What Does an Alchemist Look Like? Thoughts on Design & Full Metal Alchemist 2

This is Part II of a series of thoughts on the new second season of Full Metal Alchemist. Read Part I, Seiyuu Politics: Full Metal Alchemist & Voice Actor Idolization.

This morning, I got a chance to listen to Anime Pulse’s podcast of Professor Ian Condry’s panel from Anime Boston 2008, in which he relates his research on the production of Japanese animation in his upcoming book. I’ve known the following sentiment for a fair while, but Ian recalls a feeling that many Japanese animators of anime have expressed for a fair while on the topic of digital animation versus older, hand-drawn productions: the former doesn’t show enough of the human behind the creation. Of course, it comes down to personal aesthetics. But Ian says, “I had an interesting moment when I was in a cab with a couple of anime producers, and we were just coming back from a studio visit, and we were talking about Shrek. And they just marveled at the ways that flowing hair and the kind of detail that could happen in computer animation was really quite mind-blowing. But then one of the producers said, ‘But, y’know, for all the technical sophistication, we feel like it lacks a little soul. Right? It lacks something.’ And I think that’s one of the things that they said… Hand-drawn animation will continue in Japan.”

I personally had this feeling after recently watching the new release of the first episode of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (aka. the second season).

I must begin, though, by stating that the issue doesn’t come down to cel-animation versus computer animation. The first season of Full Metal Alchemist, released in Japan from late 2003 to late 2004 (and then broadcast in America from 2004 to 2006), relies heavily on digital animation. A number of sketch-based cels (as in non-painted cels) can be found online, but we can safely say that FMA is a digital production. Five years later, though, digital animation has surpassed the techniques of 2004, and we now view entirely different trends in more modern anime productions.

Because the art is constantly changing over time, looking at the evolution of anime (and especially manga, since it’s drawn by one artist rather than many members of a team) is fairly interesting. One cool thing about anime, for instance, is that since it’s made for television, you can see how the production studio’s team improved or worsened throughout the production, simply by watching the broadcast. For manga, it’s pretty much the same: compare later chapters of the manga to the earlier ones, and you’ll commonly see significant differences in the character designs, backgrounds, line work, etc. Such evolution is particularly present in Hayao Miyazaki’s work on the Nausicaa manga, which Takekuma Kentaro explained in a lecture this spring at Kyoto Seika University, entitled The Space Between Anime and Manga: #4: Why is the Manga Version of Nausicaa So Hard to Read?, which Ko Ransom skillfully translated over at welcome datacomp. It’s a must-read piece and provides particularly interesting insights on how art in manga operates in terms of story and content.

So, back to Full Metal Alchemist 2. I’ve only watched the first episode so far, but I have already noticed a distinct difference in character design and art style compared to the first season. Talking to my former roommate Kent last night tipped me off to an (apparent) opinion expressed online that the second season of FMA resembles the manga a lot more than the first season had. I wondered if this was true, and while watching the episode this morning noticed that the character’s faces were a lot rounder, the colors were a bit different, and the line strokes were a bit thicker than the first season.

Basically, I noticed three possible differences in the second season compared to the first:

1) The possibility that the design was changed due to digital technologies
2) The possibility that the design was changed to reflect the manga
3) The possibility that the design was changed because of, well, a new character designer

To start, I believe that the third point does not bear much importance in this discussion. It is true that the character designers changed from Yoshiyuki Ito to Hiroki Kanno, but ultimately the character designs do not differ; instead, the art design changes. However, the entire art team was reorganized for the second season, so I can’t make any solid judgments based on those facts.

The first point makes a bit of sense, but my argument is a bit weak. I want to assert that hand-drawn lines reflect a certain humanness that cannot be reproduced with a mouse and Photoshop, because the art programs used (probably something more advanced than Adobe’s products?) have been coded to resemble the human form already. Drawing a curved line of variable width on a computer program does not allow for the immediate human correction of said line’s skew or width by way of pencil and eraser, at least not on a similar scale.

For example, in this comparison (where the top image is from the first season of FMA, and the bottom image is from the second season), we notice that the use of bolder lines is particularly evident in the second season, namely the line of Ed’s facial structure. This, however, may be a reflection of the manga, as will be discussed later.

However, I feel that in terms of digital technology, one thing we can examine is the use and modification of color.

If we examine more modern anime, the colors seem bolder and brighter, by far. A basic look at the history of color in anime produces a few interesting points in a very indistinct timeline. Avoiding discussion of black-and-white anime, we can see:

a) Flat colors, as seen in the Cutie Honey intro from 1973

(However, this does not ignore instances of shading, as seen in the intro to Mazinger Z from 1972.)

b) The four-layer technique, probably begun in the ’80s, as seen in the movie, Macross: Do You Remember Love from 1984 (and advocated by Paul “Otaking” Johnson)

Which continued on into the ’90s with anime such as Trigun from 1998

c) Sometime in the new millenium, a return to flat colors, propelled by (IMO) digital coloring techniques, such as in the first opening of Naruto from 2002.

Nowadays, the colorization depicted in Example C appears to be the common trend in popular modern anime (my assumption is that it’s the easiest to produce). It’s certainly difficult to argue a difference between the first and second season of Full Metal Alchemist, because both seasons use the modern, flat colorization. However, with updates to technology, from my perspective I see those colors becoming much more bold and distinct. Perhaps this also has to do with the switch to digital broadcasting and HD technologies.

Here, we see Ed in the first and second seasons, from the top respectively. The first season’s colors seem a bit fuzzier or faded to me.

Ed ripping his shirt in Season 1 and Season 2, from the top respectively. Even the lines seem a bit more distinct in the second season. Comparing the color of the shading between seasons, I think that the first season’s shadows look a bit more realistic, while the second season’s seem more like a darker and more-defined layer of color.

Light shining off of Ed’s armor in the first and second seasons of FMA, from the top respectively. Again, like the shadows in the above image, the glint of the light seems more realistic in Season 1, because it gives off a blurred, dusty feeling. However, it may be argued that it appears that way as an effect of the metal or environment (eg., the second season is supposed to seem like more-polished armor).

Approaching the possibility of Season 2 resembling the manga more so than Season 1 might require a stronger argument. However, it is clear that the facial designs from Season 2 are a lot rounder than Season 1, and the line strokes are in places much deeper or bolder than the first season (look again at the images of Ed’s face [image 1 and image 2]). If we examine the manga, we can see the change in design that I mentioned at the beginning of the article.

Images from the earlier chapters of the Full Metal Alchemist manga.

Images from the later chapters of the FMA manga.

I chose two fight scenes from both the earlier and later chapters of the manga serialization, because the pictures contained a maximum amount of lines, providing us with some material for comparison. Just as Takekuma Kentaro in his lecture explains that Miyazaki later learned to adapt his images for manga and developed much bolder lines, so does Hiromu Arakawa, the artist and writer of the manga. The characters and their appendages in the later chapters are surrounded by much bolder, distinct lines, even if those lines are drawn with much more rigor (they appear to be more jagged). The faces of the characters also appear to have rounder characteristics. Even the background lines evolve: in the earlier chapters, all of the lines resemble each other and are arranged in a similar pattern; however, in the later chapters, the background vary, even though similar actions are taking place.

When I talked to Kent, he said that “people online” expressed their distaste for the new season of Full Metal Alchemist, because the art style was significantly different enough to notice. Whether or not that change is a reflection of the manga, I believe, does not matter, but if the cause of the change is actually an attempt to mirror the manga’s style, that would indeed be, well, awesome. It’s a neat tip-of-the-hat to the series origin, but it’s also a more subtler one than, say, the new Shin Mazinger Shōgeki! Z-Hen being shown on Japanese television this season, which attempts to retain a similar style of artwork and animation from its predecessors.