Specificity killed the cat
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has been on my mind quite a lot recently, kind of odd when you consider it’s a series I’ve neither read nor watched, and only really experienced through cultural osmosis. That of course hasn’t stopped me from nailing down a few opinions though: at a glance, Araki is a very interesting artist with extremely potent stylings. Echoes of Michelangelo, Antonio Lopez, pop iconography, fashion photography. I’m not turning over any new rocks here. He’s widely beloved for this rather peculiar aesthetic he’s cultivated over the years. The ubiquity of his work also leads to funny instances where JoJo now becomes certain people's single point of reference to process imagery well within the traditions of the fashion world. A model creating interesting shapes with their body is actually doing “JoJo poses”. Someone dressed in high fashion is “dressed like a stand user”. The list goes on.
Another opinion I’ve also settled on is that the JoJo anime adaptations look horrible. Bold coming from someone who hasn’t watched them, but that’s hardly relevant here. Every glimpse I’ve gotten of either season of the TV adaptation has left me completely rattled. I could expand by talking about art direction, color design and compositing, departments the series seems to constantly struggle to activate and synergize, but what really bothers me is the way characters are drawn and consequently animated.
An immediate and easy diagnosis is that the character designs are "too detailed", which is a fair assessment by most measures but that still leaves me dissatisfied. I don’t believe good animation design necessarily has a threshold for line count, despite the observable truth that more often than not keeping it on the low side can yield more interesting results. I can’t bring myself to reject the potential appeal of something “needlessly” (who's to say?) complicated and ornate. Those are descriptors that apply to some of my favorite works in animation at large. With that being said there is a noticeable issue with JoJo’s designs. If not the line count, what is it?
Walk with me here, but I would argue that the problem lies in every single point I raised earlier that helped paint Araki as an interesting artist. Michelangelo, Antonio Lopez, Gianni Versace, Steven Meisel all come together to create a double edged sword. One that on one hand gives Araki his appeal, but also simultaneously creates a mile-high barrier for any animator working on the show to overcome.
I’m the kind of person who constantly begs for anime design to diversify. I can only stand to see so many default anime dolls before I start begging for the next Windy Tales to shake things up. I’m always looking for work that seems to be in conversation with other mediums and aesthetic traditions, or at least challenges and reinterprets the status quo at any given moment. With that kind of mindset, JoJo should be a godsend for me. Not only does it pull from a rich world of art and design outside of the industry’s usual pool of influences, said world happens to be one I’m very interested and invested in. However, this vested interest also reveals many of the TV series’ shortcomings. Somewhat paradoxically, whereas the source material exists in genuine conversation with fashion and European art history, the adaptations only present a veneer of that dynamic. They can mimic the accent, but they cannot speak the language.
What is style? That’s not a can of worms I’m really interested in opening, nor one I’m particularly equipped to handle. For our purposes in this context, it can be understood as a product of taste and study, eventually solidified by habit. This is of course a reductive view of things, but it will suffice. Habit is a defining factor here because beyond establishing a sense of repetition for viewers to latch on to, it can manifest in the artist’s work through the emergence of shorthands. The shapes an artist resorts to when drawing fingers, familiar patterns that inevitably emerge as they chisel out the leaves of a tree, particular expressions they gravitate towards, can all be understood as shorthands. The task of adapting a work for TV often means translating a certain style, (henceforth, certain shorthands) into animation designs, designs that will then be articulated on screen by various animators. The issue is that shorthands can be deceptive. Their often immediate appeal and relative simplicity belies a nuanced understanding of not only the fundamentals of draftsmanship, but also of the various works of art and life experiences that shape an artist’s oeuvre.
Failing to grapple with those factors means perceiving shorthands as mere symbols. The surface detail that signaled a decades-long process of self-cultivation in Araki’s work become as flat as cutouts, stiffly gliding around on screen, seldom (if ever) matching the appeal of the source material. Could it simply be a matter of skill? For example, it’s no surprise that a world class draftsman such as Takahiro Kishida could produce one of the less stifled-feeling scenes in the series. There are probably other examples I’ve not been exposed to, but I know for sure that they are far from the standard. Nearly everything else I’ve seen from the series is plagued by bad design: strange splotches of pitch black shadows, unconvincing noses, haphazard hatching that fails to convey form, posing that feels more awkward than fashionably contrived. That’s to say nothing about the way characters actually move on screen. However, skill is not necessarily the issue. While it is hard to match Kishida’s caliber as an artist, the series has been graced by plenty of respectable names whose talents I could not dare to question in good conscience. This is about depth of understanding and interpretation.
In order to articulate the character designs in a way that does them justice, you have to be somewhat initiated to the world they're referencing. Nailing the assignment demands extraneous knowledge: who is Linda Evangelista? How did she pose for Steven Meisel in the 90s? Who is Gianni Versace? What exactly did he bring to fashion and how is his creative ethos informing the design of this series? What delineates the Renaissance, Mannerist and Baroque periods in European art history? Failing to engage with these things is also failing to engage with the aesthetic of the series itself, resulting in an inevitable disconnect. With enough of Araki’s surface stylings (and lifted compositions) on screen, most audiences are rather easily pleased, and that’s great! Good for them. In my eyes however, the end result is often at best impotent and at worst an eyesore.
This is the problem that arises when trying new things in anime design. The articulation of new, relatively unconventional ideas in animation demands not only a great deal of skill, but also an acute understanding of the sources that inform them. Anime as an industry often gets a bad rap for the staleness of its design work. The most common criticisms involve decrying that things “all look the same”, with descriptors like “protag-kun” emerging to capture the endless repetition of certain go-to “types”. I’m usually among that crowd, because it’s by all means true. Specificity is what makes art interesting, but anime often seems to reject it in favor of familiar archetypes, be that narratively or in its presentation. Many factors could be said to inform this development, such as amateurishly illustrated (and written) light novel slop flooding the industry with equally subpar adaptations. This in itself reflects broader cultural issues that have been raised by others about manga, anime and peripheral industries refusing to look beyond their own confines and immediate past for inspiration… Those aren’t bad answers, but I think an often ignored dimension to this issue is a kind of nasty feedback loop, and its negative consequences are far more insidious than most people realize.
I believe anime production has come to genuinely depend on that massive set of unspecific, universal symbols, ultimately resulting in an outright inability to draw certain subjects in a convincing or compelling way. Let’s go back to the tension between symbol and shorthand. While sakuga culture serves to highlight the work of exceptional artists within the industry, the scaffolding of animators working to support them is equally important. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The truth is that idiosyncrasy and learnedness are not necessarily default dispositions for most of the industry’s workforce and that for them, as opposed to those who might be predisposed to pushing boundaries with their craft, articulating character designs on screen absolutely hinges on picking them apart as mere symbols. When your work is about getting things done, you don’t always have the luxury of “meaningful interpretation”... Sometimes your job is just to trace the settei, approximate how something would look based on vibes, and carry on.
The industry thus absolutely benefits from a universal language of symbols. Animators do not necessarily have to learn entirely new design conventions for every single show, nor do they have to figure out how to get them to move on screen. Protag-kun’s hair will look and move the same in every show he’s in, his love interest’s short skirt will flutter the same it always has, and the questionable dimensionality of both their noses will never be questioned. You’re not working on The Tale of Princess Kaguya, where you would have had to learn the ins and outs of Osamu Tanabe’s stylings over many years. You’re not working on Ping Pong with industry legends and visionaries on the monumental task of translating Taiyo Matsumoto’s distinctive aesthetic on screen. Relax, everything is the same as it’s always been. Of course, unless you’re working on JoJo, which means you’re fucked.
The inevitable problem is that these symbols, due to demographic factors and project selection, seldom put diverse types at the forefront. Protag-kun and his squadron of love interests are all muscle memory at this point, so even the most absent-minded attempt at drawing them turns out alright to untrained eyes. Things are the same as they’ve always been! On the other hand, certain archetypes like burly men, older people (meaning past their 20s), fat people, etc. all suffer in their depictions. The reveal of the character designs for the anime adaptation of Futari Solo Camp helped me articulate these feelings. These are both mediocre drawings, but Shizuku’s “survives” in a way Gen doesn’t. He’s not the most common or prominent type whose symbols have been endlessly disseminated in the industry to the point of automation. Shizuku's round, soft features read perfectly well, meanwhile Gen’s facial hair, his rugged cheekbones, his under eye wrinkles, his eyebrows, and even his nose on the full body model are all drawn as a noisy mess of confused lines. The artist has no issue conveying Shizuku’s large chest using a few lines as signifiers, but when it comes to Gen’s (I’d say equally!) developed pectorals, there’s a sense of flatness. The pictures are otherwise equal in execution: inarticulate folds, dodgy anatomy (I think his wrist is broken?), strange proportions… But Shizuku’s appearance can rely on an accessible set of symbols in a way Gen’s simply can’t.
Character visuals of Shizuku and Gen from Futari Solo Camp
Look across the industry at large, this issue is there. Muscular bodies are anatomical abominations, fat characters are drawn without any studied sense of gesture, wrinkles might as well be tattoos. That’s to say nothing about the depiction of other races, especially when their designs emphasize their ethnic features compared to everyone else: Mika from Lycoris Recoil, I am so sorry the show couldn’t do you justice half the time.
I don’t really have a didactic conclusion to these ramblings. It’s really damned if you do, damned if you don’t. There are probably better places to read about ways the industry could change things for the better… I obviously would rather see attempts at unique design work more often, but I sometimes question how much my desire for novelty can outweigh my need to see things done well. In any case, I’ll try to keep cheering on even the less successful attempts. The universe will ultimately reward me for my patience.
When it comes to JoJo though, to tie things together, there’s one elephant in the room left unaddressed: the 1993 OVA, which from the cursory glance I’ve given it seems to offer a much more compelling vision of the series. It’s perhaps unfair to compare the current TV adaptation to an OVA that featured many industry legends proper, but the lavish animation isn’t really what I’m getting at. For reasons I won’t bother to investigate (perhaps this reflects the state of the source material at the time it was made) there’s a much more dramatically grounded approach. The colors are anything but garish, there’s intentionality to the lighting and general staging, the rendering uses the hatching and inky black shading very strategically and tastefully, resulting in beautifully articulated drawings. It’s hard to believe this is an adaptation of the same series! I guess it’s entirely possible that the comic at that point simply handed them this aesthetic on a platter, and that all they had to do was plastering it on screen. Or perhaps the endless appeal on display is a result of meaningful interpretation of the material, adapting it in a way that better reflects the strengths of the team! I guess I’ll never know, because I’m not really interested in finding out.
I do believe however that somewhere out there, in an alternate dimension, there’s a version of the JoJo TV series that manages to properly convey and speak to the worlds of art and fashion that inspired it. Walk cycles that read like a model’s strut on a catwalk, color design full of beautiful and harmonious jewel tones, art direction that reflects a world of marble and brocade… what if anime was always that good?
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