Red and Blue make Purple

anime

why do anime girls from the 80s and 90s look so much better than anime girls today

glitchmeow

Three factors: Color, personality, and realism.

First, color and shading.

vs.

The predominant style of the day in anime employs very crisp cell shading and eye-watering colors. Both female and male hair and eye coloration comes in any range of colors, from neon to pastel to white (although female characters most often display this). The typical color for skin in anime has gradually lightened to almost pure white over the years. Additionally, modern anime has a very specific, hard method of shading and highlighting that makes hair and skin look unnaturally shiny and often gross, lowering the realism value and throwing the texture of the skin into uncanny valley territory.

Secondly, anatomical proportions. Besides the shading, female character body and facial proportions have degraded so much that they are barely caricatures of human anatomy. Here are some examples of female anatomy in early anime:

and some in modern anime:

The biggest changes have been to the breast to waist proportion. For some reason, anime producers believe that an E-cup is the appropriate cup-size for an average 14 year old Japanese female. Bodies have also lost all of their depth (that come from an illusion of thickness necessary to two dimensional media) in favor of being skinny and flat (except for voluminous breasts, of course) and many normal, attractive parts of ladies (ribcages, stomach pooches, and natural folds) are simply smoothed over. Another noticeable change has been to the eyes and facial shape. Anime noses and mouths are apparently inversely proportional to eye shape, size, and distance apart. As the size of the eye increases, shape becomes more prominent, and distance towards the ears increases, the size of the nose, mouth, and chin decrease, contributing highly to the uncanny valley effect many modern any girls have.

Take these faces:

vs these

Thirdly, anime girls have lost much of their visible personality over the years due to moefication. This has happened to male characters also, although to a lesser extent. Anime girls are often not allowed to make cartoonish expressions (deemed unattractive) or generally change their expressions at all barring blush lines. In producers’ efforts to make the girls attractive to the audience in every frame, they sacrifice any personality that they might have. Anime girls look increasingly similar to one another, differentiated only by their hair style and eyes. Granted, there has always been a problem with female character same-face syndrome since the conception of anime (actually, in all drawn media) but as the number of female main characters in anime has grown, ironically, the problem has only increased.

Wow! Anime girls with the same hair color that you can actually tell apart!

And somehow, girls with all different colors that you can’t.

The screenshots in this post were taken from Urusei Yatsura, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Ranma ½, Kimagure Orange Road, Ping Pong Club, One Piece, Angel Beats, Higurashi When They Cry, Sword Art Online, Shakugan No Shana, and Chobits. The examples above were not used to bash any anime, but merely to demonstrate the evolution of anime art tropes from the 1980s to now. The writing and plot of each anime were not taken into account at all.

persefones

#this is also a good addition #but lets not forget that the newer styles is also pandering to pedophiles #hence why they often look younger regardless of how old they are

kylogram

Okay, my biggest problem with this post is that it compares well known classic anime with modern anime’s B-game. I recognized only a three of the examples of modern anime, two of those three for being notoriously bad. No one is going to be making honest comparisons between Nadia and *shudder* Sword Art Online.

This post only serves the narrative that anime is getting worse with little or no redeeming value.

There are, however, a number of post-2000’s anime that have both varying character design, and “personality” or whatever you think makes for a good buzz word to sell your theory.

Varying and thoughtful character design never stopped being a thing.

If your argument is simply that there’s not enough realistic proportions in character designs, I GOTCHA COVERED.

If you don’t think the 80′s and 90′s also had bad problems with moefication, then you’re only thinking about the stuff that continued to remain popular to this day. And this is just the stuff that I know.

Get over your wistful nostalgia for days long past, Modern anime isn’t that bad as long as you’re looking in the right direction, you’re only seeing what you want to see, like a baby boomer ranting about millennials.

tldr; get wrekt, I can do this any time.

sailor-arashi

Speaking as someone who grew up watching 80′s and 90′s anime? The body proportion and same-face problems existed back then too. The people saying older anime was better about it are 100% cherry-picking their examples.

Like…are you seriously including Ranma ½ screenshots while talking about distinctive facial features and body proportions? Every single character Rumiko Takahashi has ever drawn has the exact same face and is only distinguishable by their hairstyle. Her thousand imitators of that era also drew only that face. In fact, the very same-face features being complained about can be directly traced back to the massive popularity of Rumik works in the 80′s and 90′s.

Hell, take the Kimagure Orange Road pic up there (the ballet one) and compare the faces to the Ranma pics…hey look…featureless faces with eyes, no nose, a mouth you could draw with a single shape tool in MS Paint. Hikaru and the Kasuga sisters would be absolutely identical if you gave them the same hair…but I thought that only happened in modern anime!?!?!

In short, the past was never as good as people seem to think it was. The present isn’t half as bad as people seem to think it was. And again, speaking as someone who has actually lived through all of these eras, anime is much better now than it was back then. The variety and types of stories being told are astounding when compared to the utter banal simplicity of most 80′s and 90′s fare.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Red and Blue make Purple

boyf riends