ULTIMATE GUIDE ON THE EVOLUTION OF ANIME ART STYLES

Gaining popularity like never before, anime has permeated the west like a current coming in from a completely different direction. That being said, many people take one glance at this wacky niche of the animation medium and decide to never set foot and to take a look inside. The main reason for this is the art style, a double edged sword that’ll alienate anyone who isn’t familiar with it.

This blog post’s purpose is to show the evolution of anime, and how that art style has evolved over the last 50 years. Each decade has its own general trends and by looking at the history of the medium, you’ll be able to understand it better and notice things that you can incorporate into your art style. And even if you’re not an artist, I can offer recommendations of some of my favorite shows from each decade, and I can highlight some cool creators.

Here’s each decade that I’ll look at over the course of this blog post:

• What’s the look?
• Anime in the Seventies
• Anime in the Eighties
• Anime in the Nineties
• Anime in the Two Thousands
• Anime in the Twenty Tens
• How Might Anime in the Twenties Look?

What’s the look?

Generally, regardless of the anime you look at, it’s going to look fairly distinctive compared to western cartoons. Of course, if you were to go far back enough into the 1960s and earlier, all cartoons, anime included, look relatively the same. For our purposes, the earliest I’ll be looking at anime made in the 1970s, so there will be a distinct enough difference. On that note, here are a few general trends found in the human characters that remain consistent regardless of where you look.

Vaguely Realistic Body Types

Most characters will have a fairly realistic appearance, by having a body type similar to yours and mine. That being said, head and chest size are usually exaggerated.

Big ‘Ol Eyeballs

Their eyes are larger than our human eyes, and usually have more details within them. Sometimes their eye color may be depicted as a gradient or use multiple colors. Pupils may also be differently shaped, such as by using stars. Speaking of, some artists prefer the aesthetic of cataracts and may give their characters white pupils.

Anime in the Seventies

Welcome to the seventies. Back then cars ran on leaded gasoline and all animation was hand drawn and painted. Many people who like watching anime typically don’t tread into this decade because of how old or cheap it works. Animation errors are common like additional fingers or wonky cuts. Sometimes animators would paint things the wrong color, such as by messing up hair colors or by having colors change between frames. Despite all this, anime from the seventies are absolutely worth watching, with some of my favorites being from this decade. Here are a couple that have a particularly cool art style and what we can learn from them:

Lupin III (1971)

One of the most interesting things about Lupin III is the color palette. Much like many 70s anime, the colors are vibrant and inviting. The protagonist wears a forest green sports jacket matched by a yellow tie, whereas his best friend wears a black suit with a cool blue dress shirt. This is colloquially known as the Green Jacket series, and each part uses a different color pallete, such as the 1978 series giving Lupin a red jacket. In Part One, the men are drawn lanky with long, thin legs. They have incredibly thin ankles matched with large brown shoes. Additionally, for many seventies anime, most characters have simple black eyes, and Lupin III is no different. It wouldn’t be until the end of the decade in shows like Rose of Versailles (1979) that colored eyes became apparent. As thieves by trade, Lupin and Jigen are dressed well as if showing their wealth. Speaking of, at various points of the first episode, There are multiple cuts that show Lupin’s and Jigen’s watches, both of which are luxury watches (that you can buy). In a later episode a third character, Inspector Zenigata’s watch is shown, and it looks about as simple as a watch that could physically be drawn. This was always a detail I liked because it showed that Zenigata was poor, with another fun one being that Zenigata still owns a black and white TV whereas Lupin and Jigen have a color one. Of course, rather than text it would be better to view Lupin III visually, so you can watch a recent trailer here. That being said, the real star of part one is not the characters, but instead the machinery.

The car that Lupin rides, a Mercedes Benz SSK, is drawn with far more detail than you’d expect from a show from the early seventies. Being a bright yellow that matches his tie, Lupin’s car in many angles, and is even shown internally. It is drawn in such detail that you can’t help but wonder what kind of references they had on hand at the time. An episode that highlights this is episode 9, where the chrome grill is shown up close, and the Mercedes is drawn at many angles that makes it clear that they had to have had either a scale model or actual car on hand. I myself happen to own two 1/18th replicas of Lupin’s Mercedes, which I use as a drawing reference, but I am tragically terrible at drawing cars so I won’t post that. Anyways, you can see the Mercedes here:

Another piece of machinery that’s depicted in detail are the weapons, such as Lupin’s Walther P-38. In episode eleven during the climax the Walther is zoomed into and made the focus to highlight the recoil. I’m not personally familiar with firearms, but given how weighty the recoil felt while watching I can only assume it’s accurate.

Getter Robo (1974)

Aiming for a younger demographic, it’s no wonder that Getter Robo is filled with primary colors. The Getter itself is colored using red, white, yellow, and green highlights. Furthermore, each of the machine’s forms use simple shapes that would make it easy to draw. (In later decades, the design of mecha would be complex enough that animators would use CGI, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.) The unique caveat of the Getter Robo is that it’s a combination of three jets called the “Get Machines”, and that each of these jets are one of the primary colors I listed earlier, with the green highlights only showing up when all machines are combined. You can watch some upscaled footage here to see the Getter Robo in action.

Its first combined form, Getter One, has an appearance comparable to western superheroes. Like superheroes the Getter One has a long red cape, and has the appearance of “wearing yellow underpants on the outside.”  Its second combined form, Getter Two, has an overall pointy appearance. It has a white pointy head and a rather pointy drill for an arm. Much like Getter One, the Getter Two also appears to be wearing a piece of clothing despite being mechanical, this time being a pair of red bell bottoms. The third form, Getter Three, most accurately looks like three jets being mashed together. The white Get Machine acts as the base of this form like a tank, the red one acts as its chest, and the yellow one is the head and arms. Overall the robot design doesn’t really make sense if you think about it too hard, but I believe it works because each form is able to accurately portray the personality of its pilot.

In its second season, Getter Robo G (1975), the white Get Machine gets a color change, changing from white to blue. This was probably done to mimic the formula of sentai series (Power Rangers, for instance) where the leader of the group is represented by red, with the number two being blue. I personally believe that this color change is a misstep because given the personality of the white Get Machine’s pilot, white just made more sense. This is because the pilot, Hayato, is a teenager with a very bad attitude. While the anime simply depicts him as a loner, the darker source material introduces his character by having him use his hands to rip off the eyes, ears, and nose of a fellow classmate simply for disagreeing with him. By having the machine be a fragile white, I believe it represents how easily it could easily be dyed a darker color if Hayato wasn’t meant to be a good guy.

Anime in the Eighties

At this point in the evolution of anime, the eighties was the decade where anime started to look good. While I really enjoy how “charming” seventies anime look, It doesn’t animate as well as any decade that would follow. It also doesn’t help that eighties anime look incredible. 

More the most part, the eighties had two types of art styles going for it. The first one is the rounded style popularized by works drawn by Rumiko Takahashi and Haruhiko Mikimoto. Rumiko Takahashi is known for series such as Urusei Yatsura (1981), Maison Ikkoku (1986), and Ranma ½ (1989), all of which have main characters with round, dreidel-like faces with large eyes and smaller noses and mouths. Likewise, Haruhiko Mikimoto’s work as the character designer for shows like Macross (1982) and Gunbuster (1988) would feature characters with a similar type of face, though he draws his characters more realistically with slightly smaller eyes and more detail in the hair to make it seem more realistic. The trends shown by these two can be seen in other eighties shows such as Dirty Pair (1985) and Bubblegum Crisis (1987).

The other type of art style the eighties were using was a realistic one. Unlike the seventies, I will only be highlighting one show for this section, though I will be comparing its art style with the 2018 remake. That show is, of course:

Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988)

If you have never seen or heard of this series before, I suggest you do yourself a favor and watch it. It is 110 episodes long and masterfully depicts a space opera that incorporates past wars such as the he Napoleonic Wars and the then recent Cold War, while also predicting the actions in wars that hadn’t taken place yet when the story was written. It remains as relevant as ever, despite taking place thousands of years in the future. To get yourself interested, you can watch the trailer here.

On that note, detractors of Legend of the Galactic Heroes say that the characters in the show look uncanny because everyone is drawn in a fairly realistic art style. While not the best resource, you can view the faces of some the cast at the official website here. Something that immediately stands out while watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes is that the cast has realistic hairstyles that you could expect to see in the eighties, and hair color is equally realistic. Admittedly some characters do have blue hair, but blue is often used to be a more exciting version of black. Additionally, none of the cast has hair that cover their eyes, making the military setting all the more real. I also like that nobody wears glasses, considering this show takes place two thousand years in the future where characters can easily replace lost limbs with robotic versions. Age is also made very obvious in this show, because characters in their thirties look older than those in their teens.

Which makes the 2018 remake Die Neue These all the more disappointing. You can view some of the character’s here, and by doing so you’ll notice the some of the things that I praised the original for not doing show up here. Hairstyles are no longer very realistic, with some looking as if they were supposed to be a 3D model. Some characters who didn’t have glasses in the original now wear them, which doesn’t make sense considering it is shown by episode 4 that you can in fact get replacements for your eyeballs. But my biggest grievance is that it’s a lot harder to figure out the age of a person by looking at them, because Die Neue These forgoes adding many creases to faces which makes everyone look smooth and young.

Moving back to the original series, clothes wise, the inhabitants of the series fall into two camps. For people living in the Free Planets Alliance they wear modern clothes (in terms of the eighties, anyway) and those living in the Galactic Empire wear the latest in 1700s French fashion. To further the divide between them, the military uniforms are also different. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t change much on either side of the conflict are the machinery. Each side fight in large rectangular spaceships that are either olive colored or grey depending on which army they belong too. Internally, the only difference is in the bridge where the leader of any given Galactic Empire ship gets a throne to sit on.

Anime in the Nineties

Here we are in the nineties, the last decade that primarily used cel animation before switching to digital with the rise of computers in animation. In that way, the nineties was a bit like the end of an era, and what happened here would change this niche corner of a medium forever.

I’m talking about Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). Of course, nearly everybody with a .com address or a YouTube channel has talked about Eva changing anime forever, so this segment is going to be very brief. The main takeaway from Eva is that this is where anime started to become a brand. Characters like Asuka and Rei are immediately recognizable, and both of them still have tons of fan art being made of them. Furthermore, the color schemes of the Evas themselves are instantly recognizable. For instance, If you show a bunch of people a color combination of purple and green, chances are that a lot of them are going to think of Unit 01.

Outside of Eva, something else you might notice about watching nineties anime is how baggy clothes are, with Outlaw Star (1998) being a good example of that. Of course, plenty of eighties anime did show the folds in clothes, but a show like Outlaw Star is a better example to look at because of how oversized and baggy the clothes in that show is. I particularly like how comfortable Melfina’s poncho looks, which you can see by going to the official website. Another thing that show is a good example at is the trend 90s anime have for giving characters spiky hair. Additionally, many characters in the 90s have /// lines on their cheeks to act as shading and to give them something of a cheeky appearance. Though other shows like Getter Robo Armageddon (1998) use the /// lines to add more intensity to each character’s expression. On that note, here are a few anime from the nineties that I’d like to talk about in a bit more detail:

Black Jack (1993)

Black Jack was treated by Osamu Tezuka, the man called the father of manga and considered a god by many. To people unfamiliar with his name, you may recognize his works such as Astro Boy or Kimba the White Lion; However, he also created some mature works like MW or The Book of Human Insects. Black Jack falls into the more mature camp, and is a medical drama about the greatest surgeon known to man: Dr. Black Jack. The original story was created in the seventies, and was later adapted into a 10 episode OVA series in the nineties. Unrelatedly, Black Jack (the series) is the only anime to my knowledge that follows a surgeon, but there are multiple manga such as Super Doctor K (1988) or Dr. Koto’s Clinic (2000) if this is a genre that interests you.

On that note, Black Jack is directed by Osamu Dezaki, who is a man with a clearly defined art style. Be it a show he directed in the seventies or one he directed in the nineties, you can usually tell it’s by him by looking at the eyes. The way eyes are drawn in his work are fairly realistic, with special detail going to the placement of the eyelashes. Even the men get eyelashes, which is pretty rare as eyelashes are typically used to denote something as female. Other choices Dezaki makes while directing is to use many vignettes and lense flares, replay the same cut three times for dramatic effect, and to use plenty of harmony shots.

The general design of Black Jack is very dark. The titular man himself dresses primarily in black, and many of the locations are dark and poorly lit. Following the generally realistic appearances of the eighties, Black Jack also goes for a realistic style while also still incorporating Tezuka’s iconic style. This mainly shows in child characters, who have large heads and rounded shoes.

Being a show about surgery, the insides of the human body is shown quite a bit, which is a nice detail I can’t help but appreciate. The viewer is treated with shots of many pulsating organs and splashes of blood. Tezuka does have a medical degree, and so Black Jack always felt grounded in reality when organs were shown. You can watch a clip here to see what I mean.

Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997)

Revolutionary Girl Utena is a hard show to introduce. Most people who watch it think it’s incredible, but I think that the show is boring and repetitive. Of course, reptation is a major theme of the show, with the show’s title taking on a double meaning. Revolutionary Girl Utena is both cyclical and progressive.

What stands out the most watching Revolutionary Girl Utena are the backgrounds. Everything appears like a watercolor painting and helps further the fairy tale vibe that Utena has. This would become more obvious in the movie, but the world of Revolutionary Girl Utena takes place in is nonsensical. There’s an upside down castle in the sky and stairs that seemingly go on forever. The entire school that Utena takes place in feels like a labyrinth with sections only appearing when it becomes relevant to the plot.

Revolutionary Girl Utena also uses a very unique pattern for when drawing the eyes. Characters have big, round eyes that uses two colors. Generally, the top half of the iris is a darker color, where the bottom half is a lighter one. Additionally, the two colors are separated by what can only be described as thin black strings that are probably used to suggest pupils. Furthermore, the eyes feature big white bubbles within them that act as a glare. Combined with the pastel colored color palette, the eyes of Utena’s cast is incredibly unique. For a visual reference, you can watch the opening here.

However, my favorite part about the design of the series is the way the titular character’s clothes look. Utena Tenjou wears a boy’s school uniform despite being a girl, and it’s further modified to make her stand out. She wears a black top and red short shorts which contrasts with the actual boys uniform that uses a mint green color. In the movie Utena Tenjou’s outfit changes into a black and white outfit that looks like a moon cookie. Additionally, she ties her long hair up into a bob to give her the appearance of a boy. Because it’s an outfit that should really be seen, you can view the outfit she wears in the movie here.

Anime in the Two Thousands

I’ll admit that this is the decade that I have the least to write about, but that doesn’t mean that this decade wasn’t important. The Two Thousands might even be most important for the evolution of anime. That being said, this is the decade where animators began using computers in earnest, so many anime in the decade look off. One of my least favorite quirks from this decade is that everyone realized that they have access to more colors, so they just started using as many colors as possible. As an experiment, you should look up Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (2004) in your preferred search engine and ponder whether or not the colors used are too distracting. Regardless, experimenting with colors would only last a few years and by the end of the decade, anime had evolved to the point where if you looked at what was being produced you’d might have a hard time figuring out if it was from the two thousands or twenty tens. On that note, here are two anime that highlight the decade:

Lucky☆Star (2007)

During the two thousands, many anime art styles went through an evolution that is known as the Moe Boom. Pronounced Mo as in more and e as in eight, the Moe Boom was a trend to have anime characters be as cute as physically possible. This meant that eyes bigger than ever, noses as microscopic as ever, along with large, pudding like heads. Additionally, the generally color pallet sought to be as candy colored as possible, with pink becoming a popular color.

As it follows, Lucky☆Star has a very cute art style. You can see how cute it is by watching a trailer here. In fact, by looking at the visuals you might think that the demographic this show was aiming for was for young girls, but you’d be dead wrong. Generally, the target demographic for this shows and other created during the Moe Boom were adult men. As I stated earlier, anime were becoming more recognizable as a brand, and the designs of Lucky☆Star were no exception. What I’m trying to say is that you’ve most likely seen Konata before, the blue haired lead with a mole under her eye.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006)

It was in this decade that anime started to look like what you’d expect it to. When you think of the word anime, chances are you’re probably thinking of an art style that appears in this show. The characters in this show are drawn with fairly realistic, petite bodies with a larger head to make space for the larger eyes. Furthermore every character has a hairstyle that anyone could feasibly pull off along with a natural hair color. Additionally, clothes generally cling to the body in a realistic manner. I particularly like how memorable the school uniforms are in this series. The color scheme consists of white blue, and red highlights, with the girl’s uniform using a lighter blue than the boy’s uniform. Additionally, this show uses a rustic color pallet that will pull its viewers into the show, which makes the school it takes place in seem lived in. Watching a trailer will convey what i’m trying to say better than I can write it, so you can watch a trailer here.

Anime in the Twenty Tens

More anime was created in this decade than any decade that came before it, so it is a bit disingenuous for me to only highlight two anime from this decade. However, because you’ve likely seen anime from this decade you probably don’t need me to write about it much detail because you are probably acutely aware of some of the trends yourself. Regardless, some key features you might’ve noticed from this decade is that clothes appear to cling to the characters that wear it, and is used to highlight figures. Additionally, many characters look overdesigned, with many patterns and accessories being used. This is also the decade that uses CG to cut corners, so background characters and vehicles are in 3D to save costs to animating them. And of course, 3D and 2D things interacting which each other is very jarring and stands out, giving the anime that use it a very cheap feel. It would take till the second half of the decade for an animation studio such as Studio Orange to get the hang of CG.

Additionally, as I mentioned in the segment on the nineties, anime has become a brand and this can be seen in full force here. Character designs have been boiled down to a science where each character has a particular gimmick to them. The twenty tens is also the decade where anime figures and gacha games have been exploding in popularity, so being able to sell a character is important more than ever. In one of the shows I’ll talk about in this segment, characters having a gimmick will become very apparent/

On that note, here are two anime that I personally like and want to talk about a bit.

Lupin The IIIRD (2014)

Lupin The IIIRD is a spin off directed by Takeshi Koike that currently consists of three OVAs called Jigen’s Gravestone (2012), Goemon’s Blood Spray (2017), and Fujiko’s Lie (2019), though additional OVAs are currently in production. If you’ve been reading this linearly, you might’ve noticed that this is the second time I’m mentioning Lupin III, though the title is now stylized as Lupin The IIIRD. Speaking of style, the main man himself Lupin III wears a blue jacket in this series, and his partner Jigen wears a dark green shirt with a dress shirt the color of red wine. Jigen also wears a a bright yellow tie, but after getting shot in the shoulder in the first 10 minutes of the Jigen’s Gravestone, he takes it off and it is never seen again.

Like I said in the previous paragraph, this spin off is directed by Takeshi Koike. I’d argue that much like Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Dezaki, the art style of Takeshi Koike is instantly recognizable. This can also be seen in his work on directing Redline (2009), but the most noticeable thing about what Takeshi Koike does is the shading. While Takeshi Koike does use simple shading that you’d find in any anime, he also uses harsh blacks to give everything a comic book feel. Koike’s works also uses thicker lines compared to the norm, so everything just pops. It also helps that the color choice in everything is perfect, as you can see in this trailer for Jigen’s Gravestone. By watching that, you might’ve also noticed that characters have long and slender limbs, but accessories like shoes or hats end up looking massive. And that’s to say nothing on how these characters actually animate! Everything moves with a weight as if they actually exist, and seeing the cars get damaged feels equally as powerful.

Classicaloid (2016)

I’ll admit that out of every show I’ve listed, Classicaloid is probably the worst. I enjoyed watching this series more than I did others on this list, but from a critical lens Classicaloid doesn’t have a lot to offer. The show is about various classical composers being reborn via science and how they live out their lives in the modern world. Sometimes, like in episode 4, Classicaloid tries to take this premise seriously, but for the most part this show is resigned to being a comedy. Which is a shame, because episode 4 was great. For this segment I will just write about the design of one of the characters, and how Classicaloid put way more effort than you’d expect from a simply comedy show. This sentence sounds silly, but the character I’ll be looking at is Frédéric Chopin.

First off, here is a link to how every character in the show looks. Chopin is the one with orange hair and bangs that cover his face, so navigate over to him. If you’d prefer, you can also watch the trailer here. While Chopin’s design might be weird looking at first, I eventually figured out what the character designer was going for. Most noticeably, Chopin is wearing a track suit. In anime, track suits are commonly worn by recluses and introverts, which is a trait that Chopin very much has. His magenta “cape epaulette thing” is meant to look like a blanket, which is again commonly used by introverted anime characters. Additionally, his bangs cover his eyes because he’s (you guessed it) shy. The baton that he uses to transform into his magical composer form is composed of many purple squares that looks like pixels, which is used because in this anime, Chopin is a gamer. The outfit he gains when using his composer magic is a deep purple. Chopin usually uses that magic (called musik) to isolate himself from others, so I personally find that the deeper color is supposed to be him “sinking into the deep end” and being swaddled by the isolated created by his musik. In season 2 episode 21, Chopin gains an alter ego that uses the color scheme of his original outfit. His silver tracksuit becomes shining armor, and his magenta cape epaulette thing becomes a flowing mantle. In that episode, Chopin makes friends that aren’t a part of the main cast of reanimated classical composers, so it felt like the symbolism of this one-off outfit was that he gained the courage to no longer isolate himself. Of course, Classicaloid is unfortunately resigned to being comedy show that ends four episodes later, so any character develop wouldn’t be shown.

That being said, not every character is created equal. I can’t really find a reason why a composer like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky would turn into a little girl, though I’ve got an inkling of a theory. My theory is that since the book Lolita is written by a Russian-American, and equipped with that knowledge the character designer wanted to make the Russian one a little girl that wears the frilly type of dresses that falls under “lolita fashion”.

How Might the Twenties Look?

As this blog post is written in the beginning of the twenty twenties, I can’t say for certain of what the future might look like, but I can make a guess as to how anime might evolve next. Specifically, I’m guessing that anime will look more realistic than ever. I believe this because many movies of the last few years have been trying to mimic life. For example, Jujustu Kaisen 0 (2021) used incredibly realistic shadows in the opening scene that it looked true to life. Then there’s other movies like Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel – I. Presage Flower (2017) that uses CG renderings to trace over with in 2D to create many scenes that would’ve been impossible to create without digital technology. It’s a bit hard to explain but you can see what I’m talking about here. Something else you might’ve noticed from that clip is the amount of post production that went into making the animation pop. The final animation uses many digital filters that makes the lighting look realistic. Another movie, Evangelion 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time (2021), went so far as to film actual flesh and blood actors to choreograph each scene, using rotoscoping to give every pose a particular human touch. Therefore, I suspect that the anime art style has evolved to the point where it will directly mimic reality.

Frequently Asked Questions About The Evolution Of Anime Art Styles: