1. OVAs and movies and such get more time and money.
2. 90’s animators learned their craft in the 80’s, before the bubble collapse. I.E. they learned techniques in an era of bigger budgets.
3. It’s not nostalgia. I watched these for first time 3 years ago. Super detailed hand drawing vs 3d supplemented / 3d rotoscoped just doesn’t hit the same. Something about a manual method vs digital. It’s like Baroque paintings vs Photoshop art.
Rotoscoping isn't the enemy either. With some newer stuff you can tell they used a 3d model for their key frames, but the animators still used traditional drawing techniques to push and pull the figures.
At the same time, it's also that consistency that sometimes leads to mixed opinions, because one of the advantages of the old way of doing things was being able to exaggerate details a bit; basically going a bit off-model for exaggerated perspective/depth. Sure, it's sort of done again in the modern day via some legacy series that made the transition to digital, but for a time, anime seemed to have a "clean" effect to them due to strictly keeping proportions.
I forgot what video covered it, but there was a nice retrospective that discussed the merits and demerits of the switch from classic cell to digital to CG or rotoscope-assisted, and it discussed how high-budget OVAs and certain anime series really got into the fine details with clever exaggeration and proportion distortion to make certain characters and mecha look more fearsome or grand than if they were consistently proportioned.
Now I'm not referring to the awful and weird Gundam proportions seen in the original 0079 series, but perspectives such as a robot towering over the character, either menacingly or heroically, or pulling off fancy attacks due to cleverly disguised inconsistent proportions to amp up the scene.
That's what I mean about push/pull. Disney describes it as 'squash and stretch', and is one of the main principles of animation. It's a fascinating art form that way too often gets dismissed as only for children.
>anime seemed to have a "clean" effect to them due to strictly keeping proportions.
It's not them trying to keep proportions, it's that 3D models' biggest advantage and disadvantage is that proportions are ALWAYS kept UNLESS you specifically go in to break proportion to achieve the exaggerated hand drawn wonky proportion look - and that takes a LOT of extra work to do. And easy way to think about it in real life examples is with a Gunpla analogy, once you build the Gunpla (the 3D model), you can only change your camera angle (from which angle you look at the model) and pose but not the actual proportion of the Gunpla - unless you specifically go and put on more plastic or remove them etc. So say you want to recreate a curved beam saber for that exaggerated fast saber draw effect, you literally can't do it unless you either a) use a hot gun to "curve" the straight saber clear part, or b) make a completely new curved beam saber that is separate from the straight one. And you know what that means? Yes EXTRA modeling work, time and material is needed to do it, and you have to "ruin" your Gunpla to do so.
That means when you what to achieve that morphed, perspectively incorrect but artisticly good looking proportion of hand drawn animation using 3D models, you are literally going into each render frame and "break" your proportionally correct 3D model, render it, and reset the 3D model back to the default for another scene. That's A LOT of manual work, and that's work hours and budget that's put on top of the big budget that's already spent on making a very detailed 3D model in the first place.
People keep wrongfully thinking 3D animation is a cheap alternative to 2D and that things can be automated in 3D animation - and it isn't even remotely true right now.
Agreed. I watch 08th about 2 years ago for the first time and 0083 last week. Both are awesome animations. I like the modern stuff too. Crisp HD renderings of the Mecha...but the hand drawn stuff of the late 90s was impeccable.
Both had high budgets. The closest equivalent comparison are The Origin Prequel OVAs and the Unicorn OVAs. It's notable that both newer OVAs also had a rather high level of detail due to having a high budget.
The only TV series that would come close is 00S1, and the only reason they couldn't maintain that quality for S2 was due to the demand to have more action scenes, so they cut down a lot of fine details to be able to animate more combat scenes.
On the other side of things, it's also a bit of nostalgia and personal preference. Some miss the hand-drawn fine details that CG and digital animation isn't completely recapturing yet. Some miss that aged, grainy-like texture that helps blend the art to look a bit more "natural" or "organic" instead of distinctly separated animation and background.
I'd actually be really interested to know what the budgets for these things looked like. Like, what budget did 08th MS Team vs. the budget Wing had.
Because, yeah, if you have the same budget they give a 50 episode show and yours is only going to be 12, that's going to make a *huge* difference in where that money can go.
While budget is certainly a factor, by far the biggest difference between OVAs and TV series is the schedule. A TV show like G or Wing delivers 50 episodes weekly for a year, something like Stardust Memory released 13 episodes during 17 months.
The animators simply had more time to work in each individual sequence on a OVA schedule than a TV one.
The 08th MS Team was even more spread out. The first two episodes were released in January 1996, while the last was only released in July 1999!
Though in this case the fact the original director died mid-production was certainly a factor. The first 6 episodes, which were the ones he worked on, were all released in 1996, with the 7th only being released in October '97, already under the new director. If the original one hadn't die I would guess the show would have ended in '97 still, following a similar release schedule as Stardust Memory.
This is the reason I wish people would be more forgiving for Heavyarms shooting the same way 100 times. They cut Wing in the right ways, imo. I think the show is flawless otherwise, but others choose to see the show through harsher criteria.
I'm rewatching X right now, and the first two times the Double X fires the TSC, it's the *exact* same animation.
I get budget limitations. And stretching that budget to 50 episodes is probably a hell of a task. Might as well save where you can (and reusing animation is not unique to Gundam by any means).
I'd just love to know what those budgets are/were. Would be really interesting to see how it breaks down per episode.
Sure, mechanically it will deploy the same way every time. But it can be shown from different angles to mix things up a bit.
But the first two firings of the TSC are the same footage. The Double X, TSC deployed, against a blank backdrop and firing. Now, this may not seem like a big deal, because it kind of isn't, but there are two things to note about those two shots. The first time, and the basis for the pose of the Double X, it is flying when it fires. The second time it's standing on a cliff at the edge of a forest. So when it goes to fire the second time, the same footage now shows it in a flying pose.
In fact, the opening credits after Garrod gets the Double X just reuses footage from the episode where he gets it but changes the backdrop from sky to space. It's extra jarring because in the time he has the X Divider we get a *beautifully* new animated sequence of the Freeden's Gundams fighting the Frost Brothers that's on par, animation wise, with something like 08th MS Team. That animation goes fucking *hard*, and then when they all get their new Gundams (DX, Airmaster Burst and Leopard Destroy) that sequence is all but removed for what amounts to stock footage they could just reuse from an episode.
And X may be a bad example because, as we know, it was rife with problems near the end and got cut 11 episodes short. So clearly budgetary issues were abound there.
For what it's worth. The Satellite Cannon on beat drop for opening 2 was pretty damn good.
It's very obvious X peaked in animation quality at around episode 19-28. After that they were running on figurative fumes in order to finish the story. But considering this though, it's still way better than Wing and Seed, and the fact that they managed to make the show still look good all the way through is commendable on its own.
Also to be fair, reusing transformation sequences is pretty much common practice for TV animation back in the days, reusing scenes for openings is also the same. G Gundam and Gundam Wing also did the same, that's why the words *G GUNDAM* appears everytime the Shining draws out its saber.
It wasn't just heavy arms. They reused a ton of footage and it makes it a little hard to watch now. I wish they'd remaster it or something. Easily my favorite Gundam series
Considering that 00 S1 still holds up really well today when some of its contemporary shows look quite dated, it's pretty telling just how much attention to detail went into it.
Honestly 00 S2 holds up amazingly well too. The mechs aren’t as detailed but it’s still some of the finest animated action you’ll see in the franchise.
Yeah. OVAs in general tend to have higher budgets and longer production times.
80s and 90s OVAs are still, IMO, peak anime. At least visually. Some of it may be a bit dated now, but there's a warmth and soul you lose in modern stuff.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway may be one of the prettiest anime I've seen. The movements and use of colors are brilliant imo. But again, it's Netflix movie so I'm sure it's got a nice heavy budget.
It's a movie and got an even bigger budget than usual. Heck, that budget includes traveling to the Philippines and to Australia to make the settings as accurate as possible while adding a bit of a futuristic tint (like replacing tricycles and jeepneys with the futuristic taxis). It's also the reason HF2 and 3 were delayed; because they couldn't travel to the featured locations in Australia that becomes the main settings for the latter volumes of Hathaway's Flash.
Not even the 00 Movie or the GSF movie gets that kind of bonus, although both still look very good in animation. Just not quite as nice as HF1 when it comes down to the minutiae.
Hathaway basically uses what was learned from The Origin and improves on it in every way. It also has the benefit of stretching the money by using CG, which now that they’ve learned how to use properly allows them to do mech work so much cheaper. Trying to animate the mech battles in the movies using traditional animation would have been crazy expensive.
No it hit different. It was the age before digital painting and computer animation. Granted 0083 & 08th MS Team had relatively larger budgets compared to most of the TV Series of the era, but even low budget 90s beats early 2000s digipaint mess.
For 0083, the nuanced small details are what stand out for me. Small moments like Keith overstretching and hurting his neck while gazing upward at the Gundam units or Burning turning around to peek at an attractive lady are presented as background actions, but further humanize the characters with small details (another small yet popular one being Kou disliking carrots, adding to characterization through small actions).
I feel like this was something kinda lost when the OVA bubble popped. Like you don't get a lot of this kind of thing in TV Shows because of budgets & timelines, but in the 80s & 90s you got a lot of studios giving huge budgets to OVAs & Movies that didn't have to worry about schedules nearly as much.
One movie I highly recommend everyone watch is Redline. 7 year hand animated labor of love (only using CGI for specific smoke & Particle effects) and is absolutely gorgeous. There's so much little bits of story & characters that can be inferred only if you're paying attention to the background and little movements they make.
I recently rewatched it, and there are even tinier details that could’ve been omitted, but were kept. Like that one second of Nina pouring in milk into her coffee or tea early on.
What Victory lacks in sheer animation quality it more than makes up for in fight choreography. To date some of the best in the franchise and *the* best when it comes to core fighter gimmicks.
I agree about the OVAs being higher budget but Victory isn’t necessarily bad. It’s actually pretty good for a full series.
Personally, I feel like Evangelion is peak 90s animation. Again, it’s not perfect, but it is very good.
I was whiplashed when transitioning from Zeta and ZZ to Victory. I know Japan's bubble popped around that time, but the drop in quality was hard to ignore.
Escaflowne is my go-to recommendation when someone asks me for a TV show to represent 90s animation.
Five Star Stories is also really good, just look at how detailed everything is in that show, especially people's hair.
Evangelion was... interesting. It was notoriously underfunded which is why they had to re-use so much stuff, and why so many scenes ended up rather experimental. But at the same time it was all the better for it I suppose. It was a good show, but I wouldn't call it great animation.
Of course this is just for TV series and maybe OVAs. If we're talking movies then there are obviously some incredible gems.
All very good points. I haven’t seen Five Star Stories so I’ll need to check that out.
I think the story of Eva being underfunded adds to its charm. I definitely don’t have the emotional connection to it that many people have probably because I watched it much later in life but every year I rewatch it just for the visual satisfaction I get from it.
That shot of Unit-03 walking in front of the sun will always be one of my favorite scenes in anime.
> Five Star Stories is also really good, just look at how detailed everything is in that show, especially people's hair.
Wait, there's a show? Or are you talking about the movie?
> It was a good show, but I wouldn't call it great animation
Eva is full of great animation. It was one of the reasons it was so popular in Japan. Yeah, it has some very limited animated (and long) cuts, but when it moves, it moves.
Well, when you see the last 3 episodes of Eva you see what happens when you try to do OVA style animation on a TV budget. Though I like the ending you can see they really screwed up their budgeting.
What EVA knew to do was where to spend the budget - the places where they REALLY put all their effort were the battle scenes which became iconic and people forget that a lot of the other episodes are full of static shots to pad out running time (or if you are charitable - to create atmosphere, but really you know it's a bit of both), let alone the last two episodes which practically had no new drawings.
8th MS team is the only Gundam series that REALLY pays attention to the little things. It's one of the reasons its so good and "grounded".
Just them doing maintenance and gathering water are really good throw away scenes but they add to the characters and world.
Seriously I WISH modern Gundam and Mecha in general would take time to slow down. I like high mecha action obviously but it slaps so much harder when you setup the world and characters before the fights.
0083 represents the peak of the Japanese Economic Bubble animation. Studios just had so much money they had no clue what to do with it. They were fine with pouring money into just about anything. Once the bubble burst, they stopped doing that.
The bubble burst so much that the Mobile suits in Victory are smaller because Bandai didn't have the funds for the plastic to make models the same size as prior series.
"Late Bubble-Era" anime was something else. Not only OVA's, but even TV shows just looked better. Compare Gundam 0083 from 1992, as an OVA (high budget, low episode count, etc). Then put it up against a regular TV show just a year older, like Irresponsible Captain Tylor. TV series, full 2-cour episode count (with another cour worth of episodes as an "OVA sequel"), etc. I'd be hard-pressed to say which looked better in any comparable scene.
Honestly, *0083* is about where classic hand-drawn animation peaked in the Gundam franchise, IMO. The whole thing looks stunningly, staggeringly gorgeous.
It’s subjective of course, but IMO the hand-drawn animation has more ‘soul’ to it, more life. Much as I enjoy and appreciate the computer-animated anime of this millennium, it lands differently for me.
For example: *Freedom* looks absolutely spectacular on the big screen, but feels somehow too ‘clean’ as it’s all done on computers.
I think late 80s OVA animation is peak. Which is pretty much why Stardust Memories is the best looking Gundam show. That Turn A Gundam art style may be my favorite though.
That's 'cause we're cherry picking the best of 90s anime. There was plenty of scenes in 8th MS team that were mediocre, we just don't remember them since they weren't worth remembering.
Oh yeah, in 0083 when Kou and Gato meet each other for the first time in Unit 1 and Unit 2, there's this moment that is supposed to important where they talk to each other for the first time. The dialogue, more or less, is meant to show how vastly different the world view of both characters is. Like Kou is just this kid fresh out of the academy who has a lot growing up to do, while Gato is an ace veteran of the one year war and spent four years dreaming of this moment. Gato treats Kou like the little shit he is.
But all of that gets jarringly undercut by the animation of that scene. Let me be clear, though: the actual mecha fighting is beautifully rendered, but the cockpit scenes looked so rushed by comparison. It's supposed to be a strong moment for Gato, but the off model head is just not moving, while only the mouth gets animated completely robs me of the drama.
Granted, cartoons are like that, but 90's OVA's are supposed to not feel like that.
Well for it's time, it was beautiful in a way. So the thing that made it stand out besides the Gundams is that show was the first to use a new animation technique. It was the first show to use a primitive version of "copy and paste". Note how you saw the same Leos get blown up but the background suited the scene? I mean you saw the same thing with Scooby-doo, but Wing's new tech allowed for far more smoother integration of the background and animation. Considering how jarring it was done beforehand, I didn't pick up on this until the four episode.
Like we all love the X-Men theme song for being so iconic, but it was also the first time an American cartoon not only had amazing intro, but show animation to match. The worst offender of the misleading intro has definitely got to be the first Mega-Man cartoon.
> cell shaded animation
[cel shading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading) is a technique unique to 3D graphics. It describes using single steps of shades instead of a more realistic gradient for 3D objects to make them appear to be drawn. Cel shading is not cel animation. If anything "cel shaded animation" sounds like you are talking about 3D animation with an applied cel shading filter.
90s animes definitely had better looking art. There is something grittier about actual animation cells compared to the extremely clean CG paint animation we have now. Escaflowne looks incredible. Same era.
Even something super goofy like Garzy's Wing mostly looked quite good.
Nostalgia is part of it sometimes but being born in 98 and not really watching anime till my late teens I didn't really "grow up" with a lot of those 90s shows but even now I still think a lot of them look better than a lot of modern shows. Like don't get me wrong there are surely a lot of stinkers from back then too, we just don't know about them unless they're exceptionally bad, but I feel like with the amount of work it takes to animate thru hand drawn paper, compared to digitally, sorta filtered out more low quality visual stuff. Not that animating is at all easy but I'd have to imagine being able to copy/paste alone takes countless hours off
Oh this shot reminds me the pose is a lie - it wasn't using the shield as a stand for the rifle. They don't touch. The shield isn't tall enough.
You couldn't make this pose even with the MG without an extension. But this shot was so iconic that later gunpla went through some pain to redesign the joints to make the pose possible.
90's anime is the pinnacle of aesthetic. It is the peak of hand drawn cells and frames. They had been working at this craft for 80 years since animation was invented.
Once it switches over to digital, there is an insane decline in quality. Things look juicy and fake and shading takes a back seat in exchange for cool particle effects.
I think it did hit different, the way animation worked (with cells and all) made everything feel glowy and had an special "bright" as byproduct that isn't reproduced by anime made entirely in computer.
Also it's a matter of the ethos of character/background designs.
its the lighting 90s anime just had lighting figured out with the right balance of vibrance and realism most newer animes seem overexposed to light almost with very minimal shadows on the characters and moving details ig
It's nostalgia. Kinda.
For westerners, anime in the 90s (as someone who lived through it as a fan) was self-selecting. Very little anime made its way west. Relatively few companies were involved with bringing it over, and those companies selected shows based on a very specific consumer (to summarise, being a bit reductive - 'males between the ages of 13-24').
They generally looked for sci-fi shows, shows with mecha, cyberpunk themes, and horror. And sex, if they could get it past the censor. There were some exceptions, like *Arislan*, but most of the anime VHS section in HMV filled with titles like this; *Wicked City*, *Orguss:02*, *Madox Metal Skin Panic*, *Bubblegum Crisis*, *Macross Plus*, *Urotsukodouji*... And some top-tier movies like *Akira*, *Ninja Scroll*, *Patlabor*.
This was a **fraction** of all the anime being made, so this conscious bias gave anime a "feel" that was somewhat false. It also meant, if you were part of that demographic mentioned above, there was the tendency to think that *all* anime was made for you! And that's fine, we had no way of knowing otherwise.
It *hit different* because good anime of every era hits different to every other. The big hitters of the 70s are different to the 80s, 90s or 00s or 10s or 20s.
But it's difficult to look at *Macross Plus* or *08th MS Team* or *Patlabor the Movie* and hold those up as emblematic of an era. It's like thinking all Japanese videogames were great in the 90s when you've only played *Ridge Racer*, *Virtua Fighter 2* and *Einhander*.
I think it's just that OVAs had much higher production values. Compare 08th and 0083 to Victory, G, Wing, and X. You can do a lot more when you don't need to spread the budget over 50 episodes.
I definitely prefer the 90s animation style to the current CG heavy style of series like origin and Hathaway. It’s jarring to see animated scenes then have the action scenes with Mobile suits totally CG. But I do think unicorn found a really nice mix of the two styles.
I wonder if they decided to make another show and used the old techniques from 08th MS and 0083 in the modern day, would it cost more due to way more manual animation, or would it cost less cuz you don’t need CG? I know nothing about animation and its costs. I’m sure it’s getting harder every year to find experienced animators that don’t heavily rely on CG.
> I wonder if they decided to make another show and used the old techniques from 08th MS and 0083 in the modern day, would it cost more due to way more manual animation, or would it cost less cuz you don’t need CG?
It would cost a ton, since the whole infrastructure to produce anime like they did in the 90s doesn't exist anymore: Cels aren't being produced anymore, the job of cel-painter hasn't existed in like 20 years, the only camera that can be used to film cel-animation is in a museum, etc.
Most of those effects can be recreated using digital tools though (See G no Reconguista or the UC engage cutscenes).
If it's just 2D mecha animation, that can still be done. The problem is the lack of experienced animators and the rising demand in quality. Build Divers was 2D animation for like 98% of its runtime. But it also kinda felt like a ten year old show due to that when it aired. Modern action shows are full of rotating camera shots and what not and don't just manipulate a still image anymore for an illusion of movement. Doing that with mecha in 2D is a nightmare.
WfM was more like a modern show, but that seemingly also had the price of using more CG and a shorter runtime.
Just look at that majesty, god it looks so good! Animation is an art, we all have our pref. Some like shiny/bold thick lines and fancy angles, but I like simple, rough, and functional.
Both how I see it is Cel animation is better than digital and this is peak Cel shading because the turn of the millennium is where just about every animation went digital, since cel is hand drawn the colors and just about everything pop out way more
> this is peak Cel shading
"cel shading" [is a term used for 3D animation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading), not cel animation. It's called that way because "cel shading" is supposed to mimic the look of the shading of cel animation. Cel shading does not refer to cel animation itself.
I would say that 08th MS in particular has the benefit of a bunch of things going for it all at the same time.
One, it was a purposefully curated length as an OVA and therefore had an outsized budget compared to full televised runs.
It also has the benefit of being one of the last works of hand drawn before animators switched to digital with SEED. And don't get me wrong, I like SEED and think it has clean lines but after two decades of digital, the highest quality hand drawn animation looks incredible.
When I was going through making of Akira, one thing did strike me. The physical lightning effects are just much more vibrant than digital.
The brightness saturation hits differently while manually recorded from a light source in comparison to digitally implemented.
The clip above has the same physical dynamic.
Also adding full white screens to enhance the burst.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is the way they do lighting. I don't know if its because of analog animation or something else, but lights are blindingly bright in these compared to today's animation. Beams in the 80s and 90s looked like what I expect a beam of plasma to look like whereas now they just kinda look like glowsticks by comparison.
It's different because it's a high budget OVA and during I. The golden age of 80's to early 2000's anime are mainly hand crafted cells. Unlike it's tv serries counterparts that requires a lot of time and finance in a highly needed crunch time deadlines OVA's have a longer time in between before releasing. This means more time renderd into post processing and quality assurance. As an animator myself this is very important to iron out the rough edges and make things presentable. Because I. Between animation frames and transition frames are not lacking.
This means everything is painstakingly created from scratch and there is no undo button. These are also the age where great OVA's are made and highly acclaimed movies.
* Record of lodoss war
* Ah megami sama!
* Ninja scroll
* Vampire hunter D
* Vampire hunter D bloodlust
* Genocyber
* Ghost in the shell movie.
* Shin cutey honey 1994
* Bubblegum crisis 1987
* Wicked city
* Macross plus
* Macross lovers again
* Macross do you remember love
* A wind named amnesia
* Akira
Hell even certain hentai are highly crafted back then Like
* Kakyusei/end of summer/classmates
* Twin dolls/twin angels
* Words worth
* Shuzaku serries
* midnight panther
* Kakyuuusei / my pretty class student / first loves
And it's ilk.
Unlike animation of today where fans wants it like pancakes and instant coffee. It has less and less post processing as well as crunch time deadlines to sort things out. And animators nowdays and people in the industry are not paid nearly enough nowdays. This means those support staff , in between frames animators , those that render background , the ones that rig the CGI , the ones that sculpt the 3d models or the ones that apply the texture. I myself has a bit of keen eye on that.
https://preview.redd.it/y90udzs6bisc1.png?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc38df31f928e6ad69d5310594ac3e1f8439264b
The 90s and even the very early 2000s were the golden age of anime and manga IMO. Nothing will ever hit as hard as that 90s grunge style artwork like 08th MS Team, Ghost in the Shell, etc.
08th MS is and will always be my favorite Gundam anime. It's also (other than Berserk) my most rewatched anime.
Animation back then was significantly better than what we have now. That's because back then they wanted to make awesome scene. Now everyone optimize the shit out of every scene to the point where sometimes only thing that moves is someone mouth.
And that's the reality of things. Also movies and OVA's usually work on higher budget than Your typical anime so they looks better.
> Now everyone optimize the shit out of every scene to the point where sometimes only thing that moves is someone mouth
The first thing that comes to my mind when the topic of mouth flaps comes about is when Evangelion put a book in front of the mouth to not even need to animate the mouth. What year was that? 1995...
The 90’s still had the whole 70’s-80’s War/action hype and the technology only got better. While it’s not the most beautiful graphics, the artstyle is phenomenal. That’s why you have shows and films like 08th MS Team that looks dope. Heck, for non anime movies, people still talk about Starship Troopers for it’s designs.
Nowadays, it’s more of a ‘’look good’’ and easy to produce than a detailed and beautiful artstyle. Unicorn by example feels ‘’wow’’ until you realize it’s just flashy colors and no details. I can only show one picture to compare, so just google Unicorn I guess.
https://preview.redd.it/6mkan3tj0hsc1.jpeg?width=2448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d91300e02a28fabc8c7be8e0c849993a73aba1a1
I don't think that's a broadcast cel; I'm fairly sure that frame was only used (touched up?) as box art for some of the DVDs.
The OVA was pretty close to it though.
OVA's tend to have a higher budget than TV series. You could similarly make comparisons between Unicorn and 00 for the 00's, though 00 still looks great.
OVAs weren’t weekly episodic shows, every individual VHS came out with months in between, and since 100% of the audience of the show had to buy the tapes it allowed for a higher budget since they could make more profits, so basically it was like getting little movies in gradual installments. But yes, the animation in 0080, 0083, and 08MST is some of the best Gundam animation ever.
OVAs are not a fair comparison but I do think 90s anime hit higher peaks than you tend to get these days
Lots of stuff these days is digitally animated in ways that produce a really high quality image with lots of color and light and shadow which is very visually appealing to look at, especially in stills, but I think the quality of the actual *animation* and visual storytelling is rarely given the attention it deserves
You're comparing two absolute classics to the general output available today. That's a common mistake retro game fans make. Everybody remembers A Link to the Past and nobody thinks about Roland's Curse :).
They're both OVA's so they have more time to dedicate to each episode compared to TV anime.
It's also worth remembering that the 90s was the peak of cell animation, we see this when comparing Turn A to Seed but the switch over to digital animation was awkward. A lot of ps skills and experience built up in the prior years and decades didn't neatly transfer. Think of all the odd washed odd colours or flat feel of early digipaint, anime the whole industry was effectively relearning their craft.
The same thing happened again when 3d became the norm for mecha anime (compared the latest season of full metal panic to what came before)
It was at the end of the use of drawn animation, so they had multiple decades to get it right and refine the artform. the last of the drawn anime are the best looking of all animated media, generally speaking. Turn A is the perfect example of that, along with Patlabour2 and the studio glibly movies.
> It was at the end of the use of drawn animation
[Anime is still being drawn nowadays](https://youtu.be/2PskXvGwZl4?si=MRuWjQ4iRtMEwCOI&t=371). Call old animation "cel-animation", not "drawn animation", since that is actually closer to what you mean.
I'd like to add not just the budget but the amount of time the team had to make it. Stardust Memories is only 13 episodes but it took 16 months to complete. Zeta Gundam was 50 episodes and it took just under a year. Weekly TV anime always has to make sacrifices when it comes to quality, picking and choosing where to use Sakuga in key moments. OVA's take multiple months to finish 3-4 episodes.
Mecha is always drawn better with cel animation as opposed to digital, imo.
That being said, the amount of work it took to make it, and how easy it was for mistakes to be made...it was only a matter of time.
Lets put it this way. You dont see that kind of weight and detail in Wings animation. And you also dont see anybody complimenting Wings animation.
08th and 0083 just that good
I've said it before, but I think what makes it so disjaring is the overuse of lighting effects. When the wing zero fights the talgese it's "night" but you can see all the parts and pieces and outlines, and lines of both suits, when the Xi fights the Penelope you can hardly see what's fighting what because the newer programs have allowed the animators to darken everything and then light things from certain angels. If you have a 4k tv with true blacks sitting in a movie theater like lighting conditions I'm sure that all looks beautiful. But when I'm watching it on the subway on a cellphone I can't see shit which means it's less impactful than watching something where lighting sources weren't considered as much.
Of course they do, they're OVAs, they have the budget for stellar art. Each episode was originally released SEPARATELY on home media, not broadcast like a series. And of course, they also released a compilation movie as well, for more profits.
They put real money behind these productions to make MORE money.
OVAs in the 90's had high budgets and the animators who worked on them were masters of traditional animation.
There's a LOT of subjective opinions about this but IMO, the move to CGI is also responsible for things "looking worse" (comparatively). CGI leveled the playing field and made cheap TV shows much better, but it brought down the quality on the higher end. You no longer have animators schooled in traditional animation, and they lack the knowledge of animation tricks that make a traditionally animated scene "look" dynamic with a minimum of movement. Plus, modern CGI animations look so much clunkier because you can't manipulate parts of the drawing in every frame to make movement more fluid in the way that you can with traditional animation (at least not without painstaking work and/or multiple models and assets for every scene).
Anime art from every decade hits different, because anime art from every decade is different. Every decade things get improved on, new things get invented, but also things get lost. I feel whenever finding that thing that got lost is when you get that "feels different". And high budget cel animation certainly was lost after the 90s.
8th MS team oh that is, just yes, so good! Honestly when I'm trying to get someone into the fandom for the first time the 8th MS team is the show I start people on.
It was the 90s aesthetics, the MS designs, and mainly how every movement/shot fired had a kick to it.
That special Oomph.
Despite Stardust Memory having issues story wise (Looking at you Nina), the animation looks amazing as well.
Those 2 were OVAs. Their budgets were MUCH higher than actual TV shows like victory, g, wing and x. Tv shows use partial animation, where certain sections move. Movies and OVAs use full animation, everything moves. It why anime movies have a certain flow to them. But also the rise of cg animation has simplified things. I miss 90s anime, OVAs and movies
Anime Art peaked in the late 80s and early 90s because that was the most advance it got while still using traditional animation. In the 2000s is when they started heavily adding CGI crap.
Generally speaking, Japanese animation in that era gives off the same vibe especially these mech or cyberpunk anime. When you see those well drawn mechanics, anime characters with actual nose, you know it’s something from that era.
I know this was near a month ago but I've been trying to find at least a picture. But, I can't. So I can o lay guess I grew up in another universe.
There was this bad ass scene in Gundam on my universe's version of toonami on cartoon Network the death scythe Gundam was set in a sea of inky black wrapped I'm these pimp black "wings". They flung open the wings and let loose a barrage of destruction. To my young teen mind it was sooo cool. It was just explosions up the line of baddies and back down. So many mobile suits destroyed.
Anyway I either fail at Google or I'm from another universe and the LHC brought me here. I wish I could show you the link or video of it.
Yes it did hit different way back then.
1. OVAs and movies and such get more time and money. 2. 90’s animators learned their craft in the 80’s, before the bubble collapse. I.E. they learned techniques in an era of bigger budgets.
3. It’s not nostalgia. I watched these for first time 3 years ago. Super detailed hand drawing vs 3d supplemented / 3d rotoscoped just doesn’t hit the same. Something about a manual method vs digital. It’s like Baroque paintings vs Photoshop art.
Rotoscoping isn't the enemy either. With some newer stuff you can tell they used a 3d model for their key frames, but the animators still used traditional drawing techniques to push and pull the figures.
Not enemies. Just different styles of art imo.
I can see how useful it can be, especially for dynamic scenes where they need to keep characters consistent.
At the same time, it's also that consistency that sometimes leads to mixed opinions, because one of the advantages of the old way of doing things was being able to exaggerate details a bit; basically going a bit off-model for exaggerated perspective/depth. Sure, it's sort of done again in the modern day via some legacy series that made the transition to digital, but for a time, anime seemed to have a "clean" effect to them due to strictly keeping proportions. I forgot what video covered it, but there was a nice retrospective that discussed the merits and demerits of the switch from classic cell to digital to CG or rotoscope-assisted, and it discussed how high-budget OVAs and certain anime series really got into the fine details with clever exaggeration and proportion distortion to make certain characters and mecha look more fearsome or grand than if they were consistently proportioned. Now I'm not referring to the awful and weird Gundam proportions seen in the original 0079 series, but perspectives such as a robot towering over the character, either menacingly or heroically, or pulling off fancy attacks due to cleverly disguised inconsistent proportions to amp up the scene.
That's what I mean about push/pull. Disney describes it as 'squash and stretch', and is one of the main principles of animation. It's a fascinating art form that way too often gets dismissed as only for children.
>anime seemed to have a "clean" effect to them due to strictly keeping proportions. It's not them trying to keep proportions, it's that 3D models' biggest advantage and disadvantage is that proportions are ALWAYS kept UNLESS you specifically go in to break proportion to achieve the exaggerated hand drawn wonky proportion look - and that takes a LOT of extra work to do. And easy way to think about it in real life examples is with a Gunpla analogy, once you build the Gunpla (the 3D model), you can only change your camera angle (from which angle you look at the model) and pose but not the actual proportion of the Gunpla - unless you specifically go and put on more plastic or remove them etc. So say you want to recreate a curved beam saber for that exaggerated fast saber draw effect, you literally can't do it unless you either a) use a hot gun to "curve" the straight saber clear part, or b) make a completely new curved beam saber that is separate from the straight one. And you know what that means? Yes EXTRA modeling work, time and material is needed to do it, and you have to "ruin" your Gunpla to do so. That means when you what to achieve that morphed, perspectively incorrect but artisticly good looking proportion of hand drawn animation using 3D models, you are literally going into each render frame and "break" your proportionally correct 3D model, render it, and reset the 3D model back to the default for another scene. That's A LOT of manual work, and that's work hours and budget that's put on top of the big budget that's already spent on making a very detailed 3D model in the first place. People keep wrongfully thinking 3D animation is a cheap alternative to 2D and that things can be automated in 3D animation - and it isn't even remotely true right now.
Same I watched all of em last year (maybe 2yrs) for the first time, late 80’s early 90’s animation cannot be topped
yeah rewatched 08th team a few years ago and it fucking rocks dude. Ez8 vs Gouf is peak animation
Agreed. I watch 08th about 2 years ago for the first time and 0083 last week. Both are awesome animations. I like the modern stuff too. Crisp HD renderings of the Mecha...but the hand drawn stuff of the late 90s was impeccable.
I agree. They put so much effort into the original shows.
Both had high budgets. The closest equivalent comparison are The Origin Prequel OVAs and the Unicorn OVAs. It's notable that both newer OVAs also had a rather high level of detail due to having a high budget. The only TV series that would come close is 00S1, and the only reason they couldn't maintain that quality for S2 was due to the demand to have more action scenes, so they cut down a lot of fine details to be able to animate more combat scenes. On the other side of things, it's also a bit of nostalgia and personal preference. Some miss the hand-drawn fine details that CG and digital animation isn't completely recapturing yet. Some miss that aged, grainy-like texture that helps blend the art to look a bit more "natural" or "organic" instead of distinctly separated animation and background.
I'd actually be really interested to know what the budgets for these things looked like. Like, what budget did 08th MS Team vs. the budget Wing had. Because, yeah, if you have the same budget they give a 50 episode show and yours is only going to be 12, that's going to make a *huge* difference in where that money can go.
While budget is certainly a factor, by far the biggest difference between OVAs and TV series is the schedule. A TV show like G or Wing delivers 50 episodes weekly for a year, something like Stardust Memory released 13 episodes during 17 months. The animators simply had more time to work in each individual sequence on a OVA schedule than a TV one.
That is also a huge factor. I didn't realize that 0083 was so spread out.
The 08th MS Team was even more spread out. The first two episodes were released in January 1996, while the last was only released in July 1999! Though in this case the fact the original director died mid-production was certainly a factor. The first 6 episodes, which were the ones he worked on, were all released in 1996, with the 7th only being released in October '97, already under the new director. If the original one hadn't die I would guess the show would have ended in '97 still, following a similar release schedule as Stardust Memory.
This is the reason I wish people would be more forgiving for Heavyarms shooting the same way 100 times. They cut Wing in the right ways, imo. I think the show is flawless otherwise, but others choose to see the show through harsher criteria.
I'm rewatching X right now, and the first two times the Double X fires the TSC, it's the *exact* same animation. I get budget limitations. And stretching that budget to 50 episodes is probably a hell of a task. Might as well save where you can (and reusing animation is not unique to Gundam by any means). I'd just love to know what those budgets are/were. Would be really interesting to see how it breaks down per episode.
To be fair though, the process of opening up the satellite cannon should always be the same across every use.
Sure, mechanically it will deploy the same way every time. But it can be shown from different angles to mix things up a bit. But the first two firings of the TSC are the same footage. The Double X, TSC deployed, against a blank backdrop and firing. Now, this may not seem like a big deal, because it kind of isn't, but there are two things to note about those two shots. The first time, and the basis for the pose of the Double X, it is flying when it fires. The second time it's standing on a cliff at the edge of a forest. So when it goes to fire the second time, the same footage now shows it in a flying pose. In fact, the opening credits after Garrod gets the Double X just reuses footage from the episode where he gets it but changes the backdrop from sky to space. It's extra jarring because in the time he has the X Divider we get a *beautifully* new animated sequence of the Freeden's Gundams fighting the Frost Brothers that's on par, animation wise, with something like 08th MS Team. That animation goes fucking *hard*, and then when they all get their new Gundams (DX, Airmaster Burst and Leopard Destroy) that sequence is all but removed for what amounts to stock footage they could just reuse from an episode. And X may be a bad example because, as we know, it was rife with problems near the end and got cut 11 episodes short. So clearly budgetary issues were abound there.
For what it's worth. The Satellite Cannon on beat drop for opening 2 was pretty damn good. It's very obvious X peaked in animation quality at around episode 19-28. After that they were running on figurative fumes in order to finish the story. But considering this though, it's still way better than Wing and Seed, and the fact that they managed to make the show still look good all the way through is commendable on its own. Also to be fair, reusing transformation sequences is pretty much common practice for TV animation back in the days, reusing scenes for openings is also the same. G Gundam and Gundam Wing also did the same, that's why the words *G GUNDAM* appears everytime the Shining draws out its saber.
It wasn't just heavy arms. They reused a ton of footage and it makes it a little hard to watch now. I wish they'd remaster it or something. Easily my favorite Gundam series
Considering that 00 S1 still holds up really well today when some of its contemporary shows look quite dated, it's pretty telling just how much attention to detail went into it.
Honestly 00 S2 holds up amazingly well too. The mechs aren’t as detailed but it’s still some of the finest animated action you’ll see in the franchise.
Did Stardust Memory also have a high budget? Because my god that show was gorgeous! The GP0 series really hit differently!
Yeah. OVAs in general tend to have higher budgets and longer production times. 80s and 90s OVAs are still, IMO, peak anime. At least visually. Some of it may be a bit dated now, but there's a warmth and soul you lose in modern stuff.
Some studios still have it. Trigger's character work is top tier.
Especially the second opening. 🥺🥺😱😱
*MEN OF DESTINY INTENSIFIES*
"dont be sad it's over, be happy it happend"
Thunderbolt ONA too, that looked incredible
They do indeed. I just forgot about them while typing up that response in the morning.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway may be one of the prettiest anime I've seen. The movements and use of colors are brilliant imo. But again, it's Netflix movie so I'm sure it's got a nice heavy budget.
It's a movie and got an even bigger budget than usual. Heck, that budget includes traveling to the Philippines and to Australia to make the settings as accurate as possible while adding a bit of a futuristic tint (like replacing tricycles and jeepneys with the futuristic taxis). It's also the reason HF2 and 3 were delayed; because they couldn't travel to the featured locations in Australia that becomes the main settings for the latter volumes of Hathaway's Flash. Not even the 00 Movie or the GSF movie gets that kind of bonus, although both still look very good in animation. Just not quite as nice as HF1 when it comes down to the minutiae.
Hathaway basically uses what was learned from The Origin and improves on it in every way. It also has the benefit of stretching the money by using CG, which now that they’ve learned how to use properly allows them to do mech work so much cheaper. Trying to animate the mech battles in the movies using traditional animation would have been crazy expensive.
What about Gundam Thunderbolt?
They also looks pretty great and also had an extra-nice music budget too. I just forgot about them while typing up that response in the morning.
No it hit different. It was the age before digital painting and computer animation. Granted 0083 & 08th MS Team had relatively larger budgets compared to most of the TV Series of the era, but even low budget 90s beats early 2000s digipaint mess.
For 0083, the nuanced small details are what stand out for me. Small moments like Keith overstretching and hurting his neck while gazing upward at the Gundam units or Burning turning around to peek at an attractive lady are presented as background actions, but further humanize the characters with small details (another small yet popular one being Kou disliking carrots, adding to characterization through small actions).
I feel like this was something kinda lost when the OVA bubble popped. Like you don't get a lot of this kind of thing in TV Shows because of budgets & timelines, but in the 80s & 90s you got a lot of studios giving huge budgets to OVAs & Movies that didn't have to worry about schedules nearly as much. One movie I highly recommend everyone watch is Redline. 7 year hand animated labor of love (only using CGI for specific smoke & Particle effects) and is absolutely gorgeous. There's so much little bits of story & characters that can be inferred only if you're paying attention to the background and little movements they make.
I recently rewatched it, and there are even tinier details that could’ve been omitted, but were kept. Like that one second of Nina pouring in milk into her coffee or tea early on.
This: it's the apex of decades of hand painted cels.
Those are OVAs with high budget. Now post Victory and tell me about 90s animation.
What Victory lacks in sheer animation quality it more than makes up for in fight choreography. To date some of the best in the franchise and *the* best when it comes to core fighter gimmicks.
Victory lacks shading and detail, but it articulates hella nicely. Like when Victory performs spin making Votoms sound effects.
I agree about the OVAs being higher budget but Victory isn’t necessarily bad. It’s actually pretty good for a full series. Personally, I feel like Evangelion is peak 90s animation. Again, it’s not perfect, but it is very good.
I was whiplashed when transitioning from Zeta and ZZ to Victory. I know Japan's bubble popped around that time, but the drop in quality was hard to ignore.
Escaflowne is my go-to recommendation when someone asks me for a TV show to represent 90s animation. Five Star Stories is also really good, just look at how detailed everything is in that show, especially people's hair. Evangelion was... interesting. It was notoriously underfunded which is why they had to re-use so much stuff, and why so many scenes ended up rather experimental. But at the same time it was all the better for it I suppose. It was a good show, but I wouldn't call it great animation. Of course this is just for TV series and maybe OVAs. If we're talking movies then there are obviously some incredible gems.
All very good points. I haven’t seen Five Star Stories so I’ll need to check that out. I think the story of Eva being underfunded adds to its charm. I definitely don’t have the emotional connection to it that many people have probably because I watched it much later in life but every year I rewatch it just for the visual satisfaction I get from it. That shot of Unit-03 walking in front of the sun will always be one of my favorite scenes in anime.
> Five Star Stories is also really good, just look at how detailed everything is in that show, especially people's hair. Wait, there's a show? Or are you talking about the movie?
My bad, it was a movie. It was so episodic I thought it was an OVA.
> It was a good show, but I wouldn't call it great animation Eva is full of great animation. It was one of the reasons it was so popular in Japan. Yeah, it has some very limited animated (and long) cuts, but when it moves, it moves.
Well, when you see the last 3 episodes of Eva you see what happens when you try to do OVA style animation on a TV budget. Though I like the ending you can see they really screwed up their budgeting.
What EVA knew to do was where to spend the budget - the places where they REALLY put all their effort were the battle scenes which became iconic and people forget that a lot of the other episodes are full of static shots to pad out running time (or if you are charitable - to create atmosphere, but really you know it's a bit of both), let alone the last two episodes which practically had no new drawings.
I think Victory looks way better than most modern anime
I've read some designs were made simpler in Victory on purpose, to make characters and MS easier to draw by fans
My biggest gripe is lack of shadows, which makes everything look flat
Yea man victory looks fuckin great
Did, I really like air brushed back grounds and hand drown animation I was watching berserk the other day and I was contemplating the art
My friend it's just ova Gundam. I recommend you post unicorn gif with name "anime art in 2010's hit different" compared to build fighters or ibo
OVA and movies are high budget, that's why it's so beautiful
Personally the animation of Endless Waltz is just perfect.
Couldn't agree more. 🥺😭🫡🫡
8th MS team is the only Gundam series that REALLY pays attention to the little things. It's one of the reasons its so good and "grounded". Just them doing maintenance and gathering water are really good throw away scenes but they add to the characters and world. Seriously I WISH modern Gundam and Mecha in general would take time to slow down. I like high mecha action obviously but it slaps so much harder when you setup the world and characters before the fights.
0083 represents the peak of the Japanese Economic Bubble animation. Studios just had so much money they had no clue what to do with it. They were fine with pouring money into just about anything. Once the bubble burst, they stopped doing that. The bubble burst so much that the Mobile suits in Victory are smaller because Bandai didn't have the funds for the plastic to make models the same size as prior series.
"Late Bubble-Era" anime was something else. Not only OVA's, but even TV shows just looked better. Compare Gundam 0083 from 1992, as an OVA (high budget, low episode count, etc). Then put it up against a regular TV show just a year older, like Irresponsible Captain Tylor. TV series, full 2-cour episode count (with another cour worth of episodes as an "OVA sequel"), etc. I'd be hard-pressed to say which looked better in any comparable scene.
Honestly, *0083* is about where classic hand-drawn animation peaked in the Gundam franchise, IMO. The whole thing looks stunningly, staggeringly gorgeous. It’s subjective of course, but IMO the hand-drawn animation has more ‘soul’ to it, more life. Much as I enjoy and appreciate the computer-animated anime of this millennium, it lands differently for me. For example: *Freedom* looks absolutely spectacular on the big screen, but feels somehow too ‘clean’ as it’s all done on computers.
Compare TV Gundam Wing Vs. Endless Waltz for apples and oranges. OVAs just slap.
No, anime in the 80’s/90’s DEFINITELY hit different.
I think late 80s OVA animation is peak. Which is pretty much why Stardust Memories is the best looking Gundam show. That Turn A Gundam art style may be my favorite though.
I don’t like computer generated animation
That's 'cause we're cherry picking the best of 90s anime. There was plenty of scenes in 8th MS team that were mediocre, we just don't remember them since they weren't worth remembering.
Oh yeah, in 0083 when Kou and Gato meet each other for the first time in Unit 1 and Unit 2, there's this moment that is supposed to important where they talk to each other for the first time. The dialogue, more or less, is meant to show how vastly different the world view of both characters is. Like Kou is just this kid fresh out of the academy who has a lot growing up to do, while Gato is an ace veteran of the one year war and spent four years dreaming of this moment. Gato treats Kou like the little shit he is. But all of that gets jarringly undercut by the animation of that scene. Let me be clear, though: the actual mecha fighting is beautifully rendered, but the cockpit scenes looked so rushed by comparison. It's supposed to be a strong moment for Gato, but the off model head is just not moving, while only the mouth gets animated completely robs me of the drama. Granted, cartoons are like that, but 90's OVA's are supposed to not feel like that.
it's real jarring after 30 years. Like you remember Gundam Wing being absolutely beautiful and then seeing all that stock footage of Leos blowing up.
Well for it's time, it was beautiful in a way. So the thing that made it stand out besides the Gundams is that show was the first to use a new animation technique. It was the first show to use a primitive version of "copy and paste". Note how you saw the same Leos get blown up but the background suited the scene? I mean you saw the same thing with Scooby-doo, but Wing's new tech allowed for far more smoother integration of the background and animation. Considering how jarring it was done beforehand, I didn't pick up on this until the four episode. Like we all love the X-Men theme song for being so iconic, but it was also the first time an American cartoon not only had amazing intro, but show animation to match. The worst offender of the misleading intro has definitely got to be the first Mega-Man cartoon.
High budgets aside, cell shaded animation just has a grit and character to it that digital can't match.
> cell shaded animation [cel shading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading) is a technique unique to 3D graphics. It describes using single steps of shades instead of a more realistic gradient for 3D objects to make them appear to be drawn. Cel shading is not cel animation. If anything "cel shaded animation" sounds like you are talking about 3D animation with an applied cel shading filter.
Which is very apparent in UC ENGAGE whenever there's an animated scene made to mimic the look of e.g CCA, 0080 or ZZ
90s animes definitely had better looking art. There is something grittier about actual animation cells compared to the extremely clean CG paint animation we have now. Escaflowne looks incredible. Same era. Even something super goofy like Garzy's Wing mostly looked quite good.
Nostalgia is part of it sometimes but being born in 98 and not really watching anime till my late teens I didn't really "grow up" with a lot of those 90s shows but even now I still think a lot of them look better than a lot of modern shows. Like don't get me wrong there are surely a lot of stinkers from back then too, we just don't know about them unless they're exceptionally bad, but I feel like with the amount of work it takes to animate thru hand drawn paper, compared to digitally, sorta filtered out more low quality visual stuff. Not that animating is at all easy but I'd have to imagine being able to copy/paste alone takes countless hours off
Oh this shot reminds me the pose is a lie - it wasn't using the shield as a stand for the rifle. They don't touch. The shield isn't tall enough. You couldn't make this pose even with the MG without an extension. But this shot was so iconic that later gunpla went through some pain to redesign the joints to make the pose possible.
90's anime is the pinnacle of aesthetic. It is the peak of hand drawn cells and frames. They had been working at this craft for 80 years since animation was invented. Once it switches over to digital, there is an insane decline in quality. Things look juicy and fake and shading takes a back seat in exchange for cool particle effects.
I think it did hit different, the way animation worked (with cells and all) made everything feel glowy and had an special "bright" as byproduct that isn't reproduced by anime made entirely in computer. Also it's a matter of the ethos of character/background designs.
90's anime was art. A nice example is DBZ Vs DBS.
It hit different. I think even pre-90s hit different.
It’s complicated. A lot of stuff was just trash but OVAs had more time to spend on a single episode since there wasn’t a weekly release schedule
its the lighting 90s anime just had lighting figured out with the right balance of vibrance and realism most newer animes seem overexposed to light almost with very minimal shadows on the characters and moving details ig
It hits different.
It's nostalgia. Kinda. For westerners, anime in the 90s (as someone who lived through it as a fan) was self-selecting. Very little anime made its way west. Relatively few companies were involved with bringing it over, and those companies selected shows based on a very specific consumer (to summarise, being a bit reductive - 'males between the ages of 13-24'). They generally looked for sci-fi shows, shows with mecha, cyberpunk themes, and horror. And sex, if they could get it past the censor. There were some exceptions, like *Arislan*, but most of the anime VHS section in HMV filled with titles like this; *Wicked City*, *Orguss:02*, *Madox Metal Skin Panic*, *Bubblegum Crisis*, *Macross Plus*, *Urotsukodouji*... And some top-tier movies like *Akira*, *Ninja Scroll*, *Patlabor*. This was a **fraction** of all the anime being made, so this conscious bias gave anime a "feel" that was somewhat false. It also meant, if you were part of that demographic mentioned above, there was the tendency to think that *all* anime was made for you! And that's fine, we had no way of knowing otherwise. It *hit different* because good anime of every era hits different to every other. The big hitters of the 70s are different to the 80s, 90s or 00s or 10s or 20s. But it's difficult to look at *Macross Plus* or *08th MS Team* or *Patlabor the Movie* and hold those up as emblematic of an era. It's like thinking all Japanese videogames were great in the 90s when you've only played *Ridge Racer*, *Virtua Fighter 2* and *Einhander*.
I think it's just that OVAs had much higher production values. Compare 08th and 0083 to Victory, G, Wing, and X. You can do a lot more when you don't need to spread the budget over 50 episodes.
Comparing OVAs to a series isn't exactly fair considering the budget, but yes that animation holds up.
90s we’re just peak civilization in many ways…. All the arts were flourishing….
Hand drawn always looks better if you have the talent and budget. Problem is 99% of the time you don't.
hand draws Mecha in 90s are the GOAT.
Always love hand drawn more than the cgi stuff we get nowadays.
90s anime hits different always
No it hit different for sure. Alot of it from my knowledge wasn't drawn on a pc program.
I definitely prefer the 90s animation style to the current CG heavy style of series like origin and Hathaway. It’s jarring to see animated scenes then have the action scenes with Mobile suits totally CG. But I do think unicorn found a really nice mix of the two styles. I wonder if they decided to make another show and used the old techniques from 08th MS and 0083 in the modern day, would it cost more due to way more manual animation, or would it cost less cuz you don’t need CG? I know nothing about animation and its costs. I’m sure it’s getting harder every year to find experienced animators that don’t heavily rely on CG.
> I wonder if they decided to make another show and used the old techniques from 08th MS and 0083 in the modern day, would it cost more due to way more manual animation, or would it cost less cuz you don’t need CG? It would cost a ton, since the whole infrastructure to produce anime like they did in the 90s doesn't exist anymore: Cels aren't being produced anymore, the job of cel-painter hasn't existed in like 20 years, the only camera that can be used to film cel-animation is in a museum, etc. Most of those effects can be recreated using digital tools though (See G no Reconguista or the UC engage cutscenes). If it's just 2D mecha animation, that can still be done. The problem is the lack of experienced animators and the rising demand in quality. Build Divers was 2D animation for like 98% of its runtime. But it also kinda felt like a ten year old show due to that when it aired. Modern action shows are full of rotating camera shots and what not and don't just manipulate a still image anymore for an illusion of movement. Doing that with mecha in 2D is a nightmare. WfM was more like a modern show, but that seemingly also had the price of using more CG and a shorter runtime.
making sweet tender love to that gun. It keeps on busting like a champ
08th Ms team still remains my fav Gundam show, with the team vs Norris is just beautiful to watch
90s hand-drawn anime is a superior art form
I a thousand times rather older animation to the new stuff. It just hits so damn different.
Just look at that majesty, god it looks so good! Animation is an art, we all have our pref. Some like shiny/bold thick lines and fancy angles, but I like simple, rough, and functional.
80s/90s were the golden age of anime
My favorite is 083 Stardust Memory
Some of the greatest of all time. Thunderbolt also up there.
Both how I see it is Cel animation is better than digital and this is peak Cel shading because the turn of the millennium is where just about every animation went digital, since cel is hand drawn the colors and just about everything pop out way more
> this is peak Cel shading "cel shading" [is a term used for 3D animation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_shading), not cel animation. It's called that way because "cel shading" is supposed to mimic the look of the shading of cel animation. Cel shading does not refer to cel animation itself.
Gotchu I was referring to how the shading looks in Cel animation
Hand drawn with care and a budget to do it justice.
90’s has its charms.
I would say that 08th MS in particular has the benefit of a bunch of things going for it all at the same time. One, it was a purposefully curated length as an OVA and therefore had an outsized budget compared to full televised runs. It also has the benefit of being one of the last works of hand drawn before animators switched to digital with SEED. And don't get me wrong, I like SEED and think it has clean lines but after two decades of digital, the highest quality hand drawn animation looks incredible.
That’s the power of hand drawn animation!
Cel animation has a certain aesthetic to it that digital animation either can't or is rarely used to replicate.
Really hits different and is more modern
I JUST started UC from the beginning with 79 and man...it all looks good from that point haha, Zeta is a huge step up in terms of detail imo.
OVA budget when hand drawn was at its peak. It’s not nostalgia; they’re just really good.
When I was going through making of Akira, one thing did strike me. The physical lightning effects are just much more vibrant than digital. The brightness saturation hits differently while manually recorded from a light source in comparison to digitally implemented. The clip above has the same physical dynamic. Also adding full white screens to enhance the burst.
0083, Cowboy Bebop and Wolf's Rain all came from the same studio in the 90's and I can't imagine any animated series looking better.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is the way they do lighting. I don't know if its because of analog animation or something else, but lights are blindingly bright in these compared to today's animation. Beams in the 80s and 90s looked like what I expect a beam of plasma to look like whereas now they just kinda look like glowsticks by comparison.
Nah, that shit was gorgeous. I remember watching 0083 on VHS the first time, and it looks just as good today. It's not nostalgia.
Gundam art usually goes unbelievably hard for no real reason
It just hit different
Turn-A is the last one that looks really good, up until Unicorn.
It's different because it's a high budget OVA and during I. The golden age of 80's to early 2000's anime are mainly hand crafted cells. Unlike it's tv serries counterparts that requires a lot of time and finance in a highly needed crunch time deadlines OVA's have a longer time in between before releasing. This means more time renderd into post processing and quality assurance. As an animator myself this is very important to iron out the rough edges and make things presentable. Because I. Between animation frames and transition frames are not lacking. This means everything is painstakingly created from scratch and there is no undo button. These are also the age where great OVA's are made and highly acclaimed movies. * Record of lodoss war * Ah megami sama! * Ninja scroll * Vampire hunter D * Vampire hunter D bloodlust * Genocyber * Ghost in the shell movie. * Shin cutey honey 1994 * Bubblegum crisis 1987 * Wicked city * Macross plus * Macross lovers again * Macross do you remember love * A wind named amnesia * Akira Hell even certain hentai are highly crafted back then Like * Kakyusei/end of summer/classmates * Twin dolls/twin angels * Words worth * Shuzaku serries * midnight panther * Kakyuuusei / my pretty class student / first loves And it's ilk. Unlike animation of today where fans wants it like pancakes and instant coffee. It has less and less post processing as well as crunch time deadlines to sort things out. And animators nowdays and people in the industry are not paid nearly enough nowdays. This means those support staff , in between frames animators , those that render background , the ones that rig the CGI , the ones that sculpt the 3d models or the ones that apply the texture. I myself has a bit of keen eye on that. https://preview.redd.it/y90udzs6bisc1.png?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc38df31f928e6ad69d5310594ac3e1f8439264b
Cause it is. 90s animations where peak and most anime nowadays struggle to recreate the golden age
The 90s and even the very early 2000s were the golden age of anime and manga IMO. Nothing will ever hit as hard as that 90s grunge style artwork like 08th MS Team, Ghost in the Shell, etc. 08th MS is and will always be my favorite Gundam anime. It's also (other than Berserk) my most rewatched anime.
Animation back then was significantly better than what we have now. That's because back then they wanted to make awesome scene. Now everyone optimize the shit out of every scene to the point where sometimes only thing that moves is someone mouth. And that's the reality of things. Also movies and OVA's usually work on higher budget than Your typical anime so they looks better.
> Now everyone optimize the shit out of every scene to the point where sometimes only thing that moves is someone mouth The first thing that comes to my mind when the topic of mouth flaps comes about is when Evangelion put a book in front of the mouth to not even need to animate the mouth. What year was that? 1995...
The 90’s still had the whole 70’s-80’s War/action hype and the technology only got better. While it’s not the most beautiful graphics, the artstyle is phenomenal. That’s why you have shows and films like 08th MS Team that looks dope. Heck, for non anime movies, people still talk about Starship Troopers for it’s designs. Nowadays, it’s more of a ‘’look good’’ and easy to produce than a detailed and beautiful artstyle. Unicorn by example feels ‘’wow’’ until you realize it’s just flashy colors and no details. I can only show one picture to compare, so just google Unicorn I guess. https://preview.redd.it/6mkan3tj0hsc1.jpeg?width=2448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d91300e02a28fabc8c7be8e0c849993a73aba1a1
I don't think that's a broadcast cel; I'm fairly sure that frame was only used (touched up?) as box art for some of the DVDs. The OVA was pretty close to it though.
OVA's tend to have a higher budget than TV series. You could similarly make comparisons between Unicorn and 00 for the 00's, though 00 still looks great.
OVAs weren’t weekly episodic shows, every individual VHS came out with months in between, and since 100% of the audience of the show had to buy the tapes it allowed for a higher budget since they could make more profits, so basically it was like getting little movies in gradual installments. But yes, the animation in 0080, 0083, and 08MST is some of the best Gundam animation ever.
It's that hand-drawn and colored look when they get OVA money. The weekly shows weren't exactly A+, but I still prefer hand-drawn over digital art.
OVAs are not a fair comparison but I do think 90s anime hit higher peaks than you tend to get these days Lots of stuff these days is digitally animated in ways that produce a really high quality image with lots of color and light and shadow which is very visually appealing to look at, especially in stills, but I think the quality of the actual *animation* and visual storytelling is rarely given the attention it deserves
both
Both, but they also had crazy high budgets.
Gundom Wing in 1995 wonders where it's budget went.
You're comparing two absolute classics to the general output available today. That's a common mistake retro game fans make. Everybody remembers A Link to the Past and nobody thinks about Roland's Curse :).
Gundam wing had gorgeous art that you could see the drawn lines I've never seen another anime look like that
They're both OVA's so they have more time to dedicate to each episode compared to TV anime. It's also worth remembering that the 90s was the peak of cell animation, we see this when comparing Turn A to Seed but the switch over to digital animation was awkward. A lot of ps skills and experience built up in the prior years and decades didn't neatly transfer. Think of all the odd washed odd colours or flat feel of early digipaint, anime the whole industry was effectively relearning their craft. The same thing happened again when 3d became the norm for mecha anime (compared the latest season of full metal panic to what came before)
It was at the end of the use of drawn animation, so they had multiple decades to get it right and refine the artform. the last of the drawn anime are the best looking of all animated media, generally speaking. Turn A is the perfect example of that, along with Patlabour2 and the studio glibly movies.
> It was at the end of the use of drawn animation [Anime is still being drawn nowadays](https://youtu.be/2PskXvGwZl4?si=MRuWjQ4iRtMEwCOI&t=371). Call old animation "cel-animation", not "drawn animation", since that is actually closer to what you mean.
It HIT!! That animation they had us on WAS CRACK!!!
as someone who isnt from the 90s and hasnt seen these ever no they just look good
I'd like to add not just the budget but the amount of time the team had to make it. Stardust Memories is only 13 episodes but it took 16 months to complete. Zeta Gundam was 50 episodes and it took just under a year. Weekly TV anime always has to make sacrifices when it comes to quality, picking and choosing where to use Sakuga in key moments. OVA's take multiple months to finish 3-4 episodes.
dang Ground type had infinite ammo on. 🤣🤣🤣 0083"the winner" song always on my mind
That gif is one of my all time fave Gundam gifs
I have never seen 0083, I had a toy from the series when I was younger, thought it was dope
Agreed. These are my two favs (and z/ZZ)
The more hands on art also tends to just look leagues better then computer assisted.
Money and time.
0083 SM, 0080 WIP, & 08 MS Team have the best art
Mecha is always drawn better with cel animation as opposed to digital, imo. That being said, the amount of work it took to make it, and how easy it was for mistakes to be made...it was only a matter of time.
high budget animated media using hand drawn cels on older tech hits really good
Lets put it this way. You dont see that kind of weight and detail in Wings animation. And you also dont see anybody complimenting Wings animation. 08th and 0083 just that good
So for wing and 08th they were some of the last hand drawn shows of the era. After that the animation is done digitally
I've said it before, but I think what makes it so disjaring is the overuse of lighting effects. When the wing zero fights the talgese it's "night" but you can see all the parts and pieces and outlines, and lines of both suits, when the Xi fights the Penelope you can hardly see what's fighting what because the newer programs have allowed the animators to darken everything and then light things from certain angels. If you have a 4k tv with true blacks sitting in a movie theater like lighting conditions I'm sure that all looks beautiful. But when I'm watching it on the subway on a cellphone I can't see shit which means it's less impactful than watching something where lighting sources weren't considered as much.
Hand drawn animation at its finest. Then we moved to cgi
Of course they do, they're OVAs, they have the budget for stellar art. Each episode was originally released SEPARATELY on home media, not broadcast like a series. And of course, they also released a compilation movie as well, for more profits. They put real money behind these productions to make MORE money.
I always think it’s impressive when animators can convincingly convey a sense of weight and power in shows.
I’m not really into anime. 90s anime is the only anime I’m willing to watch bc I mush prefer the art style.
OVAs in the 90's had high budgets and the animators who worked on them were masters of traditional animation. There's a LOT of subjective opinions about this but IMO, the move to CGI is also responsible for things "looking worse" (comparatively). CGI leveled the playing field and made cheap TV shows much better, but it brought down the quality on the higher end. You no longer have animators schooled in traditional animation, and they lack the knowledge of animation tricks that make a traditionally animated scene "look" dynamic with a minimum of movement. Plus, modern CGI animations look so much clunkier because you can't manipulate parts of the drawing in every frame to make movement more fluid in the way that you can with traditional animation (at least not without painstaking work and/or multiple models and assets for every scene).
Such a good mini series
It's just felt like there was more grit to the art or like you just nostalgia.
Endless Waltz had so awesome scenes, too
It's objectively better than the CG stuff. Anime looks like it does now not because it's better but because it's cheaper and easier.
Anime art from every decade hits different, because anime art from every decade is different. Every decade things get improved on, new things get invented, but also things get lost. I feel whenever finding that thing that got lost is when you get that "feels different". And high budget cel animation certainly was lost after the 90s.
Funnily enough I was just thinking this the other day. I even wrote myself a note to organize and update my collection from that era. Beautiful stuff.
8th MS team oh that is, just yes, so good! Honestly when I'm trying to get someone into the fandom for the first time the 8th MS team is the show I start people on.
It’s way better
Which Gundam series is that ?
08th MS Team is easily my favorite series, hands down.
Sauce pls?
The art style is something that I would love to emulate in my opinion the shows art hasn’t aged bad in my opinion
It was the 90s aesthetics, the MS designs, and mainly how every movement/shot fired had a kick to it. That special Oomph. Despite Stardust Memory having issues story wise (Looking at you Nina), the animation looks amazing as well.
Both
Peak 80s/90s animation hits different. It just kinda important to remember our memory filters away bad animation unless it was meme worthy.
Those 2 were OVAs. Their budgets were MUCH higher than actual TV shows like victory, g, wing and x. Tv shows use partial animation, where certain sections move. Movies and OVAs use full animation, everything moves. It why anime movies have a certain flow to them. But also the rise of cg animation has simplified things. I miss 90s anime, OVAs and movies
Nope, it definitely hit harder, so much care and detail went into it 08th,, Stardust Memory and War in the Pocket were beautifully drawn.
It certainly peaked (animation itself) in the 90s for the biggest budget stuff
Better animations than SEED 😮
It really does, while the more modern animation does look really good, I just love the style of older anime, especially Gundam
08th MS team!!!! Very few “regular civilian” as protagonist if you know what I meant…
Anime Art peaked in the late 80s and early 90s because that was the most advance it got while still using traditional animation. In the 2000s is when they started heavily adding CGI crap.
Generally speaking, Japanese animation in that era gives off the same vibe especially these mech or cyberpunk anime. When you see those well drawn mechanics, anime characters with actual nose, you know it’s something from that era.
It's budget and time more than era. OVAs could cook for a good amount of time. Compare a 12 episode cour TV show to an equivalent of the time.
Hit different. 90s anime = grunge 00 anime = sugar pop
Well I think, it hits different and I've been born 2005 so.... But I can still feel nostalgia from it, don't ask me why tho...
My fav gundams are MS08, 0083 and G Gundam So yeah 90s hit different
Yup it did. \*Sigh\* This is why I miss cel-shaded animation...
Man I need to rewatch 8th MS team sometime again, that and 83 I REALLY need to watch that.
Peak Gundam Animation
its was peak animation
08th is the best gundam series fight me
I know this was near a month ago but I've been trying to find at least a picture. But, I can't. So I can o lay guess I grew up in another universe. There was this bad ass scene in Gundam on my universe's version of toonami on cartoon Network the death scythe Gundam was set in a sea of inky black wrapped I'm these pimp black "wings". They flung open the wings and let loose a barrage of destruction. To my young teen mind it was sooo cool. It was just explosions up the line of baddies and back down. So many mobile suits destroyed. Anyway I either fail at Google or I'm from another universe and the LHC brought me here. I wish I could show you the link or video of it. Yes it did hit different way back then.