Why does all anime look the same now? What happened? They all look so similar to one another these days. It's incredibly dull and boring. They all use the same color palate, the same art style, thin lines, all the characters look identical, the shading and tone is the same and then there's all the choppiness and framerate issues which lead to general ugliness. It's like they sink the entire budget into visual set pieces.
It probably costs less to stick to one style.
Most of the more generic anime from the mid 2000s looks pretty much all the same too. I think that style looks better, but I guess I am just becoming an old fart stuck in the past. Or it really just does take more time and effort to do it with the old techniques that made the style of the time. Stuff like Kanon, Air, Clannad, I really think that is the style to go with. It even looks decent on 360p. I still like new shows though, there's usually something I like in every season.
The framerate issues probably have to do with studios outsourcing work to the Philippines, China or South Korea. When you have animators spread out over multiple countries speaking different langauges choppinness and general ugliness is the result. It's a double edged sword really. The Philippine animators get to build expereience, but being used as cheap labor keeps them from producing their own high grade product. Anime also has to have a high turn over rate and they pump that shit out and whoever has to make it, Japanese or not, end up overworked and then their work sucks because they can't stop their hands from shaking.
To appeal to Americans anime has to look a certain way. So studios pump out the same “anime style” artwork which leads to less artistic diversity. More Americans consume anime than actual Japanese people so now they are the target audience. So its become an Asian minstrel show where people play into the stereotypes others have about them just to make money.
Hand drawn is dead. Everything is made by computers using engines and graphical tools that recycle the same components. Everything today is painfully stock.
>>3
I wonder how long those cheap labor sources have before Japanese studios just start using AI instead. Then everything will look the same and extra ugly.
>>6
They'll probably always use them. If AI will get rid of anyone it will be the Japanese animators. You'll have a handful of Japanese involved in the process, AI will do the heavy lifting, and they'll outsource the remaining human element to the cheap labor in foreign countries. The Japanese are adopting the Hollywood model of corporate exec dictated art and building huge endless content franchises. Give it decade and it will look exactly like Hollywood.
What >>4 said more or less, in tandem with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan
Generic marketable slop.
Most stuff produced in the 90s was also formulaic slop but there was more visual diversity back then at least. Probably because there were more studios with their own styles while today there are a handful of big corporations that have monopolized the industry. Formulaic slop happened when traditional cel animation was abandoned. Coincidence? I don’t think so. If you walk into a studio you’ll see most of the animators use the same tools and rely more on their tools than animators of the past and the bosses are slave drivers who want them to produce as many episodes fast as possible.