This show made me realize Anime has very little emotional effect on me. A girl and dog are on screen for like 5 minutes and I barely remember them by the time the main character comes back later. Somehow on the internet this is a major trauma for a lot of people.
Because you watched brotherhood, the original spent a lot of time building up Nina and Hughes, brotherhood pretty much glazed over everything the original covered, until the storylines diverged
That’s a definite trend. Blame HD video. Circa 2000, computer production made traditional animation a lot easier in a lot of ways, but you could still only see it on 480p-ish CRTs. You could draw more frames, but that was a lot of work for fractions of a second. You could do better shading, but that was a lot of work for every frame. Visual quality needed immense budget increases to get much better.
But analog audio could be fucking incredible. Stereo, sure, but uncompressed, and a tiny fraction of a video signal’s bandwidth. Even VHS was just shy of CD quality. So anime from that era threw serious money at musicians and got some killer scores. Yoko Kanno alone nailed a dozen of them.
The economics of that shifted with high-def. Screens got larger and closer and massively more detailed, so individual drawings could do a lot more work. Couple that with CGI getting good enough to get away with (https://animegalaxyofficial.com/misfit-of-demon-king-academys-ugly-cgi/), and digital drawing tools getting waaay better, and this visual medium produced by hundreds of draw-ers loses sight of why sound matters. We went back to a musical score being background noise.
Honestly even live-action movies have suffered from this. See criticism of Marvel movies’ bland spec-work scores, where they pre-edit to some existing music and then tell Danny Elfman to copy that homework.
Add comment