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3D vs 2D in Anime
🕑 Added 2025-07-20 03:56:51 +0000 UTCHello!
Here's a rare public video so people can see what kind of things they're missing here on the Patreon! It's a short analysis and I hope supporters here enjoy this topic as much as I do!
Anyway, old folks like me who grew up with late 80s and 90s anime are probably fans of the technique known as "background animation." It's certainly a favourite of mine, and there are quite a few examples in the above Youtube video, but here are some more.
Hand drawn background animation, when done properly, looks absolutely fantastic and can often be the absolute visual high point of an anime. On the downside, though, it takes absolutely ages to do - even by animation terms! Normally it takes long enough to animate a character on top of a still, painted background. When you have to animate the background as well...
(↑ You're Under Arrest, 1994)
In the late 90s, studios like Gonzo (does anyone remember them?) started experimenting with 3D in anime. Gonzo had great acclaim in the videogame world for their at the time visually stunning 2D/3D hybrid anime cutscenes in titles like Luna: Silver Star Story (Sega Mega CD, 1996)
Gonzo started bringing 3D to anime with Blue Submarine Number 6 (1998) and Yukikaze (2002). I believe they hit it big with the very 3D-heavy Last Exile in 2003.
Macross, known worldwide for its beautifully hand animated dogfights, switched to fully 3D Valkyrie fighters in 2002, and things progressed over the years to where we are now, with hand drawn background animation replaced with 3D environments.
The upside to this is that it doesn't take anywhere near as much time to build a 3D environment and pan a camera through it, and you can indeed put out some ridiculously nice looking action scenes. Attack on Titan comes to mind. 
On the other hand, it looks 3D. Like, really blatantly 3D. And for those of us who want things to all looks seamlessly "anime style" (which will of course mean different things to different people), that's really off putting. I want all of the bricks in my animated wall to be drawn by hand, dammit! Seeing a 3D bump mapped fully textured moving building behind my 2D jumping guy kind of takes me out of it.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, people are experimenting with using rough 3D renders and drawing all the "anime bits" over the top. The 3D helps everything stay consistent and lets you easily set up your camera movements, and then hand-drawing all the details over the top means that the end result looks, well, hand drawn. I'm constantly trying to do this in my own work and hope to master it to a degree where it looks authentic.
This will of course take longer than just texturing the 3D background and rendering it out, but I think the results look much more authentic to that hand-drawn goodness. Hopefully more studios will start doing this (maybe they already are and I just haven't seen the results) and we'll see this kind of hybrid technique on big season-header shows like Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen.
And that's not even going into the topic of fully 3D anime..!
Anyway, post your thoughts and/or favourite moments of 3D in anime, and I'll be very interested to take a look.
Also lookout for a future video of "What Otaking's Watching This Anime Season".
-Paul
Comments
Oscar Baldwin Studio
Also, there's some good 2D animated ones in Porco Rosso
Oscar Baldwin Studio
It's not anime but I loved how the early Gorillaz videos mixed 3d backgrounds and 2d characters like in feel good inc. Particularly the shot where we pan around noodle playing guitar on the floating island in the sky.
Paul "OtaKing" Johnson
Indeed, yeah. Supposedly the new Demon Slayer movie that just came out looks fantastic, and I'm enjoying the animation on Dan Da Dan this season. But it just doesn't scratch that itch that the 80s-90s stuff did.
blargcoster
Ever since I figured out how much time and effort it takes to fully animate something that pans around a person (Like the second gif you posted), I had a much deeper appreciation for things like that. That includes the moving backgrounds and dynamic scenes. It always feels like the older anime was more about combining art and the story whereas a lot of the newer anime feels like it sidelines the animation... There are certainly a lot of exceptions to this, though.
