>>287121477
Old artists were human beings that lived in the world. Their art wasn't always objectively better, but just by their experience and humanity their work had soul.
Now a lot of this work is farmed out to the cheapest bidders, or even AI generated.

>the painting itself is low fidelity and only implies a space
>the recording method is low fidelity and further fudges the impression

These two combined make a location feel real because real life doesn't exist on purpose, when you see a photo of real life the background is just something that happened to be there, it doesn't exist for the purposes of the photo and this effortless existence is what creates the genuine feeling

On the other hand backgrounds started getting too much attention over time and that amount of focus and care in each shot creates an artificial feeling of a set constructed purely for the anime, and high fidelity digital paintings being fully visible with no fudging lets you inspect them and confirm they are indeed just digital assets instead of real places that effortlessly exist on their own

Obviously skill and color choices also matter here but I feel like this is what sets apart even equals of the eras

>>287121477
I didn't think much of old anime graphics, I had seen some 90s ones but I wasn't that impressed, and I thought the new clearer, modern style was fine. Then I watched CCS and got to the newest season, Clear Card. Holy fuck. They absolutely drained the soul out of the anime.
>everything is insanely bright
>background looks like plastic
for action and shounen anime, I really don't care as the focus is fighting, but slice of life-like anime need a modicum of realism, to make the character feel more believable. Those backgrounds and colors really break the immersion, I feel like it dropped from a 9/10 to a 6/10. This also has to do with the character writing, overall plot and narration, but with old graphics it would've at least gotten 7/10 in my book.
Op pic is beautiful

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>>287121477
Different countries, same shit

>another old good new bad thread

>>287127110
Well you see, bottom is much cheaper and quicker to make. It serves a different purpose then the top right painted background. Companies don't want to put a lot of money in cartoons anymore.

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>>287127162
Not an excuse. The episode on top was released in 1947, around the time when animators were dealing with shit like this. These were also the same years that followed the 1941 Disney strike. Just face it, animators from the past were of a completely different character than those of today

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>>287128011
>I picketed every day, five days a week, and the strike lasted over seven months. We lost — Terry wanted only two animators back. The rest of us had been replaced. What was so depressing about the strike was that a couple of times a day (every day) people would come up to me and say, "You goddamn communist, why don't you go back to Russia!" You were not allowed to answer them. People would spit at us. A woman had come up to me and said her nephew was in the Army, serving his country, while communists like me were a threat to the United States. If you were on strike, you were automatically considered left-wing. This was mid-1947, long before the McCarthy hearings, and seven months of this nonsense left me depressed as hell. I spent two years overseas in the war to come back home to this? By this time my service to my country and my brothers' death in the service meant nothing.
- 1991 letter from Jim Logan

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>>287121477
Background art thread?

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>>287128081
Why not, I might be complaining in here, but this thread should at least be a substantial one for inspo, in the end

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>>287128081

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>>287128238
/a/ mind

>>287121477
I think they're more cohesive. With the characters I mean. I don't know why, but in modern anime I often have the impression that the characters don't really belong to the background, like they're walking on a treadmill with allpaper behind them. Not sure if anyone knows what the fuck I'm talking about

>>287128238
>>287128653
Nice

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>>287128654
I know what you're talking about. There's something about the way they had to put a physical cel on top of a painting. I think the act of taking pictures of physical objects gave both parts the some of the same qualities, like some kind of glue holding the scene together.

I don't really know how to put it best but whenever something is done in CG it feels like a lot of the time the background is almost TOO big for the characters and it has a sort of DOLL HOUSE look to it.

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>>287128681

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>>287128791
It feels like they have to be more mindful of where their characters are and how they're drawn

>>287128791
>some of the same qualities
Yeah, I think its's this, they looked like they were made of the same "stuff", hence the more cohesive look

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>>287127153
>another truke thread

>>287121477
>like they're very obvious temporary scenery
Because they are, it's not a secret that backgrounds where reused not only in a single anime but among multiple anime done by the same studio. The bigger reason though, is that at this point backgrounds are made for a purpose, this sounds silly however backgrounds made for a purpose don't seem real or lived in because they are not meant to they just exist for that scene and it's over. It's a lot cheaper to make backgrounds like that, especially in the modern day as making a digital background is cheaper. Another thing that digital backgrounds in the modern day, not all but many, lack is the inclusion of negative space and dark areas. Everything in a scene is supposed to be seen clearly, is the modern background art philosophy and when dealing with night scenes, it's why scenes at night basically just look like day scenes with a blue-ish filter on it.

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>>287128826

>>287128654
>>287128791
Something a noticed a long time ago, I narrowed it down to a combination of
>background and cells share the same (real world) light source, so they are affected the same way by quirks of artificial lighting such as the color temperature of the bulb used.
>the film used for taking frames has its own properties of how brightness and color imprint on the film, and also adds noise (film grain) to the entirety of the frame
This all makes the resulting frame much more cohesive by applying several subtle modifications to all parts of the frame. It looks more like one thing when all parts are getting affected this way, because something that really is one thing WOULD get affected this way. With digital animation and coloring, you get individual control of every element There's also no automatic filter or other factor modifying the entire animation unless you go out of your way to implement such a thing (like Spy x Family will just add chromatic aberration for some god forsaken reason), but you're still left with color and brightness tweaking for characters being different from how you tweak them for the background.

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>>287128654
i get it. it simply feel human or like a clear different of shooting a movie in a studio or set and actually use a real location.
i think this is why frieren is popular. among the recent animes it shows the greatest example of the characters interacting and blending in with the environment/background naturally. JJk is also a good example on how the background becomes a significant part of the fights. not just props.

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>>287129279

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>>287128011
>Right: Anonymous anti-union cartoon published in support of the union

>>287129575
Damn this shit is gorgeous.

>>287128238
The air field shots in this show are some of the best environmental shots in all of anime

>>287129680
Yeah I have no clue what that means, either, it's shittily written. It's a spoof of an actual comic which ended in 1932 about a happy-go-lucky guy who wouldn't act in that way, so I guess whoever wrote the article's trying to say it's portraying whatever "bad faith arguments" the anti-unionists were making at the time

>>287129473
It's interesting that of the 4 pics you showed, only CCS was made during the cel era. The other 4 were early digital meaning that it's fundamentally a problem of art direction.

>>287127110
Same country actually. There's a lot of Japanese tom and jerry shorts these past few years

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>>287130503
Do you know where that panorama is from? I love it.

>>287121477
Will you buy the BDs if they cost 3x more?
And more importantly, will you NOT buy the BDs if they don't do a proper job with the backgrounds?

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There's a term called "Mise en scene" which basically boils down to staging and blocking. The background says just as much about your film as the foreground. It's part of the identity. It effects everything in ways that really can't be stressed. A series that just phones in or doesn't put care into it's background might be, in the moment, functional but it's not going to endear the same way. Which is really an issue I feel there is with a lot of modern media.

>>287130202
Just an anecdote but I remember The Big O season 1 being gorgeous dud to cel shading and a strong art direction but when season 2 happened a few years after they totally switched to digital and you can feel the difference. The art style was still strong and it looked good but since we had a season 1 on cels it was so hard not to compare and notice how much better it was

>>287127110
I hate to be even close to defending the bottom image but old Looney Toons and Tom and Jerry are almost always misrepresented in these kinds of images. They were played in theaters back in the day, really high production stuff. Sure you may have grown up with them airing on your TV as a child, but they weren't weekly releases like what a lot of these kinds of images compare them too. That bottom image is probably some streaming show you can watch for free. Either way its art not worth making

>>287130202
>that it's fundamentally a problem of art direction.
well yes, that's generally the big issue. There's really nothing stopping newer things from looking more like older stuff beyond a misuse or misunderstanding of the tools. The tragic thing is digital animation isn't even a new thing anymore so you can't say there hasn't been time on the bench.

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>>287130526
Attack No. 1

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>>287129473
Celluloid is so real I can practically smell it

>>287130796
Mahoromantic I also remember having a season 2 where it switched digital and it's jarring

>>287129473
I feel like JJK is an example of the opposite because of stuff like the ice skating.

>>287131645
Oshii pretty much jizzes backgrounds

It's definitely an art direction because hyakuemu had hand painted bg and everything looked cohesive.

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>>287127110
Top doesn't even look like a real location at all

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>>287132235
isn't always the case, here both are hand painted but look at the outlines and difference between the two

>>287128654
To be fair, cel animation could have this issue as well at times, with interactive objects being drawn in a completely different style from the background they were supposed to be hidden in. Hanna-Barbera cartoons were infamous for it instantly being obvious where a hidden door was located.

>>287129575
Damn

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>>287121477
Neo Ranga thread? No? Ok.

>>287121477

I just started watching Outlaw Star and the backgrounds make up half the appeal, they're so good

>>287134185
the fuck are you talking about? it looks fine

>>287136920
Did you get the bluray rip? It's fucking gorgeous.

really interesting thread and beautiful artwork, thank you anons

>>287137035
one on the left does, look closely at the lines on the right image, even with painted backgrounds it lacks cohesiveness

>>287128238
>ARE YOU GOING TO JUST KEEP RUNNING AWAY?
God that Toonami bump was so fucking cool to see .

Also you guys need to watch Outlaw Star. So damn good.

Thought OP was a dumb schizo so I went and booted up a new seasonal I downloaded and just looked at the backgrounds.
Immediately noticed an extreme depth of field effect whenever the camera wasn't blocked by the characters.
The sky was painterly and there was a neat establishing shot of a garden but the rest was a blurry mess.
Started squinting and I'm almost certain they used CGI for everything. There was a shot of a staircase that /looked/ drawn, but the pillars were copy pasted models on further inspection.
Trees especially just didn't seem right. I don't know how to explain it. They aren't 3D models and they aren't copypasted, they had to have been drawn. But they looked weird.
Then it occurred to me. There wasn't just DOF but slight chromatic aberration too. Not for stylistic purposes, but to ruin the image and give the viewer tunnel vision.
Ultimately anime is a medium built around cutting costs now, which means every frame will have something wrong with it once you pause and really analyze the picture.

>>287121567
/thread

>>287121477
because in the older ones the background tends to be also used as part of the scene, characters interact with stuff in the background, they move around it
so they have to be more detailed and fit the style of the characters
on the other hand the animation was very often limited, so the background lingered for far longer than nowadays
sometimes the background was the "animation" sliding across, look at Lodoss OVA for example

now the bacgrounds are often just that
backgrounds
they go away quick, in action scenes they are completely devoid of detail, because animating a detailed background "exploding" into cubes would take half of the production time
but sometimes you get those longer, lingering scenes and you get great backgrounds
Grimgar has my favourite "modern" backgrounds, but pretty much anything from Cloverworks looks great too

for the same reason we don't live in stone castles anymore do we not get well made art anymore. "money" "takes too much time" "there's too many people" "there's not enough people who appreciate it"

>>287138954
>anything from Cloverworks looks great too
Kaoru hana was mediocre, cloverworks backgrounds aren't really great unless they are led by a great director. On the other hand mahotoakuma from bones had great backgrounds.

>>287130869
Yeah, it's comparing something from an era where they only put out about 35mins of animation per year vs a studio being pushed to release 360mins worth. Where one is developed by a studio that is pushed to pursue academy consideration and the other is developed by a studio that is pushed to meet a deadline for a schlocky kids' TV channel timeslot.

>>287139141
Then maybe it's time for Japan to pack up the standard seasonal approach to syndication and prioritize movies, OVAs and short-form series instead. Let's be honest, the average 12-episode isekai might seem like a drop in the bucket, but think of all the man hours being wasted producing something that is marathoned in an afternoon and then promptly forgotten. That's not to say shrinking it to one episode would magically make it 12x more interesting to watch, but no matter how you look at it, there used to be LESS anime with MORE quality going around.

>>287121477
Because they're not as sterile, clean and unrealistically simple as modern animation.
This one too, a great point >>287127110

>>287139232
I agree with you however Kadokawa exists. Kadokawa is single handedly responsible for this flooding of piss poor isekai because they decided it would be a cool idea to fund 100 anime a year and coincidentally all those anime come from Naro-kei or light novels and they just so happen to be very good partners with Shosetsuka ni Naro and they also publish a lot of light novels. I swear, look at any other anime producer like Aniplex Sony, Toho, Toei, Shochiku or CyberAgent and you'd see they produce a lot less anime and a lot less isekai compared to Kadokawa Shoten.

>>287121477
Old anime was strongly influenced by film and stylistically imitated the optic effect of having a physical camera in the room. This made things like staging, blocking, scenery etc. feel more incidental and real, because it was simulating realism.

Modern anime is mostly influenced by anime. Somewhere down the line is still that original film influence, but passed through a half dozen links in the human centipede until it's processed into something that no longer passes for incidental.

Why are there less instances of really good background artists getting promoted to series director over key animators?

>>287139558
Background artists rarely work in the anime industry specifically. They're usually general landscape artists who just do a bit of contract work for anime.

>>287130515
What's wrong with her face?

>>287139232
Steel Ball Run is doing this right now and people are in a collective fucking meltdown about it

>>287130026
>how Paris felt like before Hidalgo & migrants

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>>287138277
Based

>>287139726
she monke

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>>287139726
You tell me, fag.

>>287139595
yuuji kaneko?

>>287131178
Which episode is this from?

>>287139595
i mean with animators you get promoted from an inbetweener to key animator then either AD or ED who then go on ahead to direct series, meanwhile background artists just get promoted to art director, i haven't heard many of them directing a series.

>>287130661
This could be another example of "creativity from restriction" could animation be going through the same thing as CGI is? It's too easy to make new things all the time, there's no limits, so everything is just shit out with no thought. Like the old backgrounds were seriously labor intensive, so they had incentive to think really carefully about how they'd use them, the exact angles and composition, and the character blocking for scenes. Also they'd re-use them so they went even harder into making them as good as possible.
This results in a bizarre situation where copypasted transformation scenes and time filler slow scrolls actually elevated the medium. They were cost driven and kinda tacky if you look at the series as a whole, but looking at a single episode they're massive quality pops out of nowhere effectively for free.

Reminds me of how a significant fraction of what made NGE so good was just the production fucking up horribly and them having to drag out the shots as long as possible to fill time, hide people's mouths so they can just voiceover stills, set scenes in pitch darkness so you could barely see anything and they wouldn't have to animate it, etc...

>>287130934
Of all things Pop Team Epic did a perfect 1-to-1 recreation of old style cell animation entirely using digital tools proving it's entirely possible for anime to look exactly like it used to if anyone actually wanted to put in the effort.

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>>287141794
Queen Millennia 23

>>287139726
Her parents made her play tennis, but she wants to play baseball to pursue a violent gay courtship with a tomboy pitcher.

>>287142458
Realistic proportions don't impede fanservice in the least.

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Something I feel like I've been seeing a lot of is and I can't quite say for certain but ... are they blurring real photos?

>>287144995
It's the filter they used in Desert Punk.

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>>287144874
Oh Queen Millennia series has the fleshiest Leiji women I've seen and it's beautiful. The film is very ethereal in contrast.

>>287138242
No it doesn't anon. Not in that picture at least

they should make an anime with real photos as background and see how it comes out

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>>287146549
it's contrasting just a little bit unlike the image on left where it blends. this would be a better example.

>>287127110
>>287121567
The first picture is art, the second picture is art bastardized by capitalism.
It's only going to get much worse with AI slop.

pLumMET