Like the willpower it’s taking to not go and be like make my ears into bling cheese is not to be underestimated

I wanna make another appointment for more piercings but I’m trying to resist

This is not coming from a luddite studio or anything either - if anything KyoAni is ahead of the pack when it comes to certain digital tasks, both in execution & workflow. They are clearly drawing some lines though, to the point where they could end up being the last bastion of 100% paper animation

So the handy technological advance, be it CGi, be it whatever else, has actually narrowed what can be expressed through traditional animation. It's not 100% a fault of its own, but that *does* end up being the reality in the industry, so it makes sense for someone like Ishihara to have these worries

The example he uses is 2D trains, though the obvious one is 2D mecha: used to be a pillar of anime, but with the CG alternative & increasingly fewer people drawing them by hand (plus mentorship in the industry falling off) you quickly reach the stage where no one can really animate them anymore

Ishihara didn't even pass moral judgment - but after emphasizing that KyoAni exists as means to pass down knowledge to new generations (demonstrable by the fact that their school precedes their own anime), he's coherent in his worry about "handy" advances that end up narrowing what can be expressed