Beauty in Motion: Part III
The Art of Anime
(This series of articles seeks to cover only the visual aspects of anime production, and said aspects are not exclusive to anime production)
If you missed them, here are the links to Beauty in Motion: Part I and Beauty in Motion: Part II.
3D CGI
A s can be seen from the popularity of Disney-Pixar films today, 3D CGI dominates mainstream animation in the West. Expanded as 3-Dimensional Computer Generated Imagery, this technique is essentially a digital successor to the stop-motion animation of yesteryear. In most 3D animations, the animator creates a simplified structure of the character’s anatomy called a skeleton. The position of each segment of the skeletal model is defined by animation variables, or ‘Avars’ for short. By changing the Avar values over time, the animator can make the character move from frame to frame.
Judging by the advanced nature of 3D CGI, one might expect it to render traditional 2D animation completely obsolete. After all, 3D CGI involves rendering each and every frame and doesn’t require the concept of in-betweens. The more visually realistic the characters, the better the experience, right? As the immense popularity of 2D animation proves, this is not the case. Most people do not watch anime for the realism, there are live-action movies for that. 3D CGI, despite having a whole extra dimension to manipulate, is actually very limited in the creative playspace that it offers. Extremely wacky and unrealistic imagery is much more difficult to produce in 3D animation than in 2D, as the former is held back by its reliance on computer hardware. Also, traditional 2D animation has a certain beauty and charm woven into it, projecting the nuances of human expression, while 3D animation can oftentimes look quite robotic.
Special Effects and Post-processing
With all the necessary layers in place, the production gets its polishing techniques ready. Special effects such as dramatic lighting, diffraction, particle effects (for stars, dust and sparks) and fluid dynamic effects are now applied to their respective parts of the images to mimic their real world counterparts. These effects go a long way in ensuring immersion when the work is viewed.
Post-processing is an extension of special effects, and largely deals with adding filters that skew the tone of the image, slight movements that replicate hand-held cameras, and impact frames which help add weight to collisions. This is also a largely digital undertaking, and is handled at the end of the cycle of production.
Limited Animation — TV vs Film
Now, while it’s abundantly clear that TV anime are clearly far behind anime films when it comes to time, budget, and the high-profile talent that films attract, there actually exists terminology to describe the apparent difference in quality.
Going by animator linguistics, the convention is n:s. To grossly simplify it, it indicates the number of frames (including keyframes and in-betweens) in a second, in a very counter-intuitive way. Replacing the n with 1 yields you 24 frames per second, while 2 yields 12 fps, 3 yields 8 fps and so forth.
TV anime tend to incline toward 2:s, sometimes treading 3:s territory if they really feel weighed down by the brunt of their depleting budget. This is why you can find TV anime sporting properly animated foreground characters with relatively awkwardly static background characters. Anime films tend to religiously stick to 1:s animation, and the difference is astounding.
Epilogue
The cycle of Anime Production:
The Beauty in Motion series has come to a glorious finish. We hope you enjoyed venturing into the rewarding depths of Anime. We sure did.
This article was written in collaboration with Adhithya Sundar and Siddarth Arvind.
