/cel/ - Retro Anime & Manga

Look up the difference between cel and digital animation

>>359
The pointiest designs were on mostly cel production from the mid-late 90s . Anime went to more of a middle ground after that in the 00s while everyone went digital, then pointed designs started coming back to a more minor degree in the 10s.

>>358
Like what >>360 said, extremely pointy designs was mostly a 1990s thing.
If anything designs have progressively become rounder again.

1990s sharp/jagged artstyle is really weird from an animation/theory perspective because literally any animation class will teach you that it's more easy and efficient to animate rounder, curvier things than it is to animate consistent, sharp things.

Here's a good example of 1990s "sharpification"

Left is late 1980s
Middle is mid-1990s
Right is 2020

Same artist.

>>361
What anime are these?

>>364
Checked.

>>362
>Right is 2020
Kek he finally learned to draw with human proportions

>>366
They all look good to me.

>>362
the 90's part still cracks me up, good lord that's bad

Ignoring very unique artstyles and just talking generally:
60's was Disney copying because muh tezuka. 70's was the rebellion against that which was Gekiga. 80's was a balance between the two which was round and pretty. The 90's was a push for more angles and spikes because it was radical. The 00's were a more calmed down 90's with influence from VN artwork which had bigger eyes and softer features. The 10's were like the 00's but even rounder. Still not as chunky and soft as the 80's, but much more approachable than the past two decades. The 20's is so far the same besides a bigger focus on color gradients, but we're still early.

>>369
I think what started defining the late 10s/early 20s already is the increasing complexity of outfits. A lot of them feel like 10s designs but with way more little trinkets and details on the pieces of the outfits, while the faces have stayed mostly the same. I think a huge part of what happened in the 80s is a desire to make the designs more animation friendly, when you see how Kanada would draw background characters in his cuts in the 70s, for example, they were very round and simplified, the explosion of the Kanada school in the early 80s probably had lots to do with where design was going. Then in the mid 80s right as the very round and animation friendly Kanada school designs of stuff like A-Ko or Leda are in vogue, you got some push towards more complexity because OVAs and films could handle such difficult designs.

>>358
You should instead be asking why this angular design was popular at all in the first place.
If you look at pre-70s anime, it's all cute round characters. It was Leiji Matsumoto's Yamato series and it's success that spawned the "80s look" where everything was done with angular shapes and stylish hair to denote passionate characters, etc. It's what Shimamoto famously drew upon when making Blazing Transfer Student and later the anime shop clerk from Lucky Star, if you remember.
It was simply the style at the time, and eventually other styles subplanted it along with a digital revolution that made animating much different than how it used to be. Back in the 90s the old way got really stuffy, with the insistence on dark shading and detailed frames making it difficult to animate well, so the digital revolution really brought life back into the industry.
So to answer your question, I think in fact, animation only reverted back to the pre-Leiji style with cute round shapes moving fluidly like you see in Mahoutsukai Sally or Tetsuwan Atom or Tetsujin 28-gou. And it was accented by the themes of the time, like moe in the 00s, the shapes of the 2010s isekai boom, and now a revert back to detailed shading with simple shapes that you see now.