A key point usually made when comparing Western animation to Anime , is a consistency of the animation quality. While western cartoons/animation generally relies more on "realistic" movements which resulted in a balance of fluidity throughout the entire animation ( which has been present even in the earliest of animation features such as Snow White), Anime , being produced by a relatively smaller studios compared to their western counterparts and having extremely tight budget and production time, uses cheats to be able to push out products effectively. This can range from anything from skipping frames, to having long scenes of dialog where only the character's mouth moves,...Unsurprisingly , this resulted in Anime, especially modern anime being branded as lazy , and looking terrible , with only a few exceptions from bigger studios with bigger budgets, and have been even poked fun at by anime and anime fans themselves.
oh god the horror !
However , there are certain points in time that the quality of scenes from anime just improve drastically , with extremely stylistic/ fluid movement , expressive and complex actions and elevated visual effects. This is called "Sakuga". Sakuga is what generally gives anime its flair when comparing to western animation , and usually is use to emphasise a certain aspect of the animation/story such as dramatic fight scenes, or an emotional situation .Sakuga is heavily presented in Anime openings and endings, to showcase the visual quality and encite execitement in the audience. Sakuga itself varies from the heavy realistic, slow yet expressive movement of Hiroyuki Okiura or Hayao Miyazaki, to surreal and exaggerated style of Shinji Hashimoto and Masaki Yawasa, or modern anime studios like Madhouse and Trigger who done works like One punch man and Kill la Kill
Little witch Academia ( studio Trigger )
examples of action-oriented sakuga
examples of more realism sakuga
Whichever style it goes for , sakuga drastically increase the visual interest of the anime they are in and usually determined , animation-wise , how good that anime is. Anime features that uses alot of sakuga such as Akira , Cowboy Bebop and works from studio Ghibli are widely praised for their artistic style and fluid animation and samething can be said for anime series that tries to follow along those line as well.
But of course, being of high-quality , sakuga is expensive and time-consuming to produce, and only big studio with high-budget and work force can produce theme. In an environment like the modern anime industries , where episodes are done while the series are airing , which create an extremely limited time frame and deadline, animation with a decent amount of sakuga are far in between , but those that do , are like the shining gem among the sand.
In general, from my personal view, its is every animator's goal to create good looking animations, an eye candy in everybody's view. However , the story of Sakuga highlights the reality of the industries, where economies comes into play and deadlines dominate the workflow. So the question is , do you sacrifice style and expressiveness for the consistency of animation quality like Western animation , or do you choose to go all out at the expense of overall quality. For me personally, as of right now , I'd be more incline to the latter, as I'm in the process of learning new techniques and I want to try out everything , but eventually , reality will change that no doubt.
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