Animation has experienced a mixed output in 2024. On the one hand, shows and films like the recently released Dan Da Dan, Look Back, and Ranma 1/2 have reignited fans’ affinity for animation continuing to be an awe-inspiring medium teeming with visual clarity and fluid artistry. On the other hand, hotly anticipated shows like the long-delayed Adult Swim Uzumaki anime adaptation and Blue Lock season two have left fans wondering why their favorite projects didn’t get as much shine as their contemporaries.
Determining why some anime shows quickly lose their hype while others gain popularity can perplex the communities that voraciously consume it. Fans often speculate why certain shows receive more visual acclaim than others. Standard conjectures suggest that studios may lack the budget or time to polish the shows, leading to rough, incomplete visuals akin to sliding keyframe PNGs of vibrant characters across viewers’ screens.
Archival databases like Sakugabooru—a play on the Japanese term for a sequence of animation that has been reinterpreted to denote high-quality animation in the West—help explain what makes good animation by earmarking artists behind their favorite scenes, and providing technical terms like compositing and smears to add to the community’s lexicon. Unfortunately, its existence has also led to online discourse over the actual definition of these terms while the anime community “um, actually” each other online.
This is to say that the iceberg of animation goes deeper than the conversations folks have been having online, desperately trying to explain why shows look better than others and why Western animated shows like The Legend of Vox Machina, Tomb Raider: Legend of Lara Croft, and Devil May Cry all look identical to something like The Legend of Korra. In the spirit of breaking through the noise, I spoke with Powerhouse Animation’s Samuel Deats and Adam Deats (directors and creators of Castlevania and Castlevania: Nocturne) and David Howe (supervising editor for Tomb Raider: Legend of Lara Croft) to myth-bust the animation industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What Is Compositing In Animation?
Isaiah Colbert, io9: There’s always conjecture whenever a new animated project goes around on Twitter, where, let’s say, Demon Slayer comes out, and people are like, “Oh, the animation’s great,” but then there’ll be a subset of people who will say “It’s just compositing.” So I wanted to ask you guys, what is the actual difference between animation and compositing?
Samuel Deats: On a very basic level, compositing is about bringing all of the various elements together—which includes the background, the animation, and the camera work—and making that all time out and play properly. Everything has to have compositing.
As a “thank you” for the warm wishes we got on Castlevania’s 5th anniversary, @SamuelDeats and I put together a before & after post reel of the Trevor and Death fight! Thanks again to our fans and partners for the love and support! @FrederatorS @powerhouseanim @NetflixGeeked pic.twitter.com/gaCCFyK0as
— Adam Deats 🌕 (@AdamDeats) July 8, 2022
Adam Deats: I think the conversation you’re bringing up online is a messy one because it’s a lot more than just that conversation. There are a lot of overlapping factors. Ufotable has an incredible post-production team that specializes in their photography department, which, in American animation terms, is the compositing department for the most part. They call it the photography department because, back in the day, when you’re doing cel-based animation, you would have plate-based compositing where they would slide all the cells on a 3D plane and multiple transparent sliding pieces of glass. The level of compositing that each show has varies wildly.
Demon Slayer is heavily composited. [Ufotable is] doing tons of polishing on the backend. What they’ve allowed that to do is supplement their animation team with incredibly dynamic 3D camera work, lighting, and special effects to help sell some stuff so that the animation team isn’t killing themselves in certain circumstances. The online dialogue goes in weird directions where there are constant fights over the compositing department and what they’re doing versus the animation department. I’ll just be the first to say they’re both really good at Ufotable.
Absolutely shook the anime community.
10/10 animation
10/10 compositing
10/10 soundtrack
10/10 voice acting10/10 episode.#鬼滅の刃 #DemonSlayer https://t.co/XkFt1MgKmB pic.twitter.com/4EhZ7reE3C
— Ufotable Perfect Shots (@UfotableShots) November 30, 2023
Samuel Deats: Personally speaking, I can see the argument that folks sometimes have. Demon Slayer is objectively well-made. There’s no way around it. But there are times where I look at the rough animation for it, and I’m like, “Oh, man, like there is so much great hand-drawn work going on down there that they’re not necessarily showcasing.” It’s in some of its parts and it comes out amazing, but sometimes wish that I was able to see that hand-drawn aspect more. The balance that Adam and his team finds is a little closer to what I think my ideals are on that front, which still showcases the animation a little bit more without losing the value of the mood and effects work, and everything that we get out of a strong composite.
It’s gonna come down to each project. A show like the new Ranma 1/2 has a much lighter composite with some diffusion and stuff like that. It’s nuanced. I don’t think you would make Ranma 1/2 with a heavier composite like some other shows.
been meaning to post abt this, but i love the stylistic choices in ranma 1/2. i love how the shading color changes whenever a fight gets serious, the use of written-out onomatopoeia, how some shots are framed as comic panels – it shifts as the tone shifts and is so creative! pic.twitter.com/asgkMR2oom
— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾ reese ⋆⁺₊⋆ || ranma saturdays! (@fuedalreese) October 12, 2024
Adam Deats: [Mappa is] doing a comic book-esque filtering and very specific stills that give it that more illustrative Rumiko Takahashi look.
Samuel Deats: Those decisions were also happening back in the cell animation days. They were doing all sorts of cool crazy tricks to use actual physical light for things that we no longer can do. We’re always trying to chase, mimicking the feeling of real lighting that miss out on in old cel animated stuff. I think that we’re finding new tricks—especially with shows like [Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury]—that makes it feel more like old-school cel animation.
David Howe: Even at Powerhouse, a lot of the Sonic Origins shorts the boutique department has done are mimicking the drop shadow of cels on top of a slate. It’s got this vibe where it feels like that ’90s anime you grew up with, but it’s all done digitally. It’s one of those things where if you’re doing your job right, a lot of people aren’t even necessarily even noticing that it’s there. It’s just evoking a vibe.
Compositing isn’t just about lighting/effects; good compositing starts with taking the assets and building a solid foundation, making sure the motion & camera works. Things like the shoulders-up walking shots can be improved just with with proper arcs to the bobbing motion. https://t.co/1MRAyoBlIC
— Samuel Deats 🌕 (@SamuelDeats) October 8, 2024
Adam Deats: You actually don’t wanna notice the compositing a lot of times. I think it’s hard to watch Demon Slayer and not notice compositing for some of the action shots with insane 3D, bloom, and after-effects. But that’s a style choice they get away with all the time. It looks dope, [but] are there times it’s too much? Yeah. But, generally speaking, it looks awesome.
A discussion always happens in compositing circles about how much light wrap you should have on a character in a shot. The reality is you don’t even wanna notice the light wrap. You want it to be just enough that it takes the edge off with a backlight on the character. If you are noticing that there’s a light, there’s a problem.
Is there a reason most of Netflix’s animated shows look so flat/dull?
(Perhaps this is just what people want nowadays but I just have zero interest in watching this stuff.) pic.twitter.com/vuhVbYCSZL
— Zack Zwiezen (@ZwiezenZ) September 20, 2024
Why Do Western Animated Shows All Look the Same?
io9: Speaking of mimicry, I came across a tweet about how Western-animated shows like Netflix’s Legend of Lara Croft, Devil May Cry, and Witcher series all look the same. I wondered if this phenomenon is due to studios like Powerhouse Animation or The Legend of Korra maker Mir taking inspiration from each other or if there’s an industry-wide in-house style for Western animation that results in visual sameness for their shows?
Adam Deats: All of the above. It’s complicated.
Samuel Deats: Some of these things are style decisions that are occasionally made for us. Someone will come to us and say, “Hey, we wanna make this. Can you guys make it look like that but a little different?” Other times, it is the availability of staff. The team we have around for character designers and stuff like that. There are occasions when we try to push for something that is a big departure from what we’ve done before, and we are reined in due to various factors.
It’s a bit of a push and pull on why you might see similar styles in our studio. For Powerhouse, we have two schools going on right now: Castlevania and Blood Zeus, which are a little bit more anime-inspired. And then we have some that are slightly more Western in design. As far as some of that stuff goes, the push-and-pull has been partly due to the decisions of the powers that be.
Adam Deats: There’s some more complicated stuff under the hood, though, with why many projects seem similar even across studios. The reality is certain things have changed in the industry, and there have also been standardizations in place that have affected the way shows look for a long time. For example, many studios have slowly shifted to digital animation cleanup pipelines. There are still studios in South Korea and Japan that are drawing and animating on paper, but then they get digitally cleaned up. Line quality is still really important for the animation process, which is why they’ve been doing that. But the other reason they’ve been doing that is that’s the pipeline they’ve had, and they’ve had a hard time changing because it costs a lot of money to update.
Every cleanup studio that Western animation studios use is reliant on South Korean pipelines to animate the actual shows. This has been going on for decades. Those South Korean studios outsource to other studios when working on the same show. We outsource to them, and they outsource to other studios internally. We don’t know who they’re outsourcing to, so you get various cleanup options.
Adam Deats: So on the same show, and it’s every show—it could be X-Men 97 or a bunch of other shows—are experiencing the same thing where the line quality changes shot to shot. We adopt whatever compositing pipeline they use, Adobe After Effects, for years. Because of that, there are certain standardizations for compositing styles that can kind of slip through in the process, so certain shows look very similarly compositing-wise.
Overall, every show has problems with consistency issues. There’s always the episode that drops in quality. What’s funny is that, on Demon Slayer, managing all that stuff and then doing the high-end compositing that they’re doing is what results in people complaining. I couldn’t tell what was even going on in that shot (seen below) because of all the crazy compositing. They’re just doing a lot and it’s hard to manage that perfectly with ultimate precision. And I tell you, Ufotable does it better than most. They’re doing a great job at it, but every team has problems.
Nozomu Abe (阿部 望)#鬼滅の刃 #DemonSlayer #ufotable pic.twitter.com/z4ATbJJ4sG
— Ufotable Perfect Shots (@UfotableShots) July 1, 2024
Adam Deats: You’re constantly fighting against all the financial time, labor issues, and pressures. On top of that, there is the sort of conge-con, the desire for the industry to congeal and conform to old patterns of artwork because they have to work on so much. We all have to work on different shows that look similar, so you might have a specialized stylistic show, but the second it goes to an outsource partner, certain scenes come back and look slightly different. It’s just the way it goes.
David Howe: I also feel like there are just people who copy other people’s styles, too. Naturally, things evolve, and people see what they like and do similar things.
Adam Deats: Yeah, Castlevania is very anime-influenced. I think the American industry has been pretty anime-influenced for the last several years. There’s bits and pieces of it kind of it slipping into the stylings of these shows in a lot of ways.
David Howe: Yeah. Not just shows, but all of [American] culture as well.
Adam Deats: All of the culture, yeah. I mean, the amount of times that J.J. Abrams has been taking shots from Nausicaä or other shows and being influenced by that is pretty intense.
Castlevania: Nocturne season two premieres on Netflix January 2025.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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