Interesting to note :0 saw it on twitter and thought I’d share!
This is FASCINATING and describes something I couldn’t put my finger on!!
A major difference things like this don’t take into account is animation.
When the original pokemon were designed, they were just static six-bit colorless sprites. They had no clue what was to come in the next 20 years.
Over the next twenty years, pokemon has become insanely popular. Disney level popular. Each game has increased the animation until each one now has a fully animated CG model, rendered in far more detail than the first gen Gameboy sprites could ever dream of. It’s had thousands of cartoon episodes and around two dozen movies.
The newer designs are-
- Much easier to animate, and more importantly,
- Significantly easier for children to draw.
And that’s ultimately what this franchise boils down to: it has to be accessible to children.
I think that’s a really interesting point because as a child I always thought it’s really really hard to draw Pokemon! So I honestly never did.
Also, just plain different times. Older anime/anime designs tended to be more complicated, as they were drawn on cells. Modern computer animation relies on different tools/simpler designs.
Neither is better than the other, mind. Just a time capsule how things were cartoonized then vs now.
