That’s a definite trend. Blame HD video. Circa 2000, computer production made traditional animation a lot easier in a lot of ways, but you could still only see it on 480p-ish CRTs. You could draw more frames, but that was a lot of work for fractions of a second. You could do better shading, but that was a lot of work for every frame. Visual quality needed immense budget increases to get much better.
But analog audio could be fucking incredible. Stereo, sure, but uncompressed, and a tiny fraction of a video signal’s bandwidth. Even VHS was just shy of CD quality. So anime from that era threw serious money at musicians and got some killer scores. Yoko Kanno alone nailed a dozen of them.
The economics of that shifted with high-def. Screens got larger and closer and massively more detailed, so individual drawings could do a lot more work. Couple that with CGI getting good enough to get away with (sometimes), and digital drawing tools getting waaay better, and this visual medium produced by hundreds of draw-ers loses sight of why sound matters. We went back to a musical score being background noise.
Honestly even live-action movies have suffered from this. See criticism of Marvel movies’ bland spec-work scores, where they pre-edit to some existing music and then tell Danny Elfman to copy that homework.
Which is kind of a shame. I’d love a smashcut of both series.
… small tangent: is it just me or was the music in Brotherhood waaaaay blander than in the first anime?
That’s a definite trend. Blame HD video. Circa 2000, computer production made traditional animation a lot easier in a lot of ways, but you could still only see it on 480p-ish CRTs. You could draw more frames, but that was a lot of work for fractions of a second. You could do better shading, but that was a lot of work for every frame. Visual quality needed immense budget increases to get much better.
But analog audio could be fucking incredible. Stereo, sure, but uncompressed, and a tiny fraction of a video signal’s bandwidth. Even VHS was just shy of CD quality. So anime from that era threw serious money at musicians and got some killer scores. Yoko Kanno alone nailed a dozen of them.
The economics of that shifted with high-def. Screens got larger and closer and massively more detailed, so individual drawings could do a lot more work. Couple that with CGI getting good enough to get away with (sometimes), and digital drawing tools getting waaay better, and this visual medium produced by hundreds of draw-ers loses sight of why sound matters. We went back to a musical score being background noise.
Honestly even live-action movies have suffered from this. See criticism of Marvel movies’ bland spec-work scores, where they pre-edit to some existing music and then tell Danny Elfman to copy that homework.