New Animation VS Old Animation

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NitroEX
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by NitroEX » Mon Jun 29, 2015 4:30 pm

dbgtFO wrote:
NitroEX wrote:The only time I can think of when they used harsh highlights in the anime was when in the brief scenes when Trunks confronts Freeza.
AjayLikesGaming wrote:
How is NitroEX's image so much more, for lack of a better word, "clear" than Ajay's?

EDIT: Oh Wait, NitroEx's is one of those singular cels, that some people in the fandom owes, right?
I first now noticed the sky croppng out Trunks' jacket in the bottom left corner.
I just found it on google since I was too lazy to screencap from my Dragon Box DVD. It's probably from the orange bricks or something. The blue bit on the left corner isn't actually an uncoloured section btw, it's just his blue strap that's holding the sword.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by dbgtFO » Mon Jun 29, 2015 4:41 pm

NitroEX wrote:I just found it on google since I was too lazy to screencap from my Dragon Box DVD. It's probably from the orange bricks or something. The blue bit on the left corner isn't actually an uncoloured section btw, it's just his blue strap that's holding the sword.
Thanks for the info. You're right it could be the orange bricks, but I'm not sure.. the sky in your example also seems greener, than Ajay's and I'm pretty sure they should both be from the same episode.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Ajay » Mon Jun 29, 2015 4:43 pm

Looks like a horribly filtered Dragon Box shot. The type of garbage you see on YouTube.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Joppuman » Mon Jun 29, 2015 4:55 pm

Personally I like the older stuff better, this really goes for most anime/animation in general. Its not that I don't like new stuff, or that i think there isn't good animation being produced today. Its more that i just like the look and feel of older animation, specifically in anime. With Dragon Ball, I don't like the new style as much, and it does seem that the key animators don't seem to be turning out as good a job staying on model, well really i feel its more they aren't trying to copy Toriyama's art style as much as they are copying the current way Yamamuro draws Dragon Ball. which you cant blame them for, because they are just doing there jobs. This seems to be something that goes on a lot in anime these days, and probably back in the day, but it doesn't seem to be as apparent.
Ill use Naruto as an example, when i look at the Naruto anime i can tell its Naruto, but the art feels quite different to the manga. Where as when you look at the good animation days of Dragon Ball, i feel the art matched Toriyama's much better. another Example would be the new Jo Jo's bizarre adventure anime. Another problem i have with animation in general is the fact that even action shows look like they could be easily turned into a slice of life show, everything has this cutesy look to it, thank goodness They haven't done this to Dragon Ball. I will say i like a lot of things that have come from being able to paint things digitally. There have been some really beautiful shows put out recently, that while i don't think they couldn't have done in the 70s 80s and 90s, but wouldn't have except for like maybe feature films because of how much more it would have cots. Sadly they really haven't done that much experimenting with color in recent dragon ball stuff. Heck i feel like they kind of did it more with the older movies than now a days, like almost all of the movies have different color pallets than the TV show. where as battle of gods feels looks like every other digital dragon ball animation to come out of the past few years for the most part.
Id like to see them do something like how the first broli movie had this purpleish look to everything, even before they got to the planet, or something like that, with the next movie. Id also like to see a lot less cg, because it never seems to look good, and always stands out. like the cg city in battle of gods, or the when they are fighting, and ether everything becomes cg or just the ground, it really looks ugly. It looks like stuff made in the mid 2000s or something.Cg in pixar movies are great, because the whole product is computer animated, but mixing it with 2d animation never seems to go right in anime and throws everything off.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Deathbringer » Mon Jun 29, 2015 5:24 pm

Since early parts of the thread talk about what Dragon Ball looked like back in the day, I want to ask if Dragon Ball/Z looked as good as other shows at the time, when I say this I'm referring to both eastern and western animation. I mean it is quite hard to compare because the art style isn't meant to be incredibly detailed to begin with in DB, and also when I say shows at the time I mostly mean serialised cartoons/anime shows on TV networks and not films like Ghibli/Disney films because that would be quite unfair.

Another point, I see people all the time wishing that Kai had been reanimated instead of a half-remaster-half-reanimation like we got, but based on the evidence in this thread it might have looked both better and worse in its own way if they had done that.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Metalwario64 » Mon Jun 29, 2015 5:25 pm

So, I decided to do a more careful and high resolution version of my "corrected" version of that shot of Vegeta:
Image

I redrew the hair more carefully with GIMPs pen tool to get smooth, rounded curves. I also highlighted his hair this time. In the original shot, the highlighting gives a sort of "pillow shaded" effect, since it' mindlessly highlighted around the entire edge of the hair, ignoring the light source. I colored his hair brown, and used Kai as a reference for the correct shade, since in Z this was his hair color throughout the series.

I also took Ajay's advice and added the hard edge to the bridge of Vegeta's nose, and everything else was as before, only done more accurately and carefully, though since the highlighting of the skin tones wasn't a consistent or very often used thing until GT, I chose to once again omit it.


Also, if anyone is confused, I decided to post this here, because I was going to reply to some earlier posts and thought that would fit in the previous page better, so for chronology's sake, I basically swapped my posts. :lol: Here's the link to my now edited previous post.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Ajay » Mon Jun 29, 2015 5:36 pm

Looks really good! I think I prefer it with the black hair, though. The two Vegeta cels I own from the Boo arc show him with very dark brown hair, just off black, in fact. Always felt Kai illuminated it above the original intentions of the show, but much like the highlights thing, it's just a preference at this point.

Honestly, fantastic work! Any criticisms at this point are just nitpicks on my part. Really nice to see what could be done if they shied away from Yamamuro's designs.

Thanks for taking the time to play around with it.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Metalwario64 » Mon Jun 29, 2015 5:42 pm

Yeah, the hair color is also preference, and it's reasonable to prefer it black since Toriyama colored it black [as well as stating it was supposed to be so]. I rushed my first effort, since it was sort of a proof of concept, but here I think I've done everything possible, and I'm satisfied with it.

But, I should thank you for taking the time to observe and constructively criticize my images. :thumbup:
Last edited by Metalwario64 on Mon Jun 29, 2015 6:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by rereboy » Mon Jun 29, 2015 6:16 pm

It's stated literally that pure blood saiyans have black hair. So, one might prefer Vegeta with dark brown hair but that will always be incorrect in-universe.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Metalwario64 » Mon Jun 29, 2015 6:28 pm

There is that, though I say it's preference because making it black makes it inconsistent with the previous anime works.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by SpiritBombTriumphant » Mon Jun 29, 2015 7:22 pm

For fuck's sake, can you people just enjoy that we get new material? The animation is better by far with the new content we have. This is like comparing modern computers to 80s-era computers and claiming that the latter is better.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by MagicBox » Mon Jun 29, 2015 7:41 pm

Or we could allow people to discuss the show this forum is dedicated to in a civil a respectful manner without people chiming in only to tell them to quit.

Things can be critiqued without hating them. I'm enjoying reading this discussion. If you want to read through pages and pages of baseless complaints, dive into the middle section of the "Resurrection 'F'" thread.

Both eras have their pros and cons. If it was truly the same as comparing an old computer to a new computer, there would be no reason to watch the old Disney movies anymore, among other things. I'm learning a lot by reading this.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Ajay » Mon Jun 29, 2015 7:42 pm

Who said we don't enjoy anything we've discussed? I absolutely adore all the new pieces of Dragon Ball animation we've had. Battle of Gods is one of my favourite things to come out of the franchise. Heck, I even enjoy Episode of Bardock for what it is.

Why is it so hard to comprehend that we have an interest in the animation process, and simply enjoy critiquing what's out there. Pointing out flaws in something doesn't equate to hating the product, so where's this implication that we're somehow against everything new. We're just having a bit of fun playing around with a screenshot and discussing the intricacies of the craft, what exactly is so wrong with that?

Moreover, your comparison shows an embarrassing misunderstanding of how any of this works. Computers have objective improvements as technology evolves, the core aspects of animation do not. It's still being hand drawn and storyboarded by individual people with independent skills. Any evolution in animation technology still requires user end talent. Some tools being technically better does mean the users using them have gotten better, too. That is an utterly useless comparison.

We're all extremely excited for Super. If you have no interest in this discussion, then you can very easily close your browser and do us all a great favour. Nobody wants to read your asinine interjections, so keep them to yourself. Thanks.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Attitudefan » Mon Jun 29, 2015 8:54 pm

rereboy wrote:It's stated literally that pure blood saiyans have black hair. So, one might prefer Vegeta with dark brown hair but that will always be incorrect in-universe.
Anime Vegeta, if you look on Toei's streaming site, having cels from the show, Vegeta's hair in Toei's anime was always that brown colour that MetalWario used. It was never black in the anime, and always a shade of dark brown. There's images on this site that have been shared by me and many other users showing how brown Vegeta's hair is in the anime. There's a cel shot where Vegeta is being slashed by Yajirobi and Vegeta's hair, contrasted in front of Yajirobi's hair, is clearly a dark brown while Yajirobi's is pure black. Anime Vegeta, whether you like it or not, has brown hair. I for one love the image edit of Vegeta, and would love to see his hair look like that in the newer material.

Image

Also, the shininess of the skin only started to appear in Yamamuro's work when he took the lead of Character Designer for DBZ. All of a sudden, shots began having that lighter coloured shine, though only rarely, but still happened. A french site, that I shared on the forums called Dr Gero's Laboratory, compiled all these screen shots under various time frames under different Character Designers for the show, and I compared a shot of Piccolo from Maeda's time to Yamamuro's and Yamamuro's shot of Piccolo's face had the bloated, flat looking faces, eyes that are too wide, pupil's that are really large, and the weird plastic shine (A SHOT OF PICCOLO FROM THE CELL ARC HAD THAT). Compared to earlier in the late 80s, and the design of the characters looked quite different.

Therefore, the new animation looks like anything in the Cell arc, except Yamamuro has more power to control the way the characters look since he's been working on the series for so long, and animator's varying styles seem to have been repressed to make it look exactly like how Yamamuro wants them to look, with the flat, bloated faces, the fat noses, the huge eye pupils, and the gross plastic shine on the hair and skin.

It's Yamamuro and only him, that makes DBZ look the way it does, and without him, I'm sure designs would change!

Image
Design change.

Image
Maeda era (not necessarily drawn by him but based off his designs)

vs

Image
Yamamuro's design in the anime in 1993! Oh look, there's the ugly shine and the flat looking line art. His ears looks so flat and his turnban looks like it is pasted over his head without any depth (and the cloth looks like molded plastic rather than actual cloth unlike the Maeda era Piccolo, where his clothes look like actual cloth-like material!! look at the varying lines and weight of the cloth in the Maeda example!)

Here's the link to the thread with great anime comparisons, and the website it comes from: http://www.kanzenshuu.com/forum/viewtop ... =7&t=28779
My favourite art style (and animation) outside Toriyama who worked on Dragon Ball: Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, Masaki Satō, Minoru Maeda, Takeo Ide, Hisashi Eguchi, Katsumi Aoshima, Tomekichi Takeuchi, Masahiro Shimanuki, Kazuya Hisada

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by bleed0range » Mon Jun 29, 2015 10:08 pm

AjayLikesGaming wrote:
Captain-Sora wrote:Additionally, there are varying line weights that serve to push the idea further. The recreated image barely suggests any of that. It's just a bunch of similar looking lines cutting off one flat space with another. There is hardly any depth ot it.
Entirely agree. Varying line weight was the first thing I noticed in the initial Revival of 'F' trailers, and has been something I've brought up in the past. It makes an absolute world of difference, as you already pointed out so articulately.

There were so few instances of it in Battle of Gods that it really put a dampener on Chioka's creative compositions (which I see JulieYBM already posted as I was writing this). Goku's Super Saiyan 3 will always stick out to me for being so painfully flat, especially compared to a similar shot we saw in the Ultimate Tenkaichi intro. Likewise, Beerus rarely gets a cut where his linework isn't a single thickness. Comparing this shot to one with a varied stroke is like night and day. It really helps bring him away from the background compared the first image.

Though Revival of 'F' is compositionally dull compared to its predecessor, the overall animation quality is much higher. It may not ever reach the heights of Shida's cut from Battle of Gods, but it's at least consistent, only marred by some unsightly CGI. In particular, this cut of Freeza demonstrates your point nicely. Likewise, the action lines really help accentuate the speed of the move -- it looks great in motion! I can't wait for the Blu-ray so I can make some WebMs of the best scenes.

Quite reasonably, much of the dialogue and long-shot action cuts are one weight, but the good majority of one-on-one action scenes feature really some really nice depth to them - especially in close-ups:
I'm not sure why it changed so much between films. I understand there were a different set of animators working on the production, but I didn't expect such a drastic jump. I know that Yamamuro claimed to have drawn a great deal of the action scenes himself, but who knows how true that is. It felt he was either exaggerating for the camera's sake, or it was just a mistranslation by Imagine-Nation. I do have a nice gif of him drawing one of the shots of Goku you see in the film, however.

I'll be interested to see how things turn out with Super. From the looks of the first episode, the down time segments are going to range from mediocre to awful. I did really enjoy the interesting composition of the Super Saiyan transformation we saw, along with these two shots of Goku.

I think I'm with Big Momma. If the series consistently looked as polished Revival of 'F', then I would above and beyond prefer the work we're getting now. As it stands, I appreciate the highlights of the modern work far more than I do the best parts of the older series, but the general aesthetic just isn't there for me quite yet.
I found this post to be extremely interesting. I didn't realize how much of a difference the line weight made. ROF really shows it off. Speaking of which, I haven't really looked at that much of ROF's animation yet because I have been trying to wait to see it in the theater (trying not to ruin a first impression). Animation looks really beautiful actually in the screenshots you posted.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by JulieYBM » Tue Jun 30, 2015 2:47 am

I feel I should mention that for Toriko Episode #99 and One Piece #590 had Ide Takeo as the chief animation supervisor, although the character designs were still Yamamuro Tadayoshi's designs. Hisada Kazuya, Shimanuki Masahiro, Shida Naotoshi and other animators from the older days worked on those two episodes. That's the closest we've gotten to 'non-Yamamuro Yamamuro'.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by VegettoEX » Tue Jun 30, 2015 6:23 am

SpiritBombTriumphant wrote:For fuck's sake, can you people just enjoy that we get new material? The animation is better by far with the new content we have. This is like comparing modern computers to 80s-era computers and claiming that the latter is better.
This is beyond inappropriate. Account strike issued. As I've unfortunately had to note elsewhere lately:

You can be critical of a franchise and its aspects - storytelling, designs, etc. - while still being a fan of it. These sweeping generalizations of people that are critical somehow "not even liking the series" are ridiculous.

Dragon Ball is an artistic creation. It is not a person. It is not alive. It does not need yours or anyone else's protection.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Tzigi » Tue Jun 30, 2015 6:46 am

This topic makes me feel like a total outsider. I love the "modern" look, Yamamuro's my man when it comes to Dragon Ball look. When I see those comparisons posted by Attitudefan I get an enormous cognitive dissonance. I just can't believe anyone can like the former ones when the latter seem so immensely superior for me*. The same with Metalwario64's "correction" of Vegeta. It's like he destroyed a perfect picture and turned it into the early Z atrocity that I can't stand looking at nowadays**.

All the criticism against Yamamuro: "the bloated, flat looking faces, eyes that are too wide, pupil's that are really large, and the weird plastic shine" is for me a list of what I love about his style. I love the highlights ("plastic shine") and the way I always picture DB characters in my mind is with nicely proportioned (what Yamamuro is for me) faces.

I know that opinions differ, I know that other people hate what I love and I'm cool with it. I only wanted to say that this difference in preference is so great for me that however hard I try, I can't even begin to connect to your point of view.
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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by Flame Dragon » Tue Jun 30, 2015 6:50 am

I absolutely despise the white highlights every character has in anime now.

I don't understand... why? Have the Twilight universe vampires infected Japan?

Why does everyone need to look like this???

Image

It makes characters look like lifeless, plastic toys instead of real humanoids made of flesh and bone.
Why everyone's skin shines like this???

It makes everybody look like they poured oil on their skin permanently.

Part of the reason why i liked the Yo! Son Goku special animation so much was because this shit didn't happen.

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Re: New Animation VS Old Animation

Post by JulieYBM » Tue Jun 30, 2015 12:42 pm

Yamamuro is really the only one to abuse the white highlights in his designs. Others use it tastefully.
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