I can’t begin to say how sorry I am for bringing my thoughts to all of you.
Apologies to newgeekphilosopher, but as I got done writing this I felt that I wanted to know other, more experienced as well as the newer anime watchers opinion on the subject, and what better way than to pose it but as a question in the MGRR?

Okay, I’ll admit it. I consider myself a bit of a n00b to anime, as I only really got into it around a year ago. Before then, all I had to go on were pirated fansubs portraying themselves as legitamate DVD’s on teh internets, which I bought unknowing of this aggravating fact. But as I’m relatively new to anime, I’ve generally only been catching the latest series, which pretty much includes everything made after the millenium, except in some rare cases which only involve movies, OVA’s and the like. As such, I’ve been exposed mostly to the simple, cleaner style of recent years rather than the darker, gritty, more detailed style of the early 90’s and late 80’s.

This picture is courtesy of Otaking and some random person who edited it.

Otaking pretty much says that as the older anime have a larger amount of shading and detail, they look better, whereas the simplistic style of recent years is cheap and “looks like shit”. But I think that this is all a matter of opinion and what you’ve personally been influenced by. It’s the same type of thing with anime subs and dubs; the first voice actors you hear are those that become ingrained in your mind. As you watch the show, identify with the characters and learn to recognise their voices, that’s the version of the anime that you’ve gotten to know. Introducing new voices takes something away from that, and as such it’s hard to appreciate the new Western voice-actors work.

Either that or the voice-actor choices just plain suck, but what I’m saying is this theory can be applied to anime art in general. Older anime viewers would have grown up with the likes of Gunbuster, Vampire Hunter D and Bubblegum Crisis, or will have gained some of their first impressions of anime from this, so perhaps they may view this style as better compared to the likes of today. Then again, their age may also mean they’ll have seen the changes the art in anime shows went through and will have either slowly adjusted to or rejected this (as Otaking seems to have done).

Even though I realise this, I also notice that either due to the lack of old anime I’ve seen or the fact I’ve only seen recent shows, I tend to see older art in anime as slightly worse than in more recent ones. Case and point: having seen Gunbuster 2, I went back and watched the original Gunbuster, and found it very hard to get through. This was partly due to the fact Noriko’s character pissed me off (that’s for another day) but also because after seeing the, in my eyes, amazing art for Diebuster, the more detailed but static nature of Gunbuster’s art didn’t click with me. There were only few minutes where I actually sat back and went “Hey, that looks great” in the entirety of the 6 OVA series. It left me relatively unimpressed. But does that mean I’m just biased against older anime in general and think that older anime looks “dated”?

One thing that I can mention in defense of myself and in condemnation (strong word but suitable) of Otaking’s views is Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky, or for that matter, most of his films.

To me, that looks pretty simple, but does that automatically mean that it’s worse looking than older anime? No. Because there is one important factor yet to be addressed in detail: the animation itself. When I say this, I’m talking about the fluidity of the anime when it tries to portray moving objects, be they characters, animals or even something such as the movement of a piece of machinery or the subtle but ever present and traditional scene of wind blowing through a field of grass. Most of the time, what’s sacrificed in the detail of the art is made up for in the quality of the animation. Most of Miyazaki’s films (or at least the 8 or so I’ve seen from him under Studio Ghibli) aren’t overly detailed or shaded but the depth of the animation is amazing; everything feels truly alive, be they cities, landscapes, animals or the random monsters he comes up with. His work seems less about making characters faces emotional and more about making everything about the characters and the scene emotional; as a side note, background art is still art, and more recently background art is gaining greater detail and beauty in animation as the creators realise that viewers are paying more attention to subtle things such as this.

Though this is a random reference, you could also take a look at the segments of Clannad which were set in the other world with the girl and the robot; you can’t deny that some of those scenes were very well done and looked beautiful. He even tries to say that by extension the art from Disney is bad, citing Pochahantas (awesome movie, by the way) as an example, but I can say the same thing in rebuttal; the movie may not be detailed but the animation, as with most of Disney’s earlier feture films, is fantastic.

He writes of how more shading = better looking, but many fantastic anime directors, such as Makoto Shinkai, have begun to use variations of lighting to good effect, in their work. You even have expermental art and animation with the likes of Kaiba, which is very simple, but still looks fantastically weird. This also brings to the argument a question of style; not all anime is going to look the same. Miyazaki’s aforementioned film was made 4 years before Gunbuster, and yet the two look nothing alike as the creators of each had a different vision for their show. The same thing can be said about recent anime series and also as a lot of them are adaptations, they stick to the manga art, which in itself isn’t that detailed these days. Plus there’s also the nature of animation budget, and whether the studios want to make things look detailed or put more money into animating scenes, which I think would lead to the choice of the latter.

So, after all this, what’s my point?

What I believe is that, though I’m more prone to seeing newer animation and art in a more favourable light, this doesn’t mean that I think older animtion is “dated” or looks crap. Anime from different generations each have their own unique appeal and you can’t just claim one is greater than the other as each of the individual aspects that make them up can be appreciated by different audiences, where some might pride one aspect over another. You also have different types of animation, so you can’t just group them into “New” and “Old”.

If if it sounds strange that I barely merit the appeal of older anime, it’s because I’m biased as I haven’t any older anime (excluding Miyazaki’s) and I’d like for other anime viewers to enlighten/agree/argue with me. I personally prefer more recent styles of animation.

But what do you think? Old, new, both, or are those types of classifications irrelevant?