Understanding Character Designs: Information in the Designs
During my Lupin redesigns in my last post, I spent some time looking at some of my favourite anime series and the character design/art style choices made as a way of developing my own approach to designing. A lot of this post will be made up of series which feature redesigns, whether permanent or temporary on a varying basis and the stylistic changes they bring to each character. Of course, a lot of this will be subjective because people appreciate different types of art, but in this post I shall share my opinions on what designs appeal to me and what I think can make an effective animation design sheet.
Seeing as the final season of Attack on Titan is currently airing, discussing these design sheets feels very appropriate. To provide context, the final season of AOT changed studios, from WIT Studio to MAPPA. More information and a better detailed analysis of this can be found above by The Canipa Effect, but as a result, the designs and art style that had been used for the previous 3 seasons were overhauled into more detailed and complex designs, much closer to Hajime Isayama’s manga designs.
The original character designer, Kyoji Asano, took a solid approach, using thick highlights and in general, as few lines as possible without compromising form. The number of creases compared to the manga feel significantly lower, and the shapes feel slightly rounder and looser. Contrast that to Tomohiro Kishi, who’s design on the left doesn’t just increase the shading, but the hair highlights feel much more precise, and the linework is incredibly detailed. The creases are much more prominent, muscle lines are also defined and the designs use hatching to shade akin to the manga. Overall, the amount of information between the designs increases, which whilst matching the tonal shift in the story, would make it incredibly difficult and time-consuming to animate. Whilst I like the season 4 designs from an illustrative approach, I’d lean much more to the previous style in terms of actually being able to animate.
This idea of information can also be addressed with the Dragon Ball franchise in the last 10 years. Since Dragon Ball’s revival in 2013 with the film Battle of Gods, Tadayoshi Yamamuro has been the character designer of the series. His designs (top left) often use a lot of line work, but they also feel quite geometric and round. Jawlines can look bubbly and eyes can look quite square. But the common complaint that fans give about his modern work is that his designs feel stiff. This can be traced back to the detail that he adds in his designs. The hair has highlights and linework to define depth, the skin often has highlights and shading at the same time, and creases in the clothing also are defined by lots of linework and shading, which makes it time consuming to animate without reducing detail.
In stark contrast, the character designer for the Broly film, Naohiro Shintani takes a completely different approach to his designs. The shading has been stripped back, reduced to only one layer of shading at minimum, the hair loses all detail and becomes one solid colour and the linework feels soft and minimal. In general, Shintani’s designs bring a sense of looseness, opting to make it easier for animators to work and going for movement over detail. Striking the right balance between detail and shape work is paramount for a good character design.
Talking about shapework, I learnt from Bianca Ansems a few months back about the impact of choosing the shapes that you construct a character with. Do you go for more circular, round shapes that suggest youth and bubbliness? Or sharper designs that feel a little more mature? I feel this encompasses the two approaches to Boruto’s character design seen below.
The series character designer, Tetsuya Nishio, uses quite round shapes to define Boruto, which suits his personality of youthful, a little arrogant and expressively happy. The jawline feels very circular, the clothes feel soft with very few creases and the hair feels very fluffy. It matches the character’s personality very well.
With Ichiro Uno’s design, he’s leant into the manga’s aesthetic a lot more, and in some ways has made the character look more his age than Nishio’s younger-looking design. As Ajay notes1, the jawline is particularly slimmer, the clothes have more creases, adding an extra level of detail. The eyes feel much sharper in contrast to the usual design and the hair feels less fluffy, feeling sharper at the tips of the strands. These sharper, slimmer shapes help to age up the characters and make them feel more like teens rather than children.
Given that the theme of this post has been redesigns and the changes that have been incorporated, it only feels right to discuss the “controversial” redesigns that Haikyuu had in its fourth season in 2020. The first set of designs felt quite detailed, with inky lines, smaller eyes, and in the case of Hinata, shorter hair. There was a greater amount of shading, which often helped to define the muscles alongside the line art.
With season 4, Kishida overhauled these designs to match Furudate’s art from the manga (similar to Ichiro Uno). The designs feel softer as a result of a toned down level of shading, the eyes feel larger and a little more expressive and the line work feels simpler and rawer, defining muscles themselves now. Reception to these designs was mixed, fans appreciated the more refined designs of the previous seasons, dubbing these as cartoony or childish. Personally, I think these designs work a lot better in capturing the expressive nature of the characters, especially Hinata who feels larger than life thanks to the enlarged gleeful eyes.
Looking at these designs and their redesigns, I’ve started to take away keeping designs to a more loose, minimal style. If you read my blog post on what makes animation feel real in documentaries, one of the defining factors was how real the movement feels, and by keeping a looser style, we can facilitate that. I understand the appeal of detailed designs, of making animation feel like truly moving art and making it look real, but for me, movement comes first. Not only that, but in cases like Shintani’s designs, these can become versatile. Watching the film these designs were used in, you can see all sorts of animators take on these designs, adding their own stylistic choices such as Naotoshi Shida’s distinctive shading, or Naoki Tate’s looseness, or Yuya Takahashi’s detailed art, and they all feel cohesive. For me, animation friendly designs are the kinds of designs I want to work with and develop.
1 – https://twitter.com/AnimeAjay/status/1369671684484177920/photo/4