Assignment - Which is better Old or New Anime (Art style)

There are a near infinite number of animes out there for you to watch and the medium has gotten increasingly popular in the last 10 years especially in the west, these vary from a large amount of different genres that potentially appeal to anyone if they find the right one right now there are 4 anime season a year and each season a large amount of new animes that are release.

Although allot of different animes have different art styles there are similarities between old and new, the anime style adapts with each story and genre for example if you had a horror anime it might be more realistic style where key features are to proportion where as if it was a comedy genre proportions may be distorted, animes form the past also tended to have bolder and more vibrant lines and colours to define characteristics where as most new styles are thinner lines and facial features are not defined very much in some instances are barley/not visible

As you can see there are subtle but clear differences between the decades, facial structure has changed and has harder edged lines and more points were as in the past there where more rounded shapes, notice the colour shades in the 80s there are more shades and colours to add more of a realistic skin tone where as in the 2000s image its all ne shade, when looking at the eye changes the eyes from 2000s style have gotten slightly rounder and more vacant almost like a soulless expression but this is just a base image as said before there are many different styles and the do depend on the artists/creators.

Here is a more detailed and variety collaboration of images starting from the 60s where anime really took off to 2010, at first glance you can see styles and designs for each individual image are different yes but if you focus on how the style has changed form the 60s to 2010 you can see there has been a huge change especially if you only compare the 60s design to the more modern ones.

In my opinion i think the animes form 60s are more family friendly designs mostly bring colours with realistic looking characters especially hair colours they usually kept to natural looking shades of blonde and brown and allot of ideas and story’s created where all about a hero or some fantasy story they didn’t diverse from genres that much where as the animes form modern day are vastly different from each other (depending on genre of course there will be similarity’s) for example going back to hair the modern style throws out the only natural looking colours and use more vibrant colours such as reds, pinks and blues ad this is not just with hair colour it also refers to eye colours too.

The designs of characters are also vastly different form before modern characters have crazy hair styles and fully developed bodies where as in old style there was usually just the one type of male and Female body type and with hair it kept to what you might call a smart looking neat hair style.

Here is a chart I found that states some of the clear differences

However not all animes that were created and classed as old animes are over various ones such as one piece and sailor moon re still ongoing and have staggering munt of episodes ,movie and even video games behind them and in these cases the styles are not usually new just more refined version of the original.

Here is an image of the first ever episode of one piece that aired in 1999 , the colours are slightly washed out and look like something you would see on a painting rather than a piece of digital media

Now here’s an image of a more recent episode aired in the last few years straight away you can see the art style is more refined and colourful, shadows and more realistic aspects are taken into account and it looks more digital rather than looking like its been painted onto a canvas.

One piece is just one of many animes to do this but this can also relate to how any anime has changed even if they are not part of the same series, because although this is still one piece the art style has taken aspects from the more modern styles of animation and tried to merge with the original style, believe it or not one simple art change could sway long term fans of a series and that would be bad for the industry and brand so when companies deal with long running series they tend to try and change as little as possible about the overall design.

Here are a few other examples

Sailor moon 1992 to modern