Answerman

Why Were Some Animation Techniques Banned?

Miroslav asks:

I have read one of your recent interviews with one of the animators of Dragon Ball Kai/Super. He said that they had had to redrawn many scenes because they had been drawn with techniques that are now prohibited to use, because they can be harmful for eyes. Is that really true that anime from early 90s and prior ones can damage your sight?

They can't damage your sight, but there's a (very) small chance that, if you have epilepsy, some of the animation effects might trigger a seizure.

This whole thing started back in December 1997. Pokémon was fairly new on Japanese TV, and was only on its 38th episode. That episode, "Electric Soldier Porygon," had Satoshi/Ash and Pikachu exploring the inside of a malfunctioning Pokéball transmitter machine, and at some point, Pikachu uses his lightning attack to blow up some virtual missiles that were coming their way. The explosion was animated with a digital red-blue strobe effect.

In a bizarre incident that the press referred to as "Pokémon Shock," nearly 700 kids were hospitalized with some sort of medical problem after watching the episode (although some were fine within a few minutes). A few were diagnosed with epilepsy. A giant media scandal ensued, and Pokémon was pulled off the air. Police and the Health Ministry conducted investigations, the show producers and key members of the anime industry met with doctors to try and figure out what happened exactly.

Four months later Pokémon came back to television. But alongside it were new rules that govern effects that can be used in anime:

• Flashing images with red cannot flash faster than 3 hertz (times per second).
• Flashing images without red cannot flash faster than 5 hertz
• Flashing images cannot last longer than two seconds total
• Tripes, whirls and concentric circles should not be the dominant element of a shot

These rules were written after an exhaustive study by Japanese researchers. An Italian study in 2000 later backed up these findings with the discovery that photosensitive people had an extreme brain response to flickering at high contrast ratios, especially at rates between 4 and 10 hertz. It's thought that these extreme brain impulses may have caused the seizures connected to the Pokémon episode.

These provisions were never legally enforced (although it's likely that without this game plan, the government probably would have done something). However, they were adopted industry-wide, and continue to guide how anime is created to this day.

Clearly something happened with that specific shot in that specific episode of Pokémon that didn't happen in other anime, but out of an abundance of caution, the rules do cover a lot of flashing effects that were previously fairly common in anime. Those effects haven't been used since. The old animation didn't appear to cause anyone any harm before, so they're allowed to air unaffected.

But as Dragon Ball Kai/Super are new iterations of old animation, they'd need to be retooled in order to fit the new guidelines.

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Anime News Network founder Justin Sevakis wrote Answerman between July 2013 and August 2019, and had over 20 years of experience in the anime business at the time. These days, he's the owner of the video production company MediaOCD, where he produces many anime Blu-rays. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.