Forum - View topicWhy Do We Hate 3DCG Anime?
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meruru
Posts: 475 |
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I think part of the problem is that with cg, you can much more quickly and cheaply produce animation, but computers naturally generate very sterile, unnaturally perfect images. You have to put in MORE work to make cg not look like that, whereas humans on their own naturally create art that has imperfection. For example, you have to go out of your way to deform a model to create squash and stretch, otherwise your model will stay perfectly the same the entire time, whereas humans will naturally not draw the model quite consistently, but that is more true to real life, where captured in very slow motion, you can see how real objects deform as they move. In other words, cg is cheap and easy, but you're fighting against the medium to produce art that humans find beautiful.
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Abraham Omosun
Posts: 158 |
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Land of the lustrous season 2 when
 . Callum is becoming my favorite ANN contributor, nice article as always
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Akamaru_Inu
 Subscriber Posts: 102 Location: Florida |
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One of the best uses of CGI in anime I've seen was in Etotama, I remember it was the first time I had seen "actually good" CGI in a series and it looked super nice. I don't know how to make links look like nice words on here lol, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSZ5H79kMXI&ab_channel=KuroDCupu
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NG_Chloe
Posts: 140 |
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I'd think it's the "60 fps" people, a resistance to change, and bitterness over series like Berserk 2016 or Ex arms.
Most CG anime these days look pretty good, capturing the anime aesthetic while adding movements, details, and other elements that 2D can't bring to the table I don't even mind(or notice) framerates either, since it's mostly done for emphasis and other stylistic pieces. the only things I've had some problems with are generally scenes where characters stand around, not emoting, but I understand that animators don't necessarily have the time to fill every scene with as much movement as possible |
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SHD
Posts: 1759 |
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We hate it? I don't hate it. In this season Night Head 2041 looks perfectly fine, in fact it's doing some things in animation that you don't often see in more traditionally animated shows. And then there's Beastars, etc.
It's not the medium that is bad, it's the lack of budget/effort in many shows. You can tell when a show just doesn't have heart, ambition or a proper artistic vision... or when it has it all, but not enough money to pull it off. |
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gpanthony
Posts: 242 |
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No mention at all of Takashi Yamazaki, who directed Dragon Quest, Stand By Me Doraemon, and Lupin III The First? Those are some of the best looking CGI movies Japan has ever done and up there with Pixar, Illumination, and DreamWorks in quality.
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TheCanipaEffect
Posts: 52 |
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This article is more about core anime fans' reactions to 3D anime, so it's more about stuff that's specifically targeted towards the sort of people who tune into SDCC. Yamazaki deserves an article of his own, in my opinion. He's targeting a family audience and has been really successful in that respect. |
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B12
Posts: 4 |
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I have always preferred 2D animation over computer generated. America has completely given up on making 2D theatrical films. The cartoons that you get in the west are mostly either adult swim comedies, or clearly made for a younger audience. I think I gave up on cartoon network, and everything else over a decade ago at this point. With a couple exceptions. DC is pretty much the only studio that makes anything remotely serious.
If you like 2D animation then seeing Japan seemingly slowly moving over to 3DCG is very concerning. Also let's be honest most anime 3DCG looks worse than what we can see in modern games, and is miles behind Pixar. It just looks lifeless and is very dull. I don't hate CG, but the complete dominance of it in the western media is kind of boring. So Japan's continued use of high level anime was why I started watching anime to begin with. CG is being adopted to cut corners, and a lot of anime fans can see straight threw that. |
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meiam
Posts: 3448 |
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I think majority of 3DCG anime look like crap, but that blade runner was just fine. Obviously it doesn't hold a candle to stuff like ghost in the shell (both movie and SAC), but I'm guessing the budget for those was wayyyyyy higher.
I think a big thing is that most 3DCG have the character skin look strangely smooth and reflective, which makes everything look like plastic. I think it's also because the model don't distort enough when action scene are happening, the model are of fairly low quality and they don't have enough articulation point, so it just look like action figure being smash together. |
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Twage
Posts: 363 Location: North Bergen, NJ |
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It's not that we hate CG. It's that, when people spend lots of time making something look better, it shows. When people rush, or have their time wasted by inefficient technological tools that weren't designed to do what they're trying to accomplish, that shows too.
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5500 |
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The biggest issue with 3D Anime is that it tries to be 2D. Lupin the First and that 3D Doraemon film work, to a degree, because they adapt to 3D. Those 2D faced models will never look right. Land of the Lustrous at least has the advantage with that whole crystal design that only works in 3D. And some people just like 2D animation and prefer it over 3D.
Maybe it wouldn't be too bad if America had largely abandoned traditional animation, aside from older shows like The Simpsons and stuff on Netflix like Castlevania and Disenchanted, In another timeline where we are all exited about Disneys latest hand-drawn film, it wouldn't matter much. But as it stands it's hard to except one of the last countries that has until recently done mostly 2D animation start to transition to 3D as a positive. |
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fathomlessblue
 Posts: 384 Location: Manchester, UK |
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There's a lot of reasons behind my misgiving towards cg - most noticeably the limited-animated kind common to tv anime, rather than the hyper-realism of mostly theatrical or short-based examples like Lupin the First, Doraemon or Show by Rock. Often it's purely due to disliking how the character models are presented (whether it be the bland same-faced expressions of many a Polygon Pictures sci fi or the uncanny doll bodies/faces Sola Digital Arts veers towards), while often it's the overuse of camera movement to capture dynamism, from staff with seemingly little to no knowledge in cinematography. However, mostly it comes down to character movement, in which I find most studios are still struggling to convey how a person navigates the world without the audience seeing the puppeteers strings moving them in place. Animate on 'two's' and the motions look choppy in a way that rarely imitates 2D animation, while having a smooth frame rate largely just makes the models look like they're gliding about. Unfortunately there currently seems to be no real solution to disguise that, other than having a stellar director on Takahiko Kyogoku's level on staff.
I think having a visual medium that places the technological aspect of the craft on full display will always have drawbacks when it comes to helping the audience fully forget the artificiality of the product in front of them in the same way '2D' animation is able to accomplish. The suspension of disbelief is generally just that much greater. I suspect that's why older more traditionally animated properties are generally seen as quaint or charming, while with cg you're mostly seeing how much the technology has aged. A lifetime of videogames and being connected digitally makes it harder to unsee the processes & limitations that have made the product. And yet for all that, when given the right subject matter, time and staff, it is possible to create wonders. That's why Land of the Lustrous has cemented itself as my favourite anime of the last 20 years, as despite having some of the flaws mentioned above, the sheer effort of the staff to effectively disguise them through a fully considered attempt at depicting the source material/cast on-screen, inspired colour composition between 2D & 3D and the intelligent use of framing and frame-cutting, the end result can still feel like a pioneering work. I recall Callum saying on I believe ANN's Best of 2017 podcast that he would hate to be still talking about Land of the Lustrous as the benchmark for cg anime in five years time, but I suspect that's where we'll still be at, with personally the only other serious competition coming from Orange themselves. So yes, that's what this post really boils down to. Asking "Where is Land of the Lustrous S2?" "Will we ever have it?" "Does Orange have a say in making more of it?" "Why isn't being beamed into my eyeballs as we speak?" Now where's that article, ANN? Seriously. Last edited by fathomlessblue on Sat Aug 28, 2021 11:41 am; edited 3 times in total |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1596 |
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A major problem with CG anime is that most anime are based on a hand drawn medium: manga. So most CG anime aren't dealing with characters and settings designed for CG, but dealing with hand-drawn, 2D characters and awkwardly trying to adapt them to a medium they weren't designed for. At that point, you have two choices: either radically redesign everything, which will no doubt upset fans, or try to make the show look as 2D as possible to match the manga's style, in which case the 3D becomes a pointless burden and you wonder why they didn't just make a traditionally animated show. This is how we ended up with embarrassments like the later seasons of Berserk.
Generally I think there are some people in the industry who want to shift everything to CG, and that's a mistake. Some styles are going to look great in CG and others will look hideous. Instead of trying to make everything CG, studios should be looking at it as just one potential way to make anime, to be employed when it can be best utilized, rather than trying to paint everything with the same brush. |
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lightturner
Posts: 10 |
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1. Bitterness from us cranky older westerners who saw their own animation industry collapse and turn into all CG. Japan never went that route. So I imagine Japan can view CG through a less-than-jaded lens and see it as a neat novelty.
2. What Wyvern said. Doing a CG adaption for a 2D manga always looks weird. Didn't like Beastars, didn't like Dorohedoro, didn't like Land of the Lustrus, don't like when anime tries to be experimental or different when the source material is already a set style (Flowers of Evil rotoscoping... ) Dragon Quest Your Story looked nothing like Akira Toriyama's art style. which is no doubt one reason it was a dud in Japan. If I was a fan of a manga and the only adaption it got was something like that I'd be pretty bummed.
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Pandsu
 Posts: 197 |
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For me, it's multiple reasons, most of which have been mentioned in this thread before.
First of all, I think it's kind of just the connotations we have with it. If we think back like 10 or more years, 3D was mostly used as a shortcut of some kind. Maybe it was used for unimportant background objects like cars during a scene in which you're supposed to focus on something completely different, like a few characters walking down the street and talking. The 3D cars were simply added to liven up the scene a bit and to make it more believable, so that you don't ask why there aren't and cars driving around in a city like this, etc. The point being, in scenes like that, the 3D stuff was the stuff you're supposed to mostly just ignore, not something they put there for you to notice and not usually something they are particularly proud of. The important stuff, which is the characters and the kinds of environments that are supposed to impress, usually weren't in 3D, making you connect 3D in anime with bad and/or unimportant things. It was also used as a shortcut whenever there wasn't enough time, budget (sometimes due to lack of faith in and importance of the product) or talent to do it in 2D. Which makes you think 3D = cheap and then you were left to your own devices to figure out WHY they would go the cheap route. Just like flash, motion tweening, 2D puppetry and now some more modern techniques like AI upscaling and whatnot are mostly just cheaper alternatives to things that could be accomplished better with more traditional means and are used almost exclusively to save time, effort and money. The same goes for 3D in most cases. And whenever 3D was a more deliberate choice and not just a shortcut, it was usually done for very specific things like dynamic cameras, certain types of special effects or perhaps to make something look all futuristic or fantastical, though even those things would often look as good, or probably better, in 2D if time and money weren't of importance. On top of that there are the aforementioned issues of bad implementation, trying to shoehorn 2D aesthetics onto 3D models and failing or stuff like differences in framerate and other things that make 3D animation stick out like a sore thumb instead of being used in its own unique, artistically pleasing ways. Now don't get me wrong. There are uses of 3D in otherwise 2D shows that are completely acceptable and even beautiful. And there have been fully 3D works that made good use of the medium as well, but a lot of those have come out in more recent times, so the negative connotations are kinda still there and it might take some time for more people to fully adapt. Just like flash animation, etc. can be used really well but still has that certain look that takes some time to get used to. Lastly, though, I think part of the problem is that because 3D is so much easier and cheaper at times, there is the danger of it taking over completely. We have seen that with Disney and other animation companies in the west and we will probably see that in Japan more and more as well. Which sucks. 3D as one type of many is one thing. But 3D taking over completely and basically replacing 2D is kinda poop and a lot of people are rejecting it for that reason alone. Because it's a shame. Anime is a certain aesthetic that a lot of fans are into. Doesn't mean that they dislike American animation or anything like that, but if you're in the mood for Anime then there's usually a few certain things that you are looking for. And the same goes with 2D vs 3D animation, no matter where that came from. The same goes with hand-drawn traditional vs. digital art. But it's usually one not just enhancing the other or just becoming another option, it's usually one slowly but surely replacing the other. There's a 2D Metroid coming, People are hyped for it. People call it 2D Metroid. Yet, it's in 3D. Could be a really cool game, might look really good in its own right. But it doesn't scratch the same kind of itch that an actual 2D Metroid would have. But the fact that they can just do things in 3D (and if they do 2D stuff they often use puppetry, scaling and rotating of 2D assets and other modern tricks that change the look and feel and make it something that might not be what you wanted) has made actual 2D things become increasingly rare and almost non-existent if it's not emulating a look from an older system like the NES. I would LOVE more 2D games that are actually making use of the higher resolutions and added screen real estate we have today, yet there barely are any games that fit that bill and Cuphead is the only one I can think of that really went all the way with it, though once again it's a game that did it solely because it tried to emulate a style from times past. And I think a lot of people feel the same about 2D (especially hand drawn) animation, both from Japan and from the West. And usually you dislike the thing that is taking away another thing that you really like. |
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