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Any fans of Japanese writer Nisio Isin will know about his two most successful works so far, which have been turned into anime: Bakemonogatari and Katanagatari. The former aired in Japan last year, while the latter came out this year and is being released one episode per month. Few people can argue that Bakemonogatari had some impressive animation that fit the story extremely well, but Katanagatari seems to have taken a different path.

After watching the first episode of Katanagatari, many people appear to be impressed with the bright colours and smooth animation. While I do admit that the animation flowed very well, I found the characters to be a bit too simplistic. Usually, when an animation company is trying to impress people, they add in as many lines and shades of colours as possible. That’s certainly not the case with White Fox, the company producing Katanagatari.

As you can see from the picture above, most pieces of clothing are a single solid colour. Even the girl’s hair only looks to have 2 or 3 colours in it. That’s not very much when you consider that some anime characters have 5 or 6 different shades of a colour in their hair. What I think makes the characters stand out though is the fact that they use outrageously coloured clothing. Who would really wear black boots with purple socks and a torn pink skirt?

The next major difference between the animation in Katanagatari and other anime is in the eyes. In this picture, the top pair of eyes is from Katanagatari, while the bottom pair are from AIR. There’s obviously very few details in the Katanagatari eyes; the lower eyelashes aren’t even drawn in. Personally, I think that the eyes in Katanagatari resemble those of characters in western cartoons rather than anime.

Here we have a comparison of hairstyles from K-ON (left) and Katanagatari (right). While Katanagatari once again has used some outrageous colours, what I wanted to point out is the detail put into the hair. On the left you can see that the hair is split into bangs and a few small strands. On the right, the hair is basically a big lump of green above the face with some pink spots in it (what is that anyways?).

My main point is that it seems like White Fox is trying to impress Katanagatari fans by showing them bright, colourful anime characters that don’t really have much detail to them. It certainly gives anime fans a break from all the long, wavy strands of hair and deep eyes that almost define Kyoani’s work, as well as the current bombardment of moe-blob anime. Whether or not people will still be impressed with just bright colours further into the series remains to be seen.