Ask John: Why Does Pre-Digital Era Anime Have an Aged Look?

Question:
Why does pre-digital era anime have an aged look to it? Older anime that was cel painted tends to have a tinge/aged look with heavy noise and jittering of the camera. Western animation from the same time rarely had the same problem. Just an interesting phenomenon I noticed about older anime.

Answer:
The advent of digital animation that hit the anime industry in the late 1990s was not a fundamental revolution. The integration of software into anime production had little impact on the way anime scripts ore are composed. The art is still hand drawn. The principles behind editing and directing remain the same. Digital animation eliminated the process of hand painting thousands of individual cels and eliminated the need to individually photograph cels to create frames of animation. Those two technical evolutions didn’t change the fundamental nature of anime, but they did forever change the way anime looks.

Most fans know that anime is typically produced on minimal budgets. In fact, many of the stylistic characteristics now typical of anime originated as cost-saving production strategies, like reusing backgrounds and using fewer frames of animation. In effect, some flaws in vintage anime are a result of human error, carelessness, hurried production, or simply cheap production technology. Computers allow even amateur artists without a lot of money to create flawless looking animation that doesn’t have the flaws inherent in analog animation that had to go through many more physical processes and hands to get made. American animation of similar age has a similar visual look but typically doesn’t have quite as many unintentional flaws because American animation simply had bigger budgets and could afford more careful technical expertise when compositing and shooting the animation.

In the early decades of anime production, anime cels were hand painted on clear acetate plastic sheets then sequentially photographed to create film. The introduction of digital coloring programs introduced a practically limitless number of colors to anime production. Animators instantly had access to countless shades of color without having to mix paints and maintain color consistency. That new larger palate explains why contemporary anime often looks more colorful and vivid than older analog animation. It literally does incorporate more color and more color variety. Furthermore, the traditional practical need to lay animation cels on a table and photograph them naturally allowed for the possibility of frames shifting slightly out of alignment. The hands-on production plus the limitations of film stock further allowed for the unintentional introduction of dust specks, small scratches on cels from physical handling, and imperfections in the film stock or developing, all of which explain the minor imperfections often seen in analog animation. Contemporary digital animation doesn’t suffer from the pop & crackle of dust, nicks and scratches, frame shifts, light under or over exposure, or numerous other potential hiccups of analog animation because digital animation is entirely composited and edited in sterile digital perfection. The result is contemporary anime that always looks crisp, clean, sharp, and bright but also anime that lacks some of the hand painted, rough and manual charm of vintage anime.