Any veteran fan knows perfectly well that it is
enough to see a single frame to know if a series was produced in Japan or
China. This undeniable reality sparked an intense debate on the REDnote
platform on July 13, where the Asian community sat down to discuss
crudely why it is so exaggeratedly easy to distinguish traditional anime from
its own local productions, even when each project supposedly tries to create
its own artistic identity.
One of the points most criticized by Chinese
users themselves was the handling of the stroke and the color palette. While
Japanese animation studios have mastered the technique of
varying the thickness of the lines to give life and dynamism to the characters,
Chinese works usually opt for completely uniform, rigid and heavy contours.
Added to this is the terrible problem of lighting and color; Netizens pointed
out that his productions often abuse extremely flashy and saturated tones, or
try to force an uncomfortable hyperrealism into fantasy stories that simply
don't fit, failing miserably to replicate that balanced aesthetic that the
Japanese master perfectly.
But the visual chasm isn't just the fault of
the cartoonists, it's the fault of how the anime industry works
compared to its neighbors. The discussion on social media exposed
that Japanese directors or their small creative teams often inject their own
personal touch into the camera direction and overall atmosphere of the
backgrounds, creating vibrant cities that breathe pure everyday life. In
contrast, the huge working groups in China prefer to play it safe, creating
static products that lack a palpable identity and relying more and more on the
coldness of 3D animation to get projects afloat, making the difference between
the two countries even more apparent from the first glance.
Knowing that the budget and workforce of large
Chinese companies often far exceeds that of Japanese studios
