgia will also help mask any deficiencies that might be more apparent with a repeat viewing when one is an adult.
However, Nostalgia will have hard time masking bad plots or bad voice acting, compared to animation quality which we can forgive citing lack of adequate technology.
I agree with Skane, we tend to remember how great things were and forget their bad parts. As youngsters with less experience, we would also not have been able to judge like we can now.
I used to think Transformers G1 was uber, then I bought the entire DVD set of the four seasons and I couldn’t watch beyond the first 5 eps. It was terrible.
But on the other hand, there are stuff that no matter how many times I rewatch, I still think the quality owns recent anime. I’m blindly loyal to Gatekeepers, Last Exile, Flame of Recca, Shadow Skill etc. They just don’t make fighting anime the same as before anymore.
I was more of a manga person before the advent of BT, so I didn’t watch that many series in the past. But now, I’ve been getting tonnes of older series and watching them. Some are really good in spite of the poorer animation, you can see how formularised recent series have become. But the number of good series doesn’t change with time, I feel. It’s just the total number that increases and thus pulls down the average.
With regard to digital animation, I think it’s worth noting that it allows studios to do more with smaller budgets. Given the difficult economic times the Japanese anime industry has faced in recent years, it’s possible the switch to digital helped a number of studios remain afloat.
(Of course, the flip side of this is that the start-up costs associated with the switch may have placed increased financial stress on those very same studios.)
These past couple of years, however, have provided some pretty amazing digital work. A show with a crap budget will look like crap whether it’s cel-based or digital. But, if you give a show a decent budget and place it in the hands of a talented studio (like KyoAni), the digital result blows even the best cel-based work out of the water (visually, of course). I think we’re headed in the right direction.
That doesn’t mean I’m be giving up on my old cel-based favorites, though. They’re pretty amazing in themselves, after all.
wontaek
However, Nostalgia will have hard time masking bad plots or bad voice acting, compared to animation quality which we can forgive citing lack of adequate technology.
My cousins most probably do not represent their entire generation, but just to use them as one example.
My cousins are aged 6-9yrs old, and their favourite anime of all time is Gundam SEED Destiny(GSD). Now, it is no big secret that GSD is more or less a laughing stock for animebloggers; but to my cousins, it is the best thing since sliced bread.
In 11 or more years time, when they reach their twenties, they will most probably still retain the “feeling of awe” they had when they were watching it there and then. Bad plot? What plot? Unless your kid cousin is a genius or something, the concept of genetic engineering, segregation, etc… will be mostly lost on them.
To my cousins, GSD is all about the cool robots fighting each other.
Bad voice acting? These are the same kids that watch Barney, Hi-5, etc… Shows that will make me want to stab my ears with screwdrivers.
Overly corny and over-the-top stuff tend to make us cringe now, but we most probably craved for it when we were younger. As we grow up, so do our taste in anime, or anything for that matter.
To an impressionable 6yr old kid, anime is usually all about the cool stuff, not the plotty stuff. How a kid and an adult perceive a show differs a lot. The one thing that the adult will retain though, is the feeling.
The positive feeling he had when he was watching the show as a kid. That is the power of nostalgia for you.
Nostalgia is about only retaining the good memories, such that it distorts one’s perception.
Remembering bad memories is not nostalgia. Remembering bad memories is trauma. :-p
The above however, is an extreme example, since the age difference between me and my cousins is almost two decades.
~~~~ ~~~~
I would also like to take this time to clarify that I do not think all old anime are bad. In fact, a lot of my favourite animes are actually from the 90s.
I just wanted to point out that since then till now, the number of not-so-good to bad animes has always outnumbered good animes. We just tend to forget about them.
Cheers.
I dunno. Maybe it’s because I’m trained, but I don’t seem to get that affected by nostalgia. I had EXACTLY the same experience with Transformers as tj_han did. I got all kinds of excited that the DVD was out, and when I actually started watching it, I fell asleep because of how awful it was. Same thing with a lot of Nintendo games, where games that I loved were boring when I played them on an emulator and realized that I could beat them in a day or two since I wasn’t like, 9 years old anymore.
Oh, and I’ll take mediocre digital over a mediocre cel, but excellent cel over excellent digital.
In my case, nostalgia is for Mazinger Z, Children’s Master Piece Theater, Boy from Future Conan, and Baby Dinosaur Dooly ( This is a Korean made Anime ). Although I have fond memory of them, I count them near bottom of my anime ranking as I have grown up and ‘know better.’ ( I do know better, or do I? ) My favorites are those I count worthy to be reviewed right now, thus nostalgia plays little part to it. The animes I mentioned are very important in commercial sense as they were the ground breakers for exportation of Anime to new audiences, but it is not what I would recommend as quality viewing. A good example is Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet. It is black & white, and they had to mix up the lines a little to make it short, but it is a piece that I would watch again, just to be mesmerized by the masters of acting. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is true to the original text with advantages of modern technology, so its overall score in my mind is slightly higher than Lawrence Olivier’s, but not by much, and judging only on how Hamlet was acted, I prefer Olivier. Another example more closer to modern time would be Star Wars. I think Empire Strikes Back was the best of 6 followed by New Hope which was the first. On visual contents alone, the revenge of Sith is the best, but I rate it below Return of Jedi despite 20 years of technological advances. Is this just because of Nostalgia? I highly doubt it as people were screaming how bad Jar Jar Binks and Anakin was. There are many movie films made before 1985 that is highly regarded by many and I don’t think it is all because of Nostalgia; some of them are just good despite their visual lacking. That is why I believe that an anime’s longevity is governed more by voice acting, music, plot, and the mood of the scene, instead of all those video highlights. I am not denying the effects of visual impression, after all that is what makes the most important thing, Money, but I believe it is just the part of the whole equation, and in the long run, may not be the most important part, thus why so many of my favorites are from the 80s, when animes had to rely on non-visual stuffs to be noticed from the crowd. Of course, all it takes is the SOS Dance to totally destroy all my statements.
jpmayer
I dunno. Maybe it’s because I’m trained, but I don’t seem to get that affected by nostalgia. I had EXACTLY the same experience with Transformers as tj_han did. I got all kinds of excited that the DVD was out, and when I actually started watching it, I fell asleep because of how awful it was. Same thing with a lot of Nintendo games, where games that I loved were boring when I played them on an emulator and realized that I could beat them in a day or two since I wasn’t like, 9 years old anymore.
Oh, and I’ll take mediocre digital over a mediocre cel, but excellent cel over excellent digital.
?
Your case is the very definition of nostalgia. :)
Your excitment for the DVD is what nostalgia is about. You were anticipating the feeling of awe you had when you watched Transformation as a kid. Reality however, as seen through the eyes of an adult, is often cruel.
Maybe it is my fault in not explaining nostalgia clearly.
This is Dictionary.com’s definition of nostalgia.
Nostalgia
Nostalgia is not about watching a bad anime and still liking it. That’s Denial. :p Nostalgia is about your fond memories of an anime.
If the anime was really good and you rewatched it, then it will reaffirm your nostalgia for it. If on the other hand, the anime was actually bad( always subjective), and you rewatched it, then it will shatter or stain your nostalgia for it.
Cheers. :)
ADD]
Argh! It is at times like this that I wish there was an Edit function.
Transformers, not Transformation. :o
My bad.
Hey Jeff, I’m wondering if you ever got my e-mail to be a guest on my podcast? I haven’t heard back from you so I’m wondering if you didn’t get it or if you got it and you just haven’t had time to get back to me or something. Anyways let me know what happened. Thanks.
This post really set me thinking. I mean, I haven’t watched that many old shows, of course the usual Evangelion, Escaflowne, etc. Also, those shows were some of the best I’ve seen, the newer anime apart from a choice few, rarely get to that sort of high. I’ve been meaning to for a while to dig back into the past and actually watch some of the series that people have been raving about. However, me being part of the newer generation, find it really hard to actually watch such anime due to the cell-shaded look.
Also on the topic of Nostalgia, I used to adore Pokemon, I simply had to get up early on the weekends to watch. I remember being glued to the front of the telly just staring with childish admiration at Ash, Misty and the gang. Nowadays, I simply shudder at the god-awful voice acting that Pokemon displays and wonder as to how I could have liked such a thing. Like Skane said though, you only remember the good memories, and to me Pokemon was all about the adventure, the Pokemon themselves.
I doubt I’ll ever rewatch the original series and let good memories remain simply good memories. I’d rather not shatter them and leave those memories as they are.
I’m fairly immune to aging anime. I still put one of my first loves as #1 on my favorites list but I don’t think anime back then are better than anime today on the whole. I know I’ve changed, so have my apperciation for it. My memories are just that; they are not embodied in any anime per se, any more than just a couple really, really sentimentally powerful titles.
Or maybe it’s just the curse of being doom to chase all thing (anime) that is new.
Sometimes nostalgia can leave a false impression on your mind - after all, the things you enjoyed 20 years ago isn’t necessarily what you enjoy today.
With that said, the very best works can withstand the test of time. Classics like Candy Candy and Maison Ikkoku are still entertaining to watch even today. Sailor Moon never fails to make me laugh. And the first few episodes of Pokemon were quite entertaining, despite (because?) the simplicity. This is even more true for movies; start playing Castle of Cagliostro or Nausicaa and I guarantee that I will be glued to the screen for the next two hours; not so much for Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke.
As for video games - the games from the 80’s are still fun to play, if you ask me. Ms. Pac-man remains a fast-paced, challenging game that requires a lot of strategy to score high. And as for those NES games… which games were you playing? Without using save-states, guides, or maps, some of the games were difficult to near impossible. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, Castlevania, Mega Man, Super Mario, and Zelda all presented their set of challenges - and patterns that were difficult to figure out for those playing for the first time. And try playing Metroid without a map - unless you’ve played it before and memorized the layout, it will literally cause you to tear your hair out. And don’t remind me about Ninja Gaiden - especially the infamous 6-2.
No question that society is always raising the bar, and we have every right to expect advancement over the long run. But it’s always important to have a sense of perspective and history - and realize that some of the old-school shows can compete with, and sometimes are better than, the best of today’s works.