NYT is about as mainstream Western media as you can get, so I thought it was interesting to see their take on the use of CG within anime (and that they even thought it worth their time to write about). I think it is a fair take. From the article:
“Fans often balk at any announcement that a show will be produced in 3-D, especially when it’s from an established franchise,” May said in an interview. “The gap between good and bad C.G. anime is wide, and fans can spot mediocre 3-D animation easily thanks to having seen decades of top-range American 3-D films.”
This lines up with my experience. Often, if the CG is done well and integrated into a consistent visual style, there aren’t any as many complaints. However, bad CG that sticks out is what annoys fans the most and garners the negative connotation.
The article also goes into some of the reasons that we should expect CG to stay and expand in usage going forward:
“I feel like the large insurgence of 3-D anime comes from the dream of an easier production,” said Austin Hardwicke, a 3-D animator who specializes in anime that is heavy on digital effects. In part, that’s because it’s easier to maintain consistent quality. “Thanks to the enormous video game industry, there are hands available across the globe, making it easy to scale a team up or down at will. And it’s famously difficult for veteran 2-D animators to teach junior animators up to their level, but 3-D animation is infinitely easier to teach.”
This lines up with what industry veterans within Japan have been saying; that there is a lack of junior talent being developed to be able to fill senior roles.
Combine this lack of traditional 2D talent with an ever-growing number of productions in any given season and more CG is what we should expect.
Are we?
Cel Anime has been digital (or at least finished digitally) for a long time, and CG Anime can be bad or good the same way hand-drawn Anime can be bad or good. The more 3D Anime that is made, the better it gets overall.
The hardest thing to do is use both styles at the same time without it being distracting. When it’s planned ahead and used for very specific things, it tends to work. When it’s a fallback because the animators are behind schedule, it ends up being terrible.
Right now, I think the worst running example of 3D Anime is the platform Netflix has been using in-house for the last ten or so years without seeing any real visual improvements. The latest example of it being Gamera Rebirth - excellent story, distractingly poor character designs against all the other visuals which do look modern and appealing. But other studios working with Netflix have done really nice 3D Anime, so even with them it depends on a combination of things.
I’m fine with the transition as long as the animators and producers care about the quality of the work they release. That what it always comes down to.
I agree with you that, in general, anime fans have more or less accepted that CG and other computer aided animation tools are unavoidable and will account for an increasingly large portion of any given production. However, I didn’t want to editorialize the title, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, a hard agree on Netflix 3D shows looking really bad. I think I could deal with bland, generic CG character models, but the actual animation on those models is usually just really poor. The characters are just not very, well, animated in their movements or expressions. Compare that with a show like Arcane and the difference is night and day.