#edwad

probably not totally but in my memory a lot of stuff was v pointy in society generally in the 90's. I feel like maybe computer polygonal rendering-as-futurism might have been part of this?

hmm possibly! i think like pointy anime has a bit of a different appearance to polygon rendering though, like if anything it’s even pointier... take these characters from Slayers for example which inspired this post:

(thanks to @angelaoroscos-sweetassknife​ who was streaming a Slayers game adaptation and put this together)

now, Slayers is possibly on the extreme end of anime pointiness and other steotypical ‘anime’ styles like huge eyes... the style has very few straight lines, like it’s generally two pretty similar curves coming together to a really sharp point. even so, i definitely think you’re right about 90s styles being pointy in general? and like really harsh lighting and exaggerated proportions were also very much a thing in American comics of the time... I could probably furnish more examples but I was a baby back then.

what i find kind of interesting about this style is that the face is by far the most distorted and stylised part... with the clothing and the rest of the body, there’s some effort to represent 3D forms, there’s foreshortening and the like, clothing folds are shaded in (which gets taken to extremes in Utena official art, which usually draws dozens of dress folds around Anthy). but the face is just a sharp blob with features placed on it in 2D space! the character at the bottom even more so... imagine what that would look like as a 3D form...

probably some of this has to do with TV animation budgets often being limited around this time. if you only have three frames of animation, you have to go a whole lot further to sell a particular movement. that helps explain the exaggeration, but what leads to the pointiness..?

@edwad​ replied:

a genealogical critique of pointy anime

🤔

The wealth animations in which the 90s mode of drawing prevails appears as an immense collection of sharp pointy bits; the individual sharp pointy bit appears as its elementary form...

(yes i know foucault isn’t marx but i don’t know any good foucault lines to parody)

@everylimb​ replied:

I'd assume it was more or less random, the way trends in most media go: a break-out hit happens to do something different or look different, and for the next decade the things that get greenlit trend towards whatever it was, until the next thing 

natural disaster movies in the 00s = superhero movies in the 10s = pointy anime in the 90s 

I know nothing about anything I'm just thinking aloud in your reply box at this point 

hehe you know about as much as me!

i think you’re definitely right, we can say that some style will catch on and become culturally dominant without necessarily naming what that style is. and it certainly wasn’t ubiquitous: the 90s also saw Cowboy Bebop in 1997-98, Ghost in the Shell in 1995, and Perfect Blue and Princess Mononoke in 1997 which all featured much less pointy, much more ‘realistic’ designs. hell, JoJo was running by then, though I don’t know what it looked like at that point.

so I guess I could then ask started the ‘pointy’ trend, and where and when it was particularly prominent? from anime I’m personally familiar with (which is a tiny subset of ‘anime in general’), you see it in Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), and it was arguably still around by the time of Code Geass in the mid 2000s. Slayers for reference was in 1995. maybe you could count some really famous anime like Dragon Ball Z (89-95) and Sailor Moon (92-97) as well?

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