For the past decade or so, moe has dominated. Moe designs seek to create a feeling of attachment with the audience, eliciting desires to protect a character. Moe character designs achieve this through various techniques, chief of which are the eyes. Moe eyes are large and dominate most of a character’s face. Eyes are the most expressive part of the human face. People connect with each other through connecting gazes. Considering this, it makes sense that moe designs aimed at maximizing character expressiveness and audience connection through exaggerated eyes. But I’ve noticed a gradual trend away from this style of character design. Eyes have grown smaller, more naturalistic over recent years. The details of eyes have also increased. These new trending eye designs remain larger, especially for female characters, than true naturalism allows. Anime retains its visual language, after all. Eyes have reduced in size, especially with during the summer 2024 season, moving toward early 2000s sizes, but these eye designs have more complexity. Of course, many past anime have featured complex eye designs, but they were standout titles compared what appears to be an emerging trend in character designs.
Let’s start with Lawrence’s eyes from the remake of Spice of Wolf, which I’ve been enjoying as an old Spice and Wolf fan by-the-way. Lawrence represents typical male eye design. Most male characters, especially older or more experienced characters, retain the naturalistic eye designs that trace all the way back to anime from the 1970s. Spice and Wolf aims at a softer storybook style than most anime. The designs match Jyuu Ayakura’s soft illustrations from the light novels. Because of this, colors blend softly into each other and lean toward earth tones. Lawrence’s eyes represent the simpler designs which have dominated most anime. Lawrence’s eye design features 6 swatches, all analogous colors. Analogous colors are colors that sit alongside each other on the color wheel. Complementary colors sit opposite each other. Complementary colors enhance the brightness of each other while analogous colors blend each other. In these color breakdowns, I use a neutral gray background so you can see the true color swatch. Colors influence each other, changing our perception of their brightness. For example, with Lawrence’s eyes, the highlight color on his iris is the same color as the “whites” of his eyes, which is a color closer to his skin tone than to white. The reflected color on the bottom section of his iris is actually a fairly dark grey. Although his eyes are predominately grey, they take on a slight slate-blue color because the greys lean ever-so-slightly to the blue side, by only 2 or 3 points of value when you sample the colors. But this slight blue tint is enhanced by this skin tone, which is ever-so-slightly complementary thanks to how it leans a few points toward red. This helps create the soft, storybook feel. Most anime design their eyes similar to Lawrence’s, only with distinct boundaries in their color swatches. Most don’t have many colors.
The emerging eye trend introduces only a few more colors but adds more details in the irises and lashes. Take 2B from Nier: Automata. With this scene, her eye color retains the same analogous design as Lawrence’s, but the colors have a wider variation. She has 3 more colors, and because this scene is a bit closer than Lawrence’s close up, 2B’s eye design features more details to her lashes and eyelids. Her eyes are even more naturalistic than Lawrence’s, which is an interesting and subtle commentary on her character because 2B is an android while Lawrence and other exaggerated anime characters are humans in their stories. The darkest color in 2B’s eyes is a shade of blue that’s quite far from black, but the color appears dark because of the lighter shift of the other colors. It’s a good example of how colors depend on what’s around them. 2B’s eye design uses two layers of reflected light along the bottom of the iris to hint at the muscle details of her iris. Not all anime, even with extreme close ups, will suggest these tiny fibers. You also see how her thick lashes cast a shadow over her eye, especially over the whites (which are a light grey). 2B’s eye design stands out because of its naturalism rather than its complexity. Her eye designs, when you get to see them, show how characters don’t need exaggerated moe eyes to convey emotion. As eyes get more complex, you will see more variation in detail as the camera pans in and out across scenes. Consistency stands as an advantage with simplified eyes. Simplified eyes can look the same regardless of the character’s distance to the camera. Complex eyes have to be drawn in an increasingly simplified manner as the character’s distance to the camera increases. This can, if animators aren’t careful, lead to eyes looking strange or off. Characters may no longer look like themselves in the most extreme cases. Animators get around this, and in the process save in their animation budget, by removing the eyes from characters, using shadows, or hiding eyes under hair, or in the case of Nier, using blindfolds. The eye-removal technique can be jarring when eyes are otherwise prominent and well-details, such in Days with My Step Sister and Shoshimin.
Shoshimin’s designs are simpler than Days and Nier but they offer interesting color choices. In this scene with Kobato, you will find around 9 colors, the same number as 2B. Kobato’s bottom iris is emphasized by an ochre yellow instead of an analogous blue. The reflected light over this ochre and the blue of his upper iris lends a feeling of dampness and glossiness to his eye. The ochre, in other words, is a part of his iris design rather than a function of reflected light. The female protagonist of the story, Osanai, has a similar iris feature.
In this image, her eyes are tinted by the sunglasses she wears, which shifts the normal colors of her irises. The animator side of me nerded out as I watched this episode. Small things like this don’t often appear in anime. Most of the time, anime uses clear lenses so eye colors don’t have to shift. While Shoshimin’s eye designs aren’t as naturalistic as 2B’s and fall into the more-normal, non-moe eye designs, the use of color lends to their expressiveness and interest.
In a similar way, Masaki from Mayonaka Punch sports interesting color designs. Her eyes are predominately grey, but this allows the animators to set interesting colors against her eyes. In this still, notice the teal on her lower iris and the purple accent under the shadow of her upper eyelid. These suggest a complexity to her eyes, because of the contrasting colors, without needing to suggest iris-muscles like 2B’s eyes use. These slight-of-hand choices using color adds to a character’s uniqueness and expressiveness without increasing animation complexity.
And then you get Days with My Step Sister. The title initially made me think this was just another trashy rom-com. It certainly is a rom-com, but surprisingly without the typical anime trashiness. It also has surprising cinematography and combines some of Spice and Wolf’s shading softness with complex eye designs. The trade off for this level of detail and framing and background design (which are well done) are scenes with obvious animation degradation, such as distance shots with characters having no eyes, and some stiff animations. But when the animators lavish their frames, it rivals film releases.
Take Akiko for instance. She’s the college-age coworker from the lead guy, Yuta. Yuta often turns to her for friendly guidance on how to handle his new step-sister Saki. Akiko may be a supporting character, but her eye design stands out in this close up. She has 10 colors compared to 2B’s 9 colors, but the colors are used to suggest a her iris complexity. The lower section of her eyes features an arc sliced by the dark green of the upper section of her iris. This lends a feeling of a two-circle iris that you can see in some people’s eyes. The same coloring technique used for Kobato’s iris in Shoshimin appears within the shadow of Akiko’s upper eyelid. Using an ochre has a shadow color blend with the yellow-brown of her eyelashes, but still remains an interesting choice. It creates a counterbalance to the light green-blue of her lower iris. There’s also a hint of pink, about the same tone as her tongue, on the upper part of her pupil. This pink along with the ochre, suggests sunlight (the scene takes place outside on a sunny day) while also serving to underline sophistication.
Finally, we have Saki. Her iris design follows the same pattern as Akiko, but the purples, reds, and blues give her eye designs even more detail. The use of blue to offset the light purples of her lower lid helps her eyes appear more reflective. The flecks of reds suggest more variability with her irises. This is an interesting observation and choice by the animators. Some people have flecks of complementary colors in their irises that can only been seen when up close, such as with these two scenes. The use of color suggests detail. Saki and Akiko’s eyes aren’t as detailed on the whole as 2B’s for example, but their use of color remains more complex than 2B’s. Animators have to retain and morph the shapes of irises as the character emotes and moves without distorting the shape too much. The more detailed a frame, the more that frame costs in time and in budget. And this is why Days will save these detailed frames for important story beats and “cut corners” in noticeable ways. Budget has to be conserved for what matters.
I’m uncertain if this is a new trend in complex eye designs or just a stylistic blip, and I’m uncertain if the trend away from moe-designs will continue. I welcome the change. More variety in character design and expressiveness enriches anime as a medium. Increased character complexity and increased quality of animation helps elevate anime as a medium. This will come at a cost, as I’ve pointed out. Details and animation quality can’t be sustained. Simplified character designs aren’t wrong. In fact, they are better for certain types of stories. I’ve been rewatching Kill la Kill and the simplified designs lend to great expressiveness and action-scenes. But even Kill la Kill has to cut back on quality among scenes in order to conserve its frame budget for major moments. Anime is at its best when it offers a wide variety of stories and styles. Not everything needs to be moe, but moe should certainly still exist. Not ever character needs to have complex, naturalistic eye designs. There’s a place for cartoony, simplified designs like Kill la Kill has. Character designs should serve the story and not work against the story. I hope anime will continue to shift toward naturalistic designs while allowing moe and other design trends to remain. Some 1970-1980 character designs, with modern techniques, would lend themselves well to many stories. Time will tell if anime will trend toward complex eye designs and naturalistic character designs.
