80s/90s anime aesthetic is so appealing to me still. Even when animation wasn't always top tier and even when a lot of what came out was lowbrow smut i just like the overall design sense of that era, it was so cool. I remember when anime studios started making the switch from traditional celluloid to digital early 00s and shows looked so weird to me all of a sudden like comparing the first saber marionette J or Slayers seasons with the next sagas that came out in digital and looked way cheaper and designs started getting too rounded and moeish.
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I actually was telling one of my little brothers about this last night after we watched
Ghost in the Shell together as he's slowly dipping his toes more into older anime. (It was his first time seeing it, and I think he watched it right off the heels of
Wicked City as a way to "cleanse" or "try to forget" some moments since that was
also his first time really delving more into adult anime, even though he really liked
Akira when he watched it a couple years back.) He happened to bring up how early
One Piece had a similar feel to it, and I pointed out that
OP is a good example of how style evolves over time, especially when it came to animation since
OP used to be cel-animated, but was digitally colored and it moved into digital animation within a few years. But in keeping with the topic of how an anime looks, I told him you could usually tell from a glance what era the anime's from as '80s anime looks rounder and softer while '90s anime got rougher, harder lines particularly in the face.
Because he's a
DBZ fan, I told him that the entirety of
Dragon Ball has to be the best example of showing off the transition from '80s aesthetics to '90s aesthetics since it was on the air straight for a good decade. From memory, I said you could tell when
DBZ left the '80s look to become more '90s when they entered the Namek saga, though it may have been more with the Android saga, but by Buu, the '90s look was much more noticeable compared to when Raditz first showed on the scene.
GT was the most strikingly-different
Dragon Ball had ever looked at the time until digital animation kicked in, and that's why
Super looks as modern as it does. There's still a bit of a '90s appearance to it, but it's been overtaken by the look of the 2010s that if it wasn't for the iconic character designs, you might not've been able to realize you're watching a
Dragon Ball production at first.
In terms of manga, I reminded him of
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure being another example of seeing how male character archetypes change over time, and that's why newcomers whined about Jonathan Joestar when it was first airing on Toonami because his character type hasn't been seen (or at least hasn't been in the public eye) since the '80s.
I have a good little brother. He's rather chillax about his opinions, but he's become more open-minded about branching out with anime lately, which is good. It used to be harder to get him to branch out, but after leaving him to his own devices, looks like he's slowly coming around. Maybe it won't be long before he finally decides to return to the
Patlabor TV series after his blind purchase of the first movie thinking he'd be getting
Evangelion-esque mecha battles lol.