Thread 281354603

What caused this brown era in anime?

>>281354603 (OP)
These are cherrypicked screenshots. Each of these anime contains many with very vibrant color palettes.

This is what dusty cities look like

>>281354603 (OP)
That's what kino looked like. Zoomers wouldn't get it.

>>281354603 (OP)
That was the post-millennium sadness, we got a new cloudy day instead of the end of the world

>>281354603 (OP)
Global artistic push for “realism” which many artists interpreted as brown and dusty

It's actually more grey than brown.

What they're doing is picking a color palette that's de-saturating the colors, ie each color tone is injected with grey or in digital really you're removing white. Why?
Well if you manipulate a color by say injecting blue into it to cool it down you get unequal hue shifting of different colors on screen, the colorist has to try to manipulate each and every color in the scene individually to try to reproduce something you'd see in cel animation composition. Reducing chroma is a uniform, blanket processes you can apply to the whole frame/scene, that's fast and easily repeatable. Extremely lower skill ceiling, higher skill floor really hard to fuck up. But it is consistent and fast, weekly anime loves fast and repeatable.

Why crush contrast in the first place? Anecdotally they were paranoid about broadcast color spaces. They knew cel photography well and how it raised blacks and lowered whites, they also had some fear of banding so neutralizing colors avoids flat areas in the S-curve which could band a lot easier in ancient digital 8-bit workflows. Paranoia Agent on your pic is a decent example of this, Tokyo Godfathers is what early digital looks like with a little more time put behind it and little fear of what it'll look like on tv, while Paranoia Agent's compromises represent a lot of those same people's work with less time and more broadcast limitations in the back of their minds.

Why did they move on from this in the later 00's? The tools for automated color management got a lot better so the quality of fast/repeatable got better. Dumb 8-bit mastering died out.

>>281354667
With the exception of Wolf's Rain, yeah, especially when you look and see fucking Naruto and Paranoia Agent, that are almost garish in most scenes

>>281354603 (OP)
Is this a stealth 2000s thread?

>>281354603 (OP)
the early digital era is the ugliest that anime ever looked

>>281355890

Whats the one on the bottom with the smoking fish?

>>281354603 (OP)
Art style choices and early digi paint. It was either like this or really bright and saturated colours. Possibly even TV/DVD resolution given the recognizable haze.They seemed to figure things by around 07.

>>281356138
Mind Game

>>281355895
Counterpoint

>>281354603 (OP)
Coincided with the brown video game era as well.

>>281356980
Of course, the reality of this thread is retards falling for a baitpost because they don't actually watch anime and are easily convinced by a cherrypicked image that literally grabs shots from some of the most vibrant and garish anime of the era, and the reason it works is because everyone here is from /v/.

>>281354603 (OP)
It was the era.
Part was the transition to digital color and rendering, the other part was it was just trendy to be darker and more drab. The lost decade dragging on forever meant that people had a taste for the melancholic.

>>281357100
Stuff like Gunslinger Girl was always beige.
Naruto could be garish, but compared to a modern shonen series, its early stuff trended toward a darker palette. The Land of the Waves arc was borderline grey scaled for long stretches. Something you wouldn't see in a modern shonen action series.

>>281358091
>its early stuff trended toward a darker palette.
That's solely because of its attempts at rural aesthetics to adapt the material.
>The Land of the Waves arc was borderline grey scaled for long stretches.
That's more because Naruto's anime was a shitshow during that time. Land of Waves is a big exception in the show, and it looks fucking ugly. Meanwhile, from the same studio in the same 'era' was Bleach, an incredibly colouful and vibrant anime.
Adjacent to Naruto was the HxH GI OVAs, again, very bright and colourful.
One Piece and Detective Conan were also going at the same time and also, again, vibrant shows. Mahoujin Guru Guru Doki Doki Densetsu, Sonic X, Soul Eater, the original Fullmetal Alchemist, these are all battle anime (or adjacent) of that relative era that have strong colour palettes.
Really, outside of Land of Waves which was just general incompetence on the part of the people working on Naruto, any instances of dull colour palettes has more to do with bad transfers of SD digital materials.

>>281358370
To add to this, weren't half othe episodes in the Land of Waves arc set in the midst of dense fog and cloudy weather?
What other color palette ought to be used?

>>281358468
It's an anime, they can do anything other than having the viewer stare at a washed out, bland image for 20 episodes.
It's honestly embarrassing that it made it to air in the state it did. It could be a 'stylistic choice', but if it is it is a bad one as it belays no actual style. It dampens the work more than anything.
For comparison, Dororo to Hyakkimaru's decision to be done entirely in black and white, Gunbuster Episode 6's decision to switch to B&W 16:9, Megalobox's emulation of aesthetics associated with LD/VHS transfers of older anime, those are legitimate artistic decisions that don't ruin the image outright.

Naruto just sucks the life out of itself. It's not presenting itself in that way to actually say anything, it's a vain play at realism that utterly fails in practice and they never attempt to return to that aesthetic ever again.

>>281354685
dust city

>>281354603 (OP)
brown is the color of the soul

>>281358553
I agree, Naruto had a lot of bad ideas and weak animation in general before Norio Matsumoto entered the scene. However I wonder how much CRTs influenced early Naruto; I've seen a lot of early digipaint anime looking very different depending on screen.

>>281354603 (OP)
i accidentally shit on the cels mb

>>281354603 (OP)
pollution

war in iraq

>>281354603 (OP)
idk

>>281354603 (OP)
browns

>>281354603 (OP)
Last exile is on there twice.

>>281354603 (OP)
animation outsourced to pajeets

>>281361899
Even today colorist is almost always an in house job, much less 25 years ago.

>>281355895
early digital is pure soul, faggot

>>281354603 (OP)
A momentary increase in japanese IQ resulting from forcing themselves to interact with western world more due to their falling economy
Once things went back to normal they returned to their natural state of making garbace nonsense anime

>>281354603 (OP)
incorrect, gundam seed, chibi vampire, and higurashi were colorful

>>281354603 (OP)
I prefer the new brown era in anime.

>>281354603 (OP)
LCD

>>281354667
Best post thus far

>>281354603 (OP)
Soul overload

>>281366516
Pic unrelated?