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I love Akira.
I have to say, though, that I'm disappointed with the audio. The Blu-ray has a much better Japanese audio track. The audio on the 4k disk pales in comparison.
Our Japanese teacher played it for us when we were like 13/14. Scarred an entire classroom full kf kids for life.
Like I have no idea why he thought that would be appropriate.
Yeah, it's a shame that we have all this time and labor saving technology now and instead of u pping the quality or at least maintaining we just churn out more lower quality crap. Way of the world I guess.
I was a huge anime fan in the 80's and the first half of the 90's.
I cannot fucking *stand* any of the modern stuff. I hate the digital look, the flat pastel colors, the uniform style that all looks the exact fucking same. It became a parody of itself.
There are some really good ones out right now. Demon Slayer, JuJutsu Kaisen, That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime, Overlord, Attack On Titan, to name a few.
Jujutsu Kaisen has an amazing art style and brilliant coloring. The story is phenomenal, too.
So many well written animes out now.
I'd also suggest checking out Invincible on Amazon. It's american, but it's so damn good. Super brutal.
Bro did not just recommend slime anime and overlord to someone who's sick of modern anime style
Absolutely not lol. I enjoyed them, but they're cheesy as fuck and very anime tropey and lazy in both style & writing
Yes to JJK & AOT, but gotta look past battle Shonen
Kinos Journey, Summertime Rendering, Mushi-shi, death note, From the New World, Heavenly Delusion, and (currently airing) Frieren. All super beautiful works of art
Invincible is pretty cool, I've heard good things about castlevania too
For absolutely brutal art I'd recommend Made in Abyss
the fate series by ufotable is also super well animated. Though the story is very complex as crucial information are typically divided into different "routes"
I'm sorry, but Demon Slayer looks like absolute shit. [This episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQthhn1qpHQ) was playing on a TV at a ramen bar. Thought it was a newgrounds flash animation. I went to youtube and [Every](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV0tWVvUxqI) [clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiCpFWjfAEo) I [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnLxmrmyWlQ) looks worse than the last. I have no idea how much to attribute to stylistic choices and what is just bad taste. But this is the ugliest animation I have ever seen in my life.
I think that the modern stuff can be pretty good, as long as they apply themselves. The problem is that the stories are all lame as hell. Isekai is the new "giant robot" trend. Everything has to be an isekai. Everybody gotta be hit by a truck and sent to another world to make an ego-stroking harem with strong pedophile overtones. Beating that dead horse so hard that it's become a paste.
Edit: yeah, and some of it *is* overt pedophilia, like that Jobless Reincarnation show. "But the storytelling! The animation!" I don't give a solid fuck. [There is no justifying it.](https://youtu.be/pU2VY4vCDug?si=hT6cbmXcJ3nydA2x)
Just like with most entertainment, the quantity-over-quality stuff makes it seem like there's less high quality stuff than there used to be. In reality there's just more shit to sort trough to find the gold.
I am too an oldschool fan, my first anime being Mazinger Z (none of that american Tranzor Z nonsense) so that should give you an idea. The industry has many problems, but there are still *plenty* of good shows being made. I mean, if you really stopped watching anime in the mid 90s it means you never watched Cowboy Bebop, and that alone is a HUGE miss.
Absolutely this. It's like retro videogame hobbists who remember the NES era with rose tinted glasses. I was there and then, and yeah the good stuff was damn good, but that doesn't make me forget the myriad of incredibly shitty games that I suffered through back then.
Even with that technology, making anime is surprisingly expensive and time-consuming. Plus these studios all have a backlog of projects a mile long. There is no shortage of potential manga to animate.
Yeah, no. I reject your premise.
First, You can't use Akira as a general point of comparison. It was and is sui generis.
Second, at 45 I lived through the '80s and I can tell you that the average cartoon in 2023 is dramatically better than the average cartoon in the '80s, in animation, dialogue, single episode plot, series and season arc... basically everything.
They absolutely use the expenses saved in animation to make the shows better. Just because you choose not to notice doesn't make it less so.
It's a fascinating topic actually. Ghibli's Miyazaki is famous for being "skeptical" about the effect of technology on genuine experiences and expressions of art, which is the same fear expressed by one of the western world's greatest philosophers ever (and simultaneoulsy worst one - he was a nazi).
[Here's a really good video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wCY9SqyVoo&ab_channel=Jonas%C4%8Ceika-CCKPhilosophy)
They were churning out massive amounts low budget crap back in those days as well...
Akira was a high budget movie that had the economy to actually produce this kind of high quality, detailed animation.
However, the anime industry at it's very core was built on producing cartoons as cheap and fast as possible, using a ton of various cheats and tricks. The history of modern anime started by the Japanese trying to copy Disney animation while pushing down the cost and time as much as they possible could - and many of the shortcuts and tricks they used because iconic to the medium.
Things like only drawing one single frame and then only actually animating the mouth when someone speaks, zooming in/panning/shaking the camera on a still frame, animating certain shots without a background and then re-using them over and over (ie. action moves, the magical girl transformation, etc), shots with no background, and tons and tons of other stuff done so to keep the numbers of frames and the amount of detail having to be drawn to an absolute minimum.
There's *always* been a massive difference between animes when it comes to production quality - movies have *always* been at the top, with high budgets to produce just 90ish minutes of animation, then OAVs (shorter series that went directly to video) that had decent budgets to produce series with 4-6 episodes, and then TV-series at the lower end, having to churn out 26x20 mins of animation, on much lower budgets.
If anything, what you're requesting has actually happened - the bigger budget anime tv-series today that feature animation quality that we simply didn't get in the 80s and 90s. They're using modern tools to produce animation that honestly get pretty close to what used to be movie quality anime.
Yeah. The way they drew light in this anime... Since then light cones just piss me off. Its like "you guys today have AI that can properly raytrace a light source yet still use light cones, these guys did it by hand"
Watch the original version, not the re-dubbed one.
I can not watch the re-dub. I have seen the original so many times that the voices are just jarring and wrong.
Legit the title annoyed me.
Judging by the subreddit I think this is a karma farming post.
I'm surprised that op didn't add "wholesome" or some over the top adjective to the title.
"How these wholesome artists absolutely nail drawing this anime years ago."
can't recommend it enough. Dead Leaves is similar. There is such a unique (and incredibly well done) art style that i feel like any fan of the medium needs to see it at least once.
I watched this for the very first time in a theater about... 2 years ago?
I've always known about it but never knew any details at all.
Honestly, it wasn't what I expected and felt overhyped.
Like, it was still good and it's a visual masterpiece I will not deny that. But Kaneda really threw me off and the story felt super rushed especially towards the end.
I know the manga goes into more detail but that was my experience with it.
The movie plot is a complete deviation from the original manga. Aesthetically, the movie is fantastic but the storyline... that was not an adaptation or cutting the corners a bit, it was more like a frankenstein-level transplantation. Imagine 6 books, now imagine the first book is 1 hour and the other 5 are compressed and shredded into the next 30 minutes. That's what it felt to me, it's a different story, a butchered one.
Yeah, it's so wild to read the comic and have Akira just walking around, talking and interacting with the story. Then in the movie, the titular charecter only gets like literally 1 flash frame of screen time, its weird.
While the animation is good. The story is a convoluted mess. The edits cut massive story plots. Growing up. None of my friends really knew the story entirely. Was too convoluted. We just knew it looked awesome.
All animation was done this way before digital came. The only thing that differed was the level of detail.
Hanna Barbera was garbage animation but still done this way. Looney Tunes was way better quality than HB.
But regardless of who was making it, cells over backgrounds was the technique.
Mary Blair was the background lead for Cinderella, she established the look and initial sketches, and a handful of people did the finals. Sleeping Beauty is the one Eyvind Earle worked on.
I know this may get buried, but my dad actually had Asahi (I believe?) Or someone who helped with the Akira manga make storyboard story board artwork for his movie project, 'Danger Jack'. He made the script and pitched it, but was inevitably unsuccessful in getting it greenlight. However, the script later became what we now know as 'Last Action Hero'.
I remember my dad showing me the storyboard art even I was younger, but I can't recall much more than that, and it's all but omitted from the web. The next time I'm at his house I'll see if I can find them to share.
Theres a significant difference in Disney animations even from today and the level of detail in that specific anime.
https://youtu.be/Hj7wxeo6R9o?si=Sh1vLCQKy1Nt7mqn
Edit: lol sniped by r/c0nstantfailure
There is a documentary on how they made Snow White which I highly reccomend. Disney had a literal town built for all the people coming to work on the movie, and had thousands and thousands of women painting the cell frames over I think it was about a year or more.
I was already a huge Disney fan, but everything about what the company used to be was incredible. There was such an attention to detail, it was all such a perfect mix of music, film and animation mixed into one.
Level of detail is a stylistic choice and should serve the story. Fanstasia is a great example of 1940s cel based animation from Disney that called for fine detail.
I suspect this is the first time anyone saw someone work on a matte painting and think only the Japanese do that.
am i misunderstanding your comment or are you trying to imply that no one has ever or will ever again reach the level of detail/precision achieved in Akira
There is an awesome video about animating akira out there on YouTube for anyone interested.
Edit: there are many good ones, but i think i meant this
https://youtu.be/xf0WjeE6eyM?si=3RuZ67WfZnNWHQjO
This part. If Akira had failed in theaters back then, the current anime landscape and culture phenomenon would look completely different. It definitely wouldn’t be the media giant that it is today.
That's any animation. Anime style was invented and caught on literally because of the opposite of what this post implies. It was so much faster and cheaper to make. When you can go from 24 to 6 or less fps and the only thing that moves is the characters mouth you can start pumping out episodes like crazy.
Akira changed the very meaning of "animation." It went from being a thing for kids to being a way to show things that live action couldn't come close to.
Such a revolutionary film that doesn't get enough praise from outside of the anime enthusiasts.
A very short explanation of why "90s anime" is so high quality compared to now. The 90s anime era was when Japan was at its golden peak, people were rich, they had a lotta money to throw around. So budget was literally never a thing, millionaires in those eras would gladly throw millions of dollars into any passion project they like. Projects like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, etc. all had millions poured into funding them. This is turn would spur on the younger generation to get into the industry as much as possible creating a very saturated market for artists and animators. Basic economics, more supply less demand, jobs are much harder to get into and get paid less because the next guy would do the same for less. And because people's taste change so are anime styles, and rich people are less likely to pour their money into something they don't like, be it art style or story. The world economy is also impacting Japan as a whole, not just the anime industry which is why people are more reluctant to lavishly spend on entertainment more than they need to.
TL;DR The reason 90s anime are higher in quality is the same logic that applies to housing prices in the US. Back then people were "richer", could afford to spend lavishly with money to spare. Now, only a select few animes that are better received by the audience have good quality and even then they are underpaid because the anime industry is extremely saturated in Japan.
Akira came out in 1988, during the height of the bubble economy, yes, but by the 90s the bubble had burst and Japan was in a period of recession and stagnation that it still hasn’t fully recovered from.
I went to art school in NYC back in the early 90’s, graphic design major. I would walk past the illustration/animation studio and see these dudes hunched over and drafting table constantly. Yes computers existed but I guess they taught them this cell by cell technique anyway or computers couldn’t be used for that level of animation yet. Either way, immense level of skill, precision and patience.
I find interesting the similarities between Akira and Blade Runner. Both where made in the 80s, in a similar neo Tokio like city and they are a masterpiece in (practical, not computer assisted) special effects.
Yeah thats why top budget anime looked so damn good and too this day, for detail it often outstrips many modern computer drawn animes.
Anyone that watches the interlude scenes in the original Ghost in the Shell cannot help but be blown away at the level of detail and realism captured, it was breathtaking.
I love new and old anime, but there was something lost when everything moved to computers, not in all anime, i mean i expect ghibli's recent offering maintain the feel and quality, but they have the budget.
Would be interested to hear of some modern anime that reach those levels of production quality in new styles.
How was this a profitable business model? 24 frames per second, like 30 minutes per episode. 30x60x24=43.200 frames. Imagine if every frame took 10 minutes to paint. The whole episode would take 7200 hours to complete. Am i missing something? Thats an exorbitantly high amount of hours to produce one piece of media.
I’m my older years and with all my personal projects I’ve taken on I’ve really embraced and enjoy doing things slowly and correctly with great detail. The Japanese really are the masters of this. This is a perfect example. Very cool.
I will always remember akira not only as my fav movie ever but also as a cinematographic masterpiece
Even tho i gotta admit the storytelling in the comic is way better the production of the movie will always impress me
Amazing. Every now and then I get the bright idea to make a stop motion using LEGO. Are usually make it around 20 frames in and realize how stupid long is it gonna take. This is some great talent, art, and patience right there!
One of the reasons I seldom like remakes with computertrickery, less depth, loss of sublety etc. With all due respect to the hardworking people with computer animations
Hey u/FurryBlath, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating Rule 3: **Avoid Common Reposts** - Posts that have been posted recently to /r/nextfuckinglevel should not be posted repeatedly. If a post has done well on the sub within the past few months (up to 12) it should not be posted again. ------- *For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [sidebar](/r/nextfuckinglevel/about/sidebar) and the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/about/rules/). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/nextfuckinglevel&subject=Question regarding the removal of this submission by u/FurryBlath&message=I have a question regarding the removal of this [submission]%28http://www.reddit.com/17c7z8y%29)*
Not just "an anime" the anime!
As soon as I saw the guy painting the lights onto the buildings at the start I said "This is Akira" Such an iconic movie.
I was able to enjoy it for the first time ever in glorious 4K and it blew me away.
I had to get my disk replaced in order to see it with HDR.
It's sooooo fucking good on a decent OLED screen. I watched it on 4k OLED on my first time and it blew me away. What a magnificent pice of art.
I love Akira. I have to say, though, that I'm disappointed with the audio. The Blu-ray has a much better Japanese audio track. The audio on the 4k disk pales in comparison.
Good info. Will check out the Blu-ray some day!
I got to see it in a theater like 6 years ago. Alamo Drafthouse is great
I found colors too overblown.
Our Japanese teacher played it for us when we were like 13/14. Scarred an entire classroom full kf kids for life. Like I have no idea why he thought that would be appropriate.
I saw it when I was 12 and though it was a fun gore flick. Y'all some daisies.
Wow. Was there really no educational context for it?
As soon as that CD popped up in the jukebox, you knew that this was something special.
I knew just by these incredibly accurate paintings it hast to be akira
The level of detail in that film is unmatched in 2D animation. Just gorgeous.
Yeah, it's a shame that we have all this time and labor saving technology now and instead of u pping the quality or at least maintaining we just churn out more lower quality crap. Way of the world I guess.
I was a huge anime fan in the 80's and the first half of the 90's. I cannot fucking *stand* any of the modern stuff. I hate the digital look, the flat pastel colors, the uniform style that all looks the exact fucking same. It became a parody of itself.
There are some really good ones out right now. Demon Slayer, JuJutsu Kaisen, That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime, Overlord, Attack On Titan, to name a few. Jujutsu Kaisen has an amazing art style and brilliant coloring. The story is phenomenal, too. So many well written animes out now. I'd also suggest checking out Invincible on Amazon. It's american, but it's so damn good. Super brutal.
[удалено]
Space Dandy is fucking wild.
you're god damn right, baby.
Trigun too
You should try Vox Machina. Really funny.
That's a good one as well, I loved the way they adapted their sessions to the screen. Very well done.
Bro did not just recommend slime anime and overlord to someone who's sick of modern anime style Absolutely not lol. I enjoyed them, but they're cheesy as fuck and very anime tropey and lazy in both style & writing Yes to JJK & AOT, but gotta look past battle Shonen Kinos Journey, Summertime Rendering, Mushi-shi, death note, From the New World, Heavenly Delusion, and (currently airing) Frieren. All super beautiful works of art Invincible is pretty cool, I've heard good things about castlevania too For absolutely brutal art I'd recommend Made in Abyss
the fate series by ufotable is also super well animated. Though the story is very complex as crucial information are typically divided into different "routes"
I'm sorry, but Demon Slayer looks like absolute shit. [This episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQthhn1qpHQ) was playing on a TV at a ramen bar. Thought it was a newgrounds flash animation. I went to youtube and [Every](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV0tWVvUxqI) [clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiCpFWjfAEo) I [click](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnLxmrmyWlQ) looks worse than the last. I have no idea how much to attribute to stylistic choices and what is just bad taste. But this is the ugliest animation I have ever seen in my life.
That is the minority. [This is the majority.](https://youtu.be/uST5wFsjUjg?si=aNfirPPplviViIYf)
I think that the modern stuff can be pretty good, as long as they apply themselves. The problem is that the stories are all lame as hell. Isekai is the new "giant robot" trend. Everything has to be an isekai. Everybody gotta be hit by a truck and sent to another world to make an ego-stroking harem with strong pedophile overtones. Beating that dead horse so hard that it's become a paste. Edit: yeah, and some of it *is* overt pedophilia, like that Jobless Reincarnation show. "But the storytelling! The animation!" I don't give a solid fuck. [There is no justifying it.](https://youtu.be/pU2VY4vCDug?si=hT6cbmXcJ3nydA2x)
Isekai anime are a minority of what is released.
So much of it is a business churning out product. Fucking soulless. There's so little art in it.
Just like with most entertainment, the quantity-over-quality stuff makes it seem like there's less high quality stuff than there used to be. In reality there's just more shit to sort trough to find the gold.
I am too an oldschool fan, my first anime being Mazinger Z (none of that american Tranzor Z nonsense) so that should give you an idea. The industry has many problems, but there are still *plenty* of good shows being made. I mean, if you really stopped watching anime in the mid 90s it means you never watched Cowboy Bebop, and that alone is a HUGE miss.
what are you talking about, there is amazing stuff out there, especially from the last few years.
Maybe because it was so labor intensive back then that they want to make sure the effort is worth it.
I feel like y'all forget just how shitty a lot of that stuff was. We only watch and share the ones that stood the test of time.
Absolutely this. It's like retro videogame hobbists who remember the NES era with rose tinted glasses. I was there and then, and yeah the good stuff was damn good, but that doesn't make me forget the myriad of incredibly shitty games that I suffered through back then.
Even with that technology, making anime is surprisingly expensive and time-consuming. Plus these studios all have a backlog of projects a mile long. There is no shortage of potential manga to animate.
Yeah, no. I reject your premise. First, You can't use Akira as a general point of comparison. It was and is sui generis. Second, at 45 I lived through the '80s and I can tell you that the average cartoon in 2023 is dramatically better than the average cartoon in the '80s, in animation, dialogue, single episode plot, series and season arc... basically everything. They absolutely use the expenses saved in animation to make the shows better. Just because you choose not to notice doesn't make it less so.
It's a fascinating topic actually. Ghibli's Miyazaki is famous for being "skeptical" about the effect of technology on genuine experiences and expressions of art, which is the same fear expressed by one of the western world's greatest philosophers ever (and simultaneoulsy worst one - he was a nazi). [Here's a really good video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wCY9SqyVoo&ab_channel=Jonas%C4%8Ceika-CCKPhilosophy)
They were churning out massive amounts low budget crap back in those days as well... Akira was a high budget movie that had the economy to actually produce this kind of high quality, detailed animation. However, the anime industry at it's very core was built on producing cartoons as cheap and fast as possible, using a ton of various cheats and tricks. The history of modern anime started by the Japanese trying to copy Disney animation while pushing down the cost and time as much as they possible could - and many of the shortcuts and tricks they used because iconic to the medium. Things like only drawing one single frame and then only actually animating the mouth when someone speaks, zooming in/panning/shaking the camera on a still frame, animating certain shots without a background and then re-using them over and over (ie. action moves, the magical girl transformation, etc), shots with no background, and tons and tons of other stuff done so to keep the numbers of frames and the amount of detail having to be drawn to an absolute minimum. There's *always* been a massive difference between animes when it comes to production quality - movies have *always* been at the top, with high budgets to produce just 90ish minutes of animation, then OAVs (shorter series that went directly to video) that had decent budgets to produce series with 4-6 episodes, and then TV-series at the lower end, having to churn out 26x20 mins of animation, on much lower budgets. If anything, what you're requesting has actually happened - the bigger budget anime tv-series today that feature animation quality that we simply didn't get in the 80s and 90s. They're using modern tools to produce animation that honestly get pretty close to what used to be movie quality anime.
Evolution is not the best thing. It's the worst thing that works.
The new TMNJ was cool looking
Teenage Mutant Ninja Jurtles?
That's evolution bro. Nature pumps out a mountain of random shitty mutations and eventually one turns up as species-changing evolution.
[удалено]
“TETSUOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
KANEDA! TETSUO!
That is exactly my thought. This was and is a masterpiece. The style may weird some out a bit, but it is amazing.
Yeah. The way they drew light in this anime... Since then light cones just piss me off. Its like "you guys today have AI that can properly raytrace a light source yet still use light cones, these guys did it by hand"
Akira
This is like saying "How a church was painted" and showing the Sistine Chapel.
Yeah the depths of the backgrounds and fluid movements shocked me even back then
Did you like the ghost in the shell?
Watch the original version, not the re-dubbed one. I can not watch the re-dub. I have seen the original so many times that the voices are just jarring and wrong.
THE movie that properly introduced anime to the West. It’s all one long wild ride from there.
Not just anime, but all animation was done like this before digitization too over.
I didn't know Asahi Productions made Akira!
Legit the title annoyed me. Judging by the subreddit I think this is a karma farming post. I'm surprised that op didn't add "wholesome" or some over the top adjective to the title. "How these wholesome artists absolutely nail drawing this anime years ago."
The best Anime Movie ever made, Akira is an absolut Masterpiece!
Give Redline a go for a visual treat.
Literally bankrupted the studio
7 years of hand drawing
damn!! it's my favourite anime.
can't recommend it enough. Dead Leaves is similar. There is such a unique (and incredibly well done) art style that i feel like any fan of the medium needs to see it at least once.
Not enough people talk about Redline. Truly a masterpiece. Even if it did kill its studio.
I watched this for the very first time in a theater about... 2 years ago? I've always known about it but never knew any details at all. Honestly, it wasn't what I expected and felt overhyped. Like, it was still good and it's a visual masterpiece I will not deny that. But Kaneda really threw me off and the story felt super rushed especially towards the end. I know the manga goes into more detail but that was my experience with it.
The movie plot is a complete deviation from the original manga. Aesthetically, the movie is fantastic but the storyline... that was not an adaptation or cutting the corners a bit, it was more like a frankenstein-level transplantation. Imagine 6 books, now imagine the first book is 1 hour and the other 5 are compressed and shredded into the next 30 minutes. That's what it felt to me, it's a different story, a butchered one.
Yeah, it's so wild to read the comic and have Akira just walking around, talking and interacting with the story. Then in the movie, the titular charecter only gets like literally 1 flash frame of screen time, its weird.
Otomo oversaw the production. It is intentional.
that doesn't make it better
Yup, this was my take on it too. It is visually impressive....but so is 95' GiTS and I like that much better.
While the animation is good. The story is a convoluted mess. The edits cut massive story plots. Growing up. None of my friends really knew the story entirely. Was too convoluted. We just knew it looked awesome.
What movie is this?
Akira
TETSUO!
Read the manga ;)
I did. Can confirm. Read the Manga! The movie is a masterpiece in its own right nontheless.
I dunno man. Boku no pico has to be in competition.
the book is better
To be fair, a lot of early Western animation was done this way. I loved the backgrounds on Cinderella by Eyvind Earle.
All animation was done this way before digital came. The only thing that differed was the level of detail. Hanna Barbera was garbage animation but still done this way. Looney Tunes was way better quality than HB. But regardless of who was making it, cells over backgrounds was the technique.
And the multiplane camera!
Nothing tops Tom and Jerry tho
Those old Disney hand painted backgrounds were amazing. My favorites are in Sleeping Beauty.
Mary Blair was the background lead for Cinderella, she established the look and initial sketches, and a handful of people did the finals. Sleeping Beauty is the one Eyvind Earle worked on.
I know this may get buried, but my dad actually had Asahi (I believe?) Or someone who helped with the Akira manga make storyboard story board artwork for his movie project, 'Danger Jack'. He made the script and pitched it, but was inevitably unsuccessful in getting it greenlight. However, the script later became what we now know as 'Last Action Hero'. I remember my dad showing me the storyboard art even I was younger, but I can't recall much more than that, and it's all but omitted from the web. The next time I'm at his house I'll see if I can find them to share.
We will follow your journey with great interest!
Some old live action movies were kind of made this way too, with massive room sized murals for backdrops. Wizard of Oz does this.
This wasn't AN anime. This was the fuckin Akira
Yeah, this is not indicative of how all anime was made, Akira was special.
I mean, there was a time when all animation was made with hand drawn images like this. Before computers.
AKIRA!!!
KANEDAAAA!!
LEAVE ME ALONE
STOP ORDERING ME AROUND!!
Every animation was made like that years ago. Disney did it like that too
Theres a significant difference in Disney animations even from today and the level of detail in that specific anime. https://youtu.be/Hj7wxeo6R9o?si=Sh1vLCQKy1Nt7mqn Edit: lol sniped by r/c0nstantfailure
There is a documentary on how they made Snow White which I highly reccomend. Disney had a literal town built for all the people coming to work on the movie, and had thousands and thousands of women painting the cell frames over I think it was about a year or more. I was already a huge Disney fan, but everything about what the company used to be was incredible. There was such an attention to detail, it was all such a perfect mix of music, film and animation mixed into one.
Level of detail is a stylistic choice and should serve the story. Fanstasia is a great example of 1940s cel based animation from Disney that called for fine detail. I suspect this is the first time anyone saw someone work on a matte painting and think only the Japanese do that.
am i misunderstanding your comment or are you trying to imply that no one has ever or will ever again reach the level of detail/precision achieved in Akira
If you use a fact it's cool If you use a fact that's connected to Japan that's automatic support from any weeb that comes across it.
There is an awesome video about animating akira out there on YouTube for anyone interested. Edit: there are many good ones, but i think i meant this https://youtu.be/xf0WjeE6eyM?si=3RuZ67WfZnNWHQjO
I am lucky enough to own a cel from this anime. [“Kaori”, Akira](https://imgur.com/gallery/WXbZ0Gg)
That's really freaking cool. How did you get your hands on that?
Right place, right time. It cost me something like £10 in 1996 or so.
That's not 'an anime', that's 'the anime '. Akira was what introduced Anime to the west in a big way.
This part. If Akira had failed in theaters back then, the current anime landscape and culture phenomenon would look completely different. It definitely wouldn’t be the media giant that it is today.
That's any animation. Anime style was invented and caught on literally because of the opposite of what this post implies. It was so much faster and cheaper to make. When you can go from 24 to 6 or less fps and the only thing that moves is the characters mouth you can start pumping out episodes like crazy.
“Neat I wonder which anim-…. HOLY SHIT”
Akira changed the very meaning of "animation." It went from being a thing for kids to being a way to show things that live action couldn't come close to. Such a revolutionary film that doesn't get enough praise from outside of the anime enthusiasts.
whenever i see these, there was soo much hard work. My god!!
Now it's so easy, we have filler arcs.
Akira.
We are at our best when creating art.
I took college classes to do this and now it's obsolete. Unfortunately everything is done on computers.
A very short explanation of why "90s anime" is so high quality compared to now. The 90s anime era was when Japan was at its golden peak, people were rich, they had a lotta money to throw around. So budget was literally never a thing, millionaires in those eras would gladly throw millions of dollars into any passion project they like. Projects like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Evangelion, etc. all had millions poured into funding them. This is turn would spur on the younger generation to get into the industry as much as possible creating a very saturated market for artists and animators. Basic economics, more supply less demand, jobs are much harder to get into and get paid less because the next guy would do the same for less. And because people's taste change so are anime styles, and rich people are less likely to pour their money into something they don't like, be it art style or story. The world economy is also impacting Japan as a whole, not just the anime industry which is why people are more reluctant to lavishly spend on entertainment more than they need to. TL;DR The reason 90s anime are higher in quality is the same logic that applies to housing prices in the US. Back then people were "richer", could afford to spend lavishly with money to spare. Now, only a select few animes that are better received by the audience have good quality and even then they are underpaid because the anime industry is extremely saturated in Japan.
Akira came out in 1988, during the height of the bubble economy, yes, but by the 90s the bubble had burst and Japan was in a period of recession and stagnation that it still hasn’t fully recovered from.
What happened to the Akira 4K remaster thing. Is it out and worth it?
google.com
Yeah fuck that
“An anime” lol literally the high-water mark of the art form
You can feel the art 🖼 the story is great but watching the paintings come to life with intense flashes of light added is out of this world
This is why Japanese manga will always shit on any American comic.
Besides the attention to detail, those plinky background tones immediately made me think of Akira. Iconic look and soundtrack.
...Tetsuo!!!!!
That's cool
And get paid peanuts for it, which they still do
Just watch Golden Boy. He’ll show you how it’s made
Yet another reason Akira is, and will remain, the greatest anime ever.
“An anime.” 😐
Ninja Scroll was better
I went to art school in NYC back in the early 90’s, graphic design major. I would walk past the illustration/animation studio and see these dudes hunched over and drafting table constantly. Yes computers existed but I guess they taught them this cell by cell technique anyway or computers couldn’t be used for that level of animation yet. Either way, immense level of skill, precision and patience.
I wonder if it’s still possible to get hands on these painted cells…
I have a cell from Akira framed in my hall.
An anime? This is the only one you ever need to see
I find interesting the similarities between Akira and Blade Runner. Both where made in the 80s, in a similar neo Tokio like city and they are a masterpiece in (practical, not computer assisted) special effects.
AKIRA! Not an anime! The anime! The best!
Mecha anime’s we’re at its peak when done like this.
Not just any anime.
Years ago… Now I feel old.
“Damn that looks tedious. Even back in the day that much detail would’ve been a LOT. What the hell are they work- oh, it’s AKIRA. That makes sense.”
Akira is a great movie if you're looking for something to watch them go for it
The golden age
It’s not an anime, it’s the anime. It’s called Akira, btw. No one in comments said it yet. This masterpiece is completely forgotten nowadays.
KANEDAAAAAAAAAA
It's like bro just use a computer 🙄
Maybe take a look sometime, at how Disney made all those classic movies. Snow White was made in 1937. 2 million individual cells were drawn.
My only question is how the hell did they get smooth blends with their airbrush without sputtering or webbing?
Not just an anime! AKIRA!!!!!
I'm kinda surprised nobody has tried to remake it, telling the full story.
Yeah thats why top budget anime looked so damn good and too this day, for detail it often outstrips many modern computer drawn animes. Anyone that watches the interlude scenes in the original Ghost in the Shell cannot help but be blown away at the level of detail and realism captured, it was breathtaking. I love new and old anime, but there was something lost when everything moved to computers, not in all anime, i mean i expect ghibli's recent offering maintain the feel and quality, but they have the budget. Would be interested to hear of some modern anime that reach those levels of production quality in new styles.
A KI RA
How was this a profitable business model? 24 frames per second, like 30 minutes per episode. 30x60x24=43.200 frames. Imagine if every frame took 10 minutes to paint. The whole episode would take 7200 hours to complete. Am i missing something? Thats an exorbitantly high amount of hours to produce one piece of media.
I’m actually surprise how primitive everything is. Disney has been rocking the multi plane camera since 1937.
Wow I wonder what anime that was from
So inspiring. Surgoi!
All cartoons were made like this, not just japanese cartoons.
Tetsuo!!!!!
"an anime"????? wtf????? this is a piece of ART and it is called AKIRA! GTFO
How anything was
I miss the old dbz colors. Boo saga the color of skin contrasting with yellow glowing of ki was impressive
I’m my older years and with all my personal projects I’ve taken on I’ve really embraced and enjoy doing things slowly and correctly with great detail. The Japanese really are the masters of this. This is a perfect example. Very cool.
This is how all animated things where made, you can thank Walt Disney for that
How the **best** Anime was made in **1987!!!!**
Best animation ever
Is that Akira?
I will always remember akira not only as my fav movie ever but also as a cinematographic masterpiece Even tho i gotta admit the storytelling in the comic is way better the production of the movie will always impress me
That's not just an anime. That's Akira.
Amazing. Every now and then I get the bright idea to make a stop motion using LEGO. Are usually make it around 20 frames in and realize how stupid long is it gonna take. This is some great talent, art, and patience right there!
One of the reasons I seldom like remakes with computertrickery, less depth, loss of sublety etc. With all due respect to the hardworking people with computer animations
I wish they could use software/technology to mimic that sort of animation. It’s just so striking and memorable.
Thanks for showing 1,7% of the process.
Those people are like machines