The Spectrum of Shifting Color Palettes; Or Why Toei Seto Kaiba's Hair is Green
I had an eureka moment from staring at color wheels a while back, and it turns out Toei Seto and Yugi's color palettes are opposite, also known as complementary colors of each other. There's awareness of Seto's white-with-gold-trim uniform vs Domino High's standard blue uniform-with-black shading. But this contrast also applies to the hair and eyes.
Seto's neon green hair is meant to compare and contrast Yugi's purple magenta streaks.
In the anime, Yugi's eyes swap around the silver or purple zone, while Yami's eyes are more red or magenta to match his more brightly colored hair streaks.
That's why Seto's eyes swap between gold and orange.
These array of colors the animators swap around, can suggest that due to lack of commitment and consistency on eye colors. Staff members may have used their judgement viewing the color palettes as analogous, meaning 2 or more colors next to each other are used.
It also happens that the Toei anime and 2016 edition are biased to certain colors which reflect on differences in Seto's hair color.
The anime shows favor to the color green:
While in the 2016 official colored release of the manga, there seems to add a lot of brown tones to Takahashi's designs:
What's even more intriguing is, starting from chapter 41, the chapter focused on the affection compatibility device. The Yugis' are given classic purple-magenta gradient eyes, in the previous chapter Yami mind crushed Seto. This made it a reverse of the Toei anime, where Yugi and Yami changed eye colors in the manga, after Yami inflicted mind crush.
Grandpa Mutou still gets to keep his brown eyes, a reminder of those days.
To wrap this post up with a conclusion, it's apparent that staff behind the 2016 edition, and Toei staff have their own artistic visions that diverge from what fans of the series are familiar with. It's not necessarily about right or wrong but more about human behavior. These differences in interpretation are natural with so many variants of Takahashi's work.
Edited: 12/30/2024, corrected the claim that the Shueisha 2016 color edition was done solely by Kazuki Takahashi.
