Will cel animation ever make a comeback? Anime kind of looked better back then

No.

So do you have a problem with the premise that cel anime looks better than digital, or with the conclusion that cel animation was the reason it looked better?

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50/50

The former.

Cel often looks better just cause there was just a fuck ton more money poured into animation during the time. If Akira was made in digital today with the budget it got when it was made(adjusted for inflation) it would still look amazing. So I would have a problem with the latter, not the former. Although I will concede there is something that feels nice about cel animation that just isn't quite captured nowadays.

retard

The reason new anime tend to look bad is because the people involved in doing the digital processing, compositing, coloring etc. are fucking bad at their job, or they think they should try to get fancy to horrid results. Good cel anime had veterans who knew what worked and what didn't and always made the picture look as it should.

Of course it might just be that you prefer the old look for reasons that have nothing to do with these technical aspects; maybe you just liked the culturally-defined approach to anime, all the mechanical stuff and super detailed buildings, things like that.

Cel animation has 2 reasons to look good:
1. More money was spent in the period, since Japan's economy where better
2. Cell's need to be colorful enough and have enough contrast to survive being scanned. And as with most forms of analog coloring, you get a lot of noise and detail for free doing that

Digital coloring essentially adds another simple way to fuck up: You can color grade everything, since its just color ranges instead of real color.
And there is a lot of questionable decisions because of that.
There is also large changes in how the slave labor for cell animation worked, compared to digital.

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>mechanical stuff
I love mechanical stuff from the cel era. While I believe digital can look good if done right, I‘ve yet to see machines drawn in digital look as good as cel.

For every single cell animation that look aesthetically more pleasing than digital, there are dozens of cell animation that looks worse than digital.

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why is it called cell animation?

He also never ever mentioned not even once in super? Is he that bad?

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Shows up briefly in the illusion forest I think.

The good to bad ratio for cel is far better than digital. So much mediocrity nowadays, I'm sure you can find shitty looking cel animation and good looking digital, but the fact is that if you compare the best of cel vs the best of digital, cel always looks better.

>but the fact is that if you compare the best of cel vs the best of digital, cel always looks better.
I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with cel being the method used during the era in which far, far, far more money was being poured into anime movies.

It will take a very strong economic upswing

>Look mah, I did the thing but opposite

It has more to do with the fact that there were more people who knew how to actually animate. All the big key artists are old as fuck and nobody's really picking up the slack.

Cel VS Digital is a false debate. With computer, you can easily do whatever you want, even make your digital anime look like cel anime.
The thing is studio today have less time and or budget to focus on details like coloring or shadows. That's why it looks like shit.

Cel animation isn't the reason old anime looked better, if you go by OPs image, literally 10% of that is the cel. Cel animation is characterized by the hand painted coloring which looked awesome but that's about the extent of the effect it actually had on the look of the anime. What most people attribute to "cel animation" is the beautiful backgrounds and detailed artstyle that had nothing to do with cels and everything to do with the state of the industry, economy, and people who make it

>the industry just needs more money
KyoAni was able to produce above-average animation most of the time with roughly an average budget. So why haven't more animation studios followed the KyoAni model?

Maybe they should start paying livable wages to massively overworked animators if they want new talent instead of the majority of animators burning out in the first year and the slack being picked up by outsourcing to Korean sweatshops. Every year I'm shocked the whole thing hasn't collapsed yet.

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>KyoAni was able to produce above-average animation
no it wasn't, stop this meme

I'd make the argument that the reason why most cel looks better palette-wise is that the limited colour availability meant it was a lot harder to fuck it up simply because you didn't have the option to. With digital you have to actually be careful about your colour design instead of just recycling what you used in the last thirty shows. There's a lot of very early digital shows that look fine because they didn't fuck up their colour design.

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>he didn't watch disappearance

>one movie
fuck off

>With digital you have to actually be careful about your colour design instead of just recycling what you used in the last thirty shows.
And I'm not saying that everybody used the same colours for everything because that would be laughable bullshit, just that your pool of options was way more limited and generally whatever you had on the shelf to use was tried and proven.

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>will classic american muscle cars come back? cars kind of looked better back then
Everything's a product of its own time, but you already knew the answer to that question didn't you?

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>one movie that revolutionized kyoani's production style for a decade
ban me

Disappearance wasn't really that amazing in terms of animation though. I mean, relative to what Kyoani was doing right after that it was completely subpar.

Japan response to your question would probably something on the lines of "sure, put YOUR money on the line, open an anime studio using these outdated, expensive techniques and see if your return of investment is any bigger than other studios. Surely people will buy your anime instead of getting it off of Nyaa just because it looks like some 80's shit"

This sounds like the worst of both worlds, I fail to see where this simplifies anything. Have you tried it? How did it turn out?

Bones manages to make amazing visual stuff digitally to this day.

This
THIS
This
THIS
This

Gits had a massive budget.

but it was? it changed the fucking industry, and what kyoani did right after was a direct result of it. you have no clue what you're talking about

That's a bad analogy. Bitching muscle cars will always look more baller than some faggy little electric space ship.

It didn't change "the fucking industry", you're gonna have to do more than simply assert things if you want to be taken seriously.

Whether or not what Kyoani did after was a result of it, that doesn't change the quality of Disappearance's animation taken on its own terms. And it's not true when it comes to animation. K-On!! was more pivotal in terms of putting the final nail in the coffin of stiff VN-inspired anime designs Kyoani had been riding for a while and turning the K-On! fluffly approach to character into something more fleshed out. Disappearance has nothing on the trifecta of K-On!! (+ movie), Nichijou and Hyouka.

Why do that if you can just add some filters in post processing.
At the very least some companies are still doing their backgrounds on paper.

KyoAni had a few things going for them.
1. They were situated outside Tokyo, in Kyoto and Osaka. That means lower rent and cost of living while still getting the benefits of living in a city.
2. KyoAni had a very long time to get to where it was. They started out as painting cels in the 80s, and top tier animation star Yoshiji Kigami joined in the 90s and was a fantastic mentor to younger animators on how to draw well but also fast.
3. They wanted to become self-sufficient for a long time, and to that you need to actually be a decent person to your artists. Not just key animators, but inbetweeners, painters, production assistants, in between checkers, color designers. There were, and still are, people in KyoAni who have been at their role for years. Even inbetweeners. But almost everything past the mid 2000s, even their movies, was produced inhouse.
4. Luck. That's not to say it was all luck, but getting lucky combined with the above attributes made for a hell of an anime studio.

To pull off a KyoAni, you have to want to be reasonably sufficient for yourself, and have the resources and resolve to actually put your money where your mouth is. That means training and trying to keep your animators, building up your studio, not relying on a network of freelancers and production assistants. Those are plenty important, and no studio can go from entirely freelance/outsourced to inhouse overnight, or even in the course of a year, but you have to commit to striving for it. Other heads of studios usually fuck up in some fashion, like PA Works who only committed to an animator training school a couple years back, and who was doing the whole desk rental bullshit.

Anime studios right now are in a tough spot, and it's difficult to survive, let alone have the balls and the empathy to follow KyoAni in that regard.

>The good to bad ratio for cel is far better than digital. So much mediocrity nowadays.
I'd argue that we got more blatantly bad animation in the cel era than we did in the digital era.

Peak cel will always look better than peak digital, but the average cel looks worse than the average digital.

Damn, TV anime in 2020 looks like this?

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But it has everything on it? Look just because you didn't live through the Haruhi age doesn't mean it wasn't impactful. I didn't bother asserting because I thought most people here already knew how Disappearance changed the fucking industry, because it did. K-On Nichijou and Hyouka and literally every post-Haruhi production don't get made until KyoAni and the rest of the world receive a massive infrastructural reshaping after the production of the movie. Studios began trying to imitate KyoAni's self-contained structure and productions tried to imitate the tight-knit almost blitzkreig management of the movie. And if you think the animation in it wasn't some of the best the industry has ever seen you seriously shouldn't even bother. Saying Disappearance is one of the best animated movies of all time is so trite and cliche I feel redundant even putting the thought to words. Literally every scene was a benchmark in character animation. Nothing was poorly put together, every character, every movement was meticulously crafted and micromanaged to produce one of the most cohesive and well put together movies in history - and it was so obvious to the industry that most SoL shows have been trying to imitate it ever since. KyoAni didn't have to because they already reaped the benefits of the massive company restructuring Haruhi initiated, that's why they dove headfirst into using their new methodology to reinvent every corner of the SoL genre left untouched. You seriously can't say that the fact that Disappearance restructured KyoAni to the point that every production shortly thereafter was a breakout hit shouldn't weigh into the discussion, because even if K-On and Lucky Star were incredible productions, they had nowhere near the effect on the industry and the greater otaku culture than Haruhi did. Not even fucking close

Now post a screenshot with a character.

Here you go.

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I mean, it's a nice rant but you're bullshitting. It's plainly false that other studios started trying to imitate Kyoani's management BECAUSE of Disappearance. To begin with, the vast majority of studios did not try to imitate shit and continued on with the tried and true Tokyo freelancing-heavy model. The two studios from around that period that could be compared to Kyoani, ufotable and PA Works, had been on that path before the movie came out.

And no sorry, the animation wasn't that good. Say, that scene with the shy girl crying (can't remember her name) which everyone hails as some sort of accomplishment, is so kitschy it hurts, and prime Kyoani was at its relative worst when it tried to hark back to that kind of style.

>looked better
Just some background photos being redrawn instead of being shopped. No big deal.
Also those backgrounds are a big part of a picture when characters are small. So it's deceiving yoiu. Think about that.

>l-lol it's obvious you're bullshitting bro
>yeah you know the scene that everyone says is good? it's not
not the type to say go with the public opinion but you're fighting a losing battle if you want to convince people disappearance wasn't full of great animation
And KyoAni's penchant for in-house animation and it's movie production infrastructure aren't the same thing. Before you try to quote sakugashit to me learn what the fuck you're talking about

the mecha shots in that look great and all of the cuts to the people look fucking horrendous
cel anime didn't look better most of the time, and cel animation is not the reason that a couple old anime look good

kyoani had to decide between spending money to give its animators a substandard living wage which is still less than what a normal burgerflipper in Japan earns, so that their animators wouldn't die from starvation, but risk being killed by crazy people, or putting more money into security measures like working fire-exits and one security guard, but then risk having animators die from starvation.
They opted for the former, and paid the price.

Remember the year "cel" came back?

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im sure in the future they'll find better ways to replicate the style
Animation is already a lot of fucking work and going back to cells would just add even more to that

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Question is why does it look better, ye artstyle is mroe human like and less inspired by pedo bait, but other than that.
Is that washed up colors? More believable and less saturated color palette thanks to using actual paint? subtle noise? All these things should be achievable in post or with better direction.
Blur on linework looks kidna the same then and now with the whole bitmap with aftereffects smoothing we got today.

2d animation is going the way of the dodo.
look a the newest ghost in the shell and despair.

you're not supposed to post a good frame faggot, screencap an in-between.

So i watched the Altered Carbon animation last night and.. well, sure it looked a little bit like a video game, but i can see why some creators are interested in pursuing CG anime since there is a shitload of dynamic stuff you can do with camera work, fast pans, sweeps, etc - sure that you can do in traditional cell, but far easier in CG.

And while it's naturally budget dependent, the more anime studios experiment with CG we'll see better and better results. The Lupin 3 movie looks fantastic for example.

In addition CG animation is more flexible with regards to retakes since the models are all ready for animation.