While this form of animation dates back to video games with Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast and Fear Effect on the original PlayStation, it has been successful in the video game genre for its own reasons, especially with Okami and Breath of the Wild. In the world of anime, Berserk has gotten a negative reception. It’s going to be hard to plead with fans to cut it some slack, but we can’t deny that the techniques are still in its infancy. Every form of special effects in its first stages aren’t going to age well, which is the unfortunate reality with CG. When you look at when CG slowly became the norm from the 1990s, you can understand how its largely changed these past 25 years. Take for example, look at how a dog is animated in the first Toy Story movie, and how a dog is animated in the fourth installment to get a general idea of how much it has evolved.

Not only that, when you look at Reptile from the first Mortal Kombat movie or the Megazord in the 1995 Power Rangers movie, they’re undeniably a laughing stock, but they’re products of their time. Berserk unfortunately represents that respective stage in regards to cel-shading techniques in anime. Considering that a new anime was 20 years in the waiting and with its on-going manga being excellently received, we sympathize with long-time Berserk fans as to why they don’t want their beloved series used as a guinea pig for such techniques that had yet to advance. If CG can advance, then so can cel-shading!

As a matter of fact, cel-shading has been slowly advancing in the last few years. Granted it still has some things to work on, but it’s all a matter of knowing your craft and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t work. Unfortunately, that’s how life, business, and art all work. It’s all a matter of just keep on trying. With 2019 releases such as Ultraman and Kengan Ashura, while they do have their respective flaws (what form of art doesn’t?), it does demonstrate how the techniques have progressively evolved in a short amount of time.

When you look at Ultraman, it’s all about proper framing, lighting and scaling, which is very true with film as a whole. Look at the original Jurassic Park movie and the latest installment, Fallen World. When you compare both films, the original film knew how to properly frame and pan to convey the scale and despite technology evolving, this technique unfortunately went out of practice due to the ratios of how the movies are filmed in.

When you look at the 2016 Berserk series, the colors of the skin and clothing were way too bright, and didn’t reflect the shadowing and dimmer lighting, which is what the original manga does a great job of using with its heavy inking. Plus, how action sequences were framed and panned by being way too close and animated from a bottom perspective further contributed to why it has been criticized. When you get to Ultraman and Kengan Ashura, it effectively uses scale, range, and lighting to make its cel-shading look a bit better. With Ultraman, it knows how to use proper range and scale to utilize its style while Kengan Ashura excellently knows how to use light and shadowing.

In some instances, it depends on the character design and style to make a certain art form work. Berserk’s rough foundation isn’t easy to transition into cel-shading because on how the original manga relies heavily on inking and pure detailed drawings. When it comes to something with simpler and more generic art and designs such as Kouya Kotobuki no Hikoutai, it’s much easier to apply that style with the right lighting and detail, which isn’t as demanding as Berserk’s.