Okay, so, here's the thing. Before I say anything, everyone should understand it's okay to like something but be able to acknowledge the issues with it.
Season 1/2 had great character designs. However, Toei, as we've all seen, does NOT have the budget to keep up those designs in an animated medium. They could hardly keep a consistent art style within the SAME episode. Episode 25, for example, was one of the VERY rare moments where they used a competent art director... for the first half of the episode. They clearly went back to outsourcing the second half. It was.. very underwhelming. They didn't use a good amount of budget on the LAST episode, which is what most studios tend to do. The last episode wasn't even the same art style as Yukie's! Toei really dropped the ball with what were good character designs. They didn't know what they were trying to do and it showed. And yes, it's true, Yukie's designs lack emotion most of the time, but I'm a sucker for really detailed designs. I really liked when they WERE animated nicely. (On a personal note, I dislike the soft blurry shading they went with. It made the designs look muddy at times. It would've looked nicer if they kept the shading sharp and crisp. I personally feel like any time a studio goes for soft shading, it makes everything look kind of cheap. This doesn't have anything to do with the character designs themselves, but I don't think it helped when an episode was animated poorly.)
As for season 3, I feel like they were on the right track with the character designs. Simplifying the designs helps make the animation process easier. Toei is not going to put a whole lot of budget into Sailor Moon and we know that by now. Going back to stock footage attacks was also a good move. It means instead of trying to choreograph whole scenes for attacks, they can just save that budget for the rest of the episode. If it was any other studio, going with choreographed attack scenes would be more likely, but Toei is a penny-pincher. Everyone has to accept that. Even in the lower budget episodes, the designs worked just fine, too. There was really only one episode I wasn't a fan of, and I think that was 11. That has more to do with the director than the designs though.
As for season 4.. we'll have to wait and see. I want to hope because they're movies that they'll put more budget into them, but I also feel like they're going the Digimon Tri route and going with a normal series budget and going to clip the episodes together to make a "movie".
Season 1/2 had great character designs. However, Toei, as we've all seen, does NOT have the budget to keep up those designs in an animated medium. They could hardly keep a consistent art style within the SAME episode. Episode 25, for example, was one of the VERY rare moments where they used a competent art director... for the first half of the episode. They clearly went back to outsourcing the second half. It was.. very underwhelming. They didn't use a good amount of budget on the LAST episode, which is what most studios tend to do. The last episode wasn't even the same art style as Yukie's! Toei really dropped the ball with what were good character designs. They didn't know what they were trying to do and it showed. And yes, it's true, Yukie's designs lack emotion most of the time, but I'm a sucker for really detailed designs. I really liked when they WERE animated nicely. (On a personal note, I dislike the soft blurry shading they went with. It made the designs look muddy at times. It would've looked nicer if they kept the shading sharp and crisp. I personally feel like any time a studio goes for soft shading, it makes everything look kind of cheap. This doesn't have anything to do with the character designs themselves, but I don't think it helped when an episode was animated poorly.)
As for season 3, I feel like they were on the right track with the character designs. Simplifying the designs helps make the animation process easier. Toei is not going to put a whole lot of budget into Sailor Moon and we know that by now. Going back to stock footage attacks was also a good move. It means instead of trying to choreograph whole scenes for attacks, they can just save that budget for the rest of the episode. If it was any other studio, going with choreographed attack scenes would be more likely, but Toei is a penny-pincher. Everyone has to accept that. Even in the lower budget episodes, the designs worked just fine, too. There was really only one episode I wasn't a fan of, and I think that was 11. That has more to do with the director than the designs though.
As for season 4.. we'll have to wait and see. I want to hope because they're movies that they'll put more budget into them, but I also feel like they're going the Digimon Tri route and going with a normal series budget and going to clip the episodes together to make a "movie".
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