How was anime animated in the 2000s? You can always identify a pre-2000s anime because the cel animated art had a greater feeling of depth and a typically darker color palette than modern fully digital anime. But between ~2000-2012 anime became brighter and a bit flatter/smoother looking but still didn't have that totally flat super vibrant look that every new anime has today. Was it a mix of cel animation and digital that led to this look or was it a different way of drawing/animating altogether?

>>280145454 (OP)
What takes someone to become a cel autist?

>>280145454 (OP)
Digital coloring?

>>280145454 (OP)
Are you genuinely retarded?

2000s digital anime looks different from 2020s digital anime for the same reason that a comic produced in 1935 looks different from a comic produced in 1970.

Artstyles and preferences change over the decades even if the technique or tools don't change too much.

2000s anime is almost entirely digital.
There's some anime from the late 90s and early 2000s that were a mix of cel and digital but such a thing was still rare and most "cel and digital" hybrid anime was moreso a hard-shift mid-production to digital, not using cel and digital together. You see this in shows like Mahoromatic (first season is cel, second season is digital), Galaxy Angel (first season is cel, second season is digital), or Inuyasha (first 100ish episodes are cel, the rest is digital).

The anime in your gif was entirely digital.

>>280145454 (OP)
What you're describing is the awkward transition era between cel and digital animation. It was 100% digital, but it was still trying to awkwardly imitate cel animation. Modern digital animation's "smoother" look is just a result of them moving beyond that and embracing digital animation as its own thing.

Some of it is also just visual trends changing. Late 00s Kyoto Animation were one of the big influences in that regard (they were also one of the first studios to start animating in higher resolution for the sake of Bluray releases).

>>280145670
Inuyasha's first hundred episodes were good, for both the reasons you stated (cel animation) and her.

>>280145670
>most "cel and digital" hybrid anime was moreso a hard-shift mid-production to digital, not using cel and digital together
One I can think of is Figure 17. 90% of the show was cel animated, but it would suddenly make a very jarring switch to digital animation for one scene any time they wanted to use a digital special effect. (it's most obvious around the :28 second mark, but you can see even the trailer is constantly jumping back and forth between styles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg7TlXY26G0

>>280145454 (OP)
>>280145670
>but still didn't have that totally flat super vibrant look that every new anime has today
Also digital anime in the 2000s was natively lower resolution, so the blurriness tends to make it look less flat compared to modern digital anime especially when upscaled to higher resolutions.

And 2000s digital anime still mostly made for CRT TV displays, so colouring was generally tweaked and effected with CRT TVs in mind much like the cel era. Modern anime is excessively brighter for the same reason blueray remasters of cel anime and 2000s digital anime are brighter than the TV broadcasts or VHS/DVD releases.

If you look at the original, raw cels of cel anime, it's actually brighter than what was broadcasted on television.

>>280145670
>2000s anime is almost entirely digital.
What? They animate on paper, then scan it. The rest is digital, like coloring.

>>280145784
The term for that is Genga, where they do a rough key animation on paper, then do the rest digitally. It's still done today.

>>280145784
That does not contradict anything I just said. Digital in regards to anime doesn't and has never implied it's done on a machine. "Entirely digital" in this context refers to the fact that it's not cel.
Most modern anime is hand-drawn too and scanned. It's still entirely digital.

Also in-betweening is almost entirely drawn on computers and animated on computers, even in the 2000s. Key animation is what's hand-drawn.

>>280145670
>>280145696
Thanks for the real answers. I did mean to mention the possibility of it just being an artistic choice as well, but forgot. I'm kinda surprised that I see basically 0 anime coming out that have that early 2000s look to them then though. While I think the smoother, brighter, flatter look that modern digital anime has can sometimes be for the best, depending on the anime, I feel like a lot of shows could benefit from the "rougher," for lack of a better word, look that was ubiquitous in the early 2000s, my main issue with modern digital anime is that a lot of it just looks so flat now and while I don't know for sure, I doubt it would take much more work, if any extra work at all, to correct.

Ironically, I think the anime in this image actually benefits from being as bright and colorful as possible, but it's still a good example of what I'm talking about.

>>280145771
>>280145886
When I was converting this image from .webp to .png I noticed the drop in resolution and suddenly realized this might be the actual issue before reading your post lol.

>>280145454 (OP)
>>280145771
No but really; Find an older anime with both a 90s/2000s VHS/DVD release and a much more recent BD release. It's harder with 2000s digital anime since the original masters are often not even preserved so it's easier to do with cel since animation cels are usually better preserved.

Compare how the VHS/DVD releases tend to have darker colours which bleed into eachother and are generally blurrier while modern BD releases of the same shows, using the original masters, have brighter, more vivid colours and generally look flatter even if it's still using the original cels.

>>280145926
The rough look of older anime was an unintentional byproduct of TVs at the time and the way anime was broadcasted.

>>280145454 (OP)
it's not 100% digital, just cleaned up and composited digitally

>>280145926
>It's harder with 2000s digital anime since the original masters are often not even preserved so it's easier to do with cel since animation cels are usually better preserved.
You're completely off-base here.

The reason cel animation tends to look better is because it's drawn on a cel. It has no inherent resolution. So if you have the masters, you can make a version of it at any resolution you want. Digital animation doesn't work like that. If you make a 30x30 png in MS paint, that's its maximum resolution because it's the original. Increasing its size to 60x60 won't make it higher quality.

It's not that they don't save the masters for early digital animation, it's that "masters" don't exist in the same way they do for cel animation. If a show was digitally animated in 480p, then it will never be higher resolution than 480p (without terrible upscaling).

>>280146038
That's mostly what I meant to say but I recall hearing ages ago that a lot of the original masters for early digital animation is simply lost due to lazy practices like throwing out old hardware, hardware failure, not really any care to properly back up or save data while for the most part, the original cels are much better preserved.

>>280146078
It's not remotely true. Digital animation is so easy to backup that it's almost never lost.

>>280146143
They recover and restore films that are 100 years old, but good luck trying to do anything with old real media files.

>>280145454 (OP)
I really hope the 2000s moe style becomes popular again. We are having an anime that is styled like 80s anime this summer so anything is possible. I really want the 2000s stuff to fully come back though in a way that reinfluences modern moe anime. I know part of it was just limitations of the time as the style hadn't fully developed and there were many cases where it looked like shit. I know stuff like the more bold shape theory and color theory were mostly from these limitations and not deliberate. But when it went right, it feels like it created excellent vibrant art, stuff that actually felt moe. Nowadays you get too many anime obviously with cute girls as the main appeal, but the designs don't pop and look hyper cute. I suppose part of this is an adaptation issue, even many loli manga now are trying for some realistic more detailed style. Although that might be flawed thinking as I'm sure there has always been stuff with more boring styles. I suppose my issue is just that good stuff is rare. There are some artists like Watanabe Akio who still make are like this to this day. I feel like if we got more anime originals we'd get more cool vibrant stuff as the studios would be allowed to put their spirit into things and this vibrancy is still very much the spirit of a lot of these guys. Hell you can even see it in stuff like Hamidashi Creative which was a project done by new animators and carried that 2000s aesthetic. I do feel like the modern lolicon culture that has been building does have some great things. So maybe we will see a bunch of manga and anime inspired by it soon.

>>280147123
2000s moe was peak character design. I can barely tell most anime girls apart from each other now.

>>280147529
It really is distinct. Probably the peak of Japanese using foreign resources, scientific knowledge, art tradition, etc. to build the best characters. Pretty much any of the art learning resources that show the skills create similar looking characters even today. A lot of the characters still popular today also came from the 2000s.

>>280147752
Even outside of moe, it seems like there was just more unique character designs and art styles in general in the 2000s, probably for all the reasons you just listed.

>>280145477
Boomer