A besetting misconception of Late Modern society has convinced most people that history only moves in one direction. Line always goes up, and you can never go back.
Yet you need do nothing more than pull up Hulu, turn on your TV, or visit Barnes and Noble to see that somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong.
A video posted on X by gallery manager Stefan Riekeles illustrated one aspect of the crisis in the arts. In the video, Patlabor artist Yusuke Takeda demonstrates his ingenious cel work:
Hat tip to author JD Cowan for bringing this post to my attention.
Here’s the main highlight:
No doubt about it. They just don’t make ’em like they used to.
Related: Anime Ground Zero
The question nobody seems to ask is “How can we get classic anime back?”
Today, let’s look for some answers.
Anime’s unique visual storytelling enthralled audiences with its trademark artistry. But the industrywide abandonment of hand-drawn cel animation to digipaint has degraded the medium’s look and feel.
While digipaint offers efficiency and cuts costs, it has also caused a noticeable decline in the warmth, depth, and heart that defined anime’s golden age.
To ensure its longevity and restore its artistic soul, the anime industry should forsake digipaint and return to hand-drawn cel animation.
And no, that idea isn’t as quixotic as it sounds.
Cel animation—meticulously painting each frame of animation by hand on transparent sheets—was the standard for decades, producing classics like Akira, My Neighbor Totoro, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. In fact, pretty much every anime produced before the turn of the millennium was hand-drawn on cels.
The imperfections inherent in this method gave anime the human touch that many find lacking in digital works–particularly those generated by A.I. Brush strokes, subtle inconsistencies, and the interplay of light and shadow gave each frame a life of its own. And the immediacy of colors layered on film stock fostered, I dare say, intimacy that digital methods struggle to replicate.
Related: Larry Correia on the A.I. Enthusiasm Deficit
In contrast, digipaint’s pixel-level precision comes off as sterile. While digital tools give you consistency and speed, they also give us visuals that look overpolished and flat. Current Year anime just lacks the organic handcrafted charm the medium made its bones with.
Frequent readers know the sad story of the master craftsman who mixed almost all of paints that anime studios used for their cel art. When he retired in the late 90s, leaving no successor, the industry had an excuse to go all-digital. But while they went to digipaint for lack of human capital, they stayed for monetary reaons. Digital tools let studios churn out anime at previously unimagined rates. But efficiency came at a cost.
The anime market is now flooded with formulaic series that prioritize quantity over quality. With tight schedules and limited budgets, many productions cut corners, resulting in uninspired backgrounds, stiff character movements, and lackluster color palettes. Studios’ focus on mass production has quashed the artistic innovation that defined the industry, turning it into an assembly line for disposable entertainment.
The across-the-board decline in the entertainment industry has audiences longing for authenticity. A return to cel animation could tap into this desire among anime fans. With Gen Y driving the Pop Cult, nostalgia is king, and hand-drawn animation evokes anime’s 1980s-1990s heyday.
And don’t say it can’t be done. The venerable Studio Ghibli still uses traditional cel animation, proving there’s still a market for handcrafted aime.
Plus, using cel animation will make studios bold enough to readopt it stand out in a saturated market. These days, differentiation is the name of the game, so bringing back painted cels is a no-brainer. Besides, making artists take their time with every line and brush stroke is the best way to restore the deliberate creativity now missing from many anime films and series.
Before WWI, the US military had to rebuild its sniper corps from scratch because they’d let that institutional knowledge lapse. The anime industry faced a similar problem regarding cel animation but took the easy way out. As the decades since have shown, the right solution was teaching a new generation of animators to master the craft. By reintroducing cel animation, the industry could cultivate a new wave of artists dedicated to preserving anime’s precious heritage.
Will a cel revival face resistance? Yes. It’s labor-intensive and takes significant resources, making going back to cel art a daunting prospect for studios already operating on thin margins. But cel animation’s return needn’t be an all-or-nothing proposition. Studios could adopt a hybrid approach, using digital tools to streamline certain parts of the process while employing hand-drawn cels for key sequences.
And let’s not forget Neopatronage. The rising viability of crowdfunding gives anime studios a viable path forward. Kickstarter worked for the closely related video game industry, as evidenced by hit games like Bloodstained and Shovel Knight. Dedicated fans are willing to support projects that place a premium on quality. By leveraging patronage models, studios could reduce financial risks while producing works that honor the true spirit of anime.
Related: Should AAA Studios Revisit Retro Style Games?
The anime industry faces a choice that will define it for the next decade. While digipaint has brought rapid production and global reach, it has also diluted the medium’s trademark aesthetic. By returning to hand-drawn cel animation, studios can recapture the warmth, intentionality, and heart that made anime a cultural phenomenon in the first place. It’s a challenging prospect, but one worth pursuing to secure anime’s artistic legacy.
Get early access to my works in progress, the chance to influence my books, and a VIP invite to my exclusive Discord.
Sign up at Patreon or SubscribeStar now.
My thrilling mech adventure comes in a stocking-sized paperback. Get it for Christmas now:
While cel painted animation would be a nice return, I think in this day and age, it’d be even cooler to expand beyond painting. I’m currently experimenting with alcohol marker animation, but I’d wager you could have some neat looking animations using other mediums.
For instance, a recent game, Scarlet Deer Inn, the creator sewed all her frames for her characters.
The bigger point is that digital has run its course and it’s bland.
Oooh, spirit drawing.
One thing I’ve learned in regards to how digital works is that it only benefits in aid, helping the practical and the analog hide their warts. See: special effects and sets/location shooting as inarguably better than all-digital.
At some point we’re going to have enough people tired of how bland computers have made everything that the younger people coming up know they have to do something else to stand out. Much like how so many zoomer writers are more inspired by pulp-style storytelling than what the OldPub has been pumping out since Harry Potter. We’ve been stuck in a rut for much too long now.
Yes, it’s frustrating how many creatives ignore how Hollywood figured out years ago that digital works best for enhancing practical effects and/or pulling off what practical effects can’t do.
Digital also isn’t “easier” or “cheaper” despite the popular refrain. It’s used because it’s easier for suits to keep a grasp on and put under their thumb, because it’s easier to automate. There’s that word again! Truly a mystery why AI is becoming so popular.
All I have to say is the last hand drawn big anime was REDLINE and to this day it stands above anything else out there in anime and animation for just how different and good it is. A handrawn anime done like REDLINE might just standout these days and above everything else.
How much did it hurt to put Neon Genesis Evangelion in the same sentence as “classics”?
What do you mean?
I know how much you don’t like NGE, so I was making a little joke.
XD
I’ve thought for some time about writing horror stories in the style of H.P. Lovecraft (mostly just as a hobby project and nothing more), simply because I like his style of writing and many of his stories conceptually. Never really sat down to get anything written, unfortunately.
When it comes to computers, I’d say the reason everything has become so bland is because there’s still a high fixation on standardization and reducing everything down to an easy-to-use template that can be recycled over and over.
Places like the gaming industry especially suffer from this; in the past, most studios would have their own in-house engine which they’d developed from the ground up specifically for the games they were creating. This meant that there was still a large amount of deep technical knowledge present that was useful for things like optimization and neat tricks to get something working with the provided hardware. In fact, it was precisely this situation that allowed modern-day monolithic game engines like Unity and Unreal to be developed in the first place.
What started to happen after some time, however, was that many game developers started jumping over to these engines primarily because they were such massive platforms with many different features. Seems fine in the short-term, but 20 years on, this has led to most of the gaming industry (especially many indie titles) become dependent on one of two overstuffed, bulky and increasingly buggy game engines (major devs switching to Unreal Engine 5 is a very good example of this). Even when it comes to teaching (as I myself experienced), everything revolves around understanding these two platforms with little time spent on understanding hardware and low-level APIs. All this leads to is a vicious cycle where technical understanding isn’t taught and thus gets lost even further while dependence on a platform like Unity increases. Thrown in the whole business aspect and you can see how things get very screwed up…
Personally speaking, the focus would have to shift to developing a deeper understanding of the underlying hardware and creating more game-specific engines, rather than continuing to support the ‘Unity-Unreal’ duopoly. There are many who go in this direction, but I’m afraid it’s only after AAA comes crashing down that this trend might come to the surface…
I’m not sure the modern characters are “stiff”; they’re more overly quirky and screetchy, like Joss Whedon characters. I rewatched the 79 Gundam recently, and Char’s Counter Attack, and MS 08th, then tried to watch some more modern Gundam. The characters in the old ones are more Stoic, less goofy teenagers, even when they are teenagers. While a return to old school animation would be nice, it’d be crap if not accompanied by a de-Whedonification of the writing.
Well, now that you mention cel painted animation in current goddamn year, I’d say yes, it definitely IS possible, if not, preferable that we return to the hand painted greatness that once defined Japanese animation in the 80s and 90s.
Hell, I’d go on to say there ARE some independents that are already doing just that like Paul “OtaKing” Johnson with his Star Wars TIE Fighter short that not only captures the true spirit of what made anime films like Venus Wars and Macross Plus so memorable and enjoyable, it’s even a middle finger to the Disney Travesty that was the “sequel” trilogy (which isn’t canon and no amount of Disney adult diaper wearing dipshit will convince me otherwise).
And then of course there’s another anime that’s in the style of late 80s/early 90s Masami Obari aesthetic that’s still being crowdfunded to this very day called Constancy Roa, created by the very fine folks at Infinity Ark. I’m still waiting for that anime to release on Blu Ray, but what I saw of the character art and mecha designs, I knew I was immediately in love.
So yeah, there IS still hope for Japanese anime, but it is gonna be a long hard road out of mediocrity and back into the greatness that gave us bangers like Armored Trooper VOTOMS, Macross: Do You Remember Love, and Gundam: Char’s Counterattack.
Allelujah
If you watch Patlabor: the Movie (which everyone should, though after the OVA series) one that thing will be immediately apparent is how different the mechas look compared to anything post 2005. This is because everything is still hand drawn, and they did a really, really good job of it.
We’re into the second decade of “if it’s a machine, make it CGI.” So very few animators active would even have attempted to get the angles right by hand, meaning that you would need to train people for at least a year to even attempt to do what Patlabor did again. Hell even the 2016 Patlabor short used CGI for the mechs.
But it’s not just robots. There are lots of perspective shots in old anime, particularly the late 80’s and early 90’s. These are not always amazing since due to budget constraints they can be pretty rough, but those animators weren’t afraid to rotating shots, shots that pan down a hallway at an angle or through a stairwell, etc. These definitely were a pain to draw, but the animators wanted to show that they knew their stuff. And I think that if you are willing to do that, you will tend to be more creative and daring in your art generally. In contrast if you default to having all the difficult stuff by CG, you will play it safer. This ties into what I said in an earlier anime post, where we have a lot of anime reboots that look better in stills but less interesting in motion.
The weird part is how many EDs in old anime are about a minute long of a simple still shot or looping animation, and somehow they still manage to be more enthralling and memorable than modern EDs which all blur together in the same type of repeated shots and 20 year old tropes. Not to mention how much more generic and samey a lot of the music is now.
You’ve got over 50 years of history in your medium. Is stale blandness really the place it should be in?