Rewatching Prince of Egypt and Joseph King of Dreams has given me such an appreciation of how detailed and realistically stylized the character design was.
Like just go through and look, really look at the background characters. Everyone has similar features if they're meant to be of the same race/background. The women are allowed to have pointy/angular faces that retain a softness to them. The men aren't just a bunch of square and rectangular-faced people. Hair colors and eye shapes match up really well across large groups. Children actually look like their own person and not just tiny clones of their parents. It gets down the nose shapes if you trace the lines making up the bridge of the nose.
It just... something that more stylized and 3D animation lost at some point. And I know its because companies want to reuse assets and do the bare minimum for a profit. But people genuinely enjoy the small differences that denote a person's race/ethnicity and background heritage. If only corporations would stop making token passes at making something impactful.
And yes, these tiny details mean getting more PoC behind the scenes for authenticity and giving a stronger voice so EVERYONE benefits from the experience. Not just a bunch of white dudes older than velcro making "educated guesses" with cultures they googled for twenty minutes.
But that's enough of my soap box. I have barely literate fanfics to write. /lh
