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Color and Tone: How “Slice-of-Life” was Constructed

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Color and Tone: How “Slice-of-Life” was Constructed

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Yucheng Zhang

A slice-of-life love comedy, Too Many Losing Heroines(Short as "Makeine") was positively reviewed as "cinematic" and "youthful", and has led to shared nostalgia among viewers for their high school years. One particular aspect, the choice of colors and lightings, helped create such immersiveness.

Early cinema and anime share common ground in how color is "applied" rather than "reproduced"¹. For Makeine, cool and desaturated colors like buff yellow, olive-drab green, and slate blue were applied to daily scenes. A neutral tone, it minimizes the "fascination and otherworldliness" caused by brighter colors². A closer examination shows scenes tinged with shades of green, often symbolizing vitality and youth in mainstream culture. This slight manipulation to the unobtrusive background "support[ed] the mood" while remaining subordinate to narration³.

As Belton suggests, color alone doesn't instill realism. It is necessary to duplicate the "monochromatic range" of black-and-white films⁴. Makeine's lighting helps provide such a wide array of tones and shades. A natural light source can be identified coming from outside the window, in contrast with the picture on the right which was lit by an omnipresent light. This difference was further revealed once color was deprived. We see in Makeine intense brightness where light was directly shone, intense darkness where it's not, and a gradual descent to darker shades from the window to the foregrounds. It relied less on color than the other scene does, as the black-white contrast and gradient of shadows was sufficient to make us perceive depth and texture. This clear contrast between the two colorless versions illustrates how "the variety of tones and shading" plays a crucial role in making "applied color" convincing⁵.

Makeine was reserved in colors but rich in shades, and such arrangements served its genre well. It feels true to say that "slice of life" here isn't just a classification, but a compliment: audiences were truly convinced to believe what they saw from these corridors, classrooms, and trees was indeed a slice of a vibrant, idyllic, and real high school life.

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Artifact 1.1 Three background scenes from the anime Too Many Losing Heroines (2024, Directed by Shotaro Kitamura).

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Artifact 1.2 Two sets of background scenes comparison. (Left being Too Many Losing Heroines and right being an anime with similar genre and was aired in the same season)

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1. Tom Gunning et al., “Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema,” Amsterdam University Press, March 6, 2015, https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089646576/fantasia-of-color-in-early-cinema, 18.

2. Gunning, 20.

3. Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press ; Combined Academic distributor, 2008), 42.

4. Higgins, 36.

5. Gunning, 22.

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Movement: “Freed From the Setting” in a Literal Sense

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Movement: “Freed From the Setting” in a Literal Sense

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Yucheng Zhang

How Princess Mononoke was Born documented the complete production of this masterpiece from Studio Ghibli, and this excerpt features the production process of 3 scenes. All 3 of them focused on a technique called "Multi Contact Filming". Characters, backgrounds, foregrounds were drawn on different layers of celluloids, and then superimposed onto each other. For each frame, character cels were swapped, while the non-character cels(background/foreground) remain a long continuous painting that moves at different speeds.

This procedure echoes the concept of "animetic interval" proposed by Tom Lamarre¹. The physically layered cells, although not sensed when stationary, still produced an "invisible effect of depth"². This "depth" was then visualized when the layers started moving separately³. In the 1st scene portrayed, the deer-riding character was jumping from left to right, while the background scene moves from down to up. The overall different movement tendency plus the detailed movements from the characters' limbs(generalized by Lamarre as "legs and arms are pumping")⁴ helped the audience identify the foreground and the background.

A more elaborate example would be the 2nd scene. The cels "add up to as many as 7 sheets", and "move[s] at 4.5: 4.0: 2.5: 1.0 mm per frame." Different distances per frame made the foregrounds, mid-grounds, and backgrounds move at different speeds. The sheer amount of layers creates motion parallax, a closer step to our daily perceptions. The 3rd scene, shot with the background rotating instead of moving horizontally, was essentially the same process.

It's fascinating how such effect corresponds Metz's comment that motion "free [objects] from their settings."5 Metz used it as a rhetorical phrase to describe movement in cinema: We were bound to perceive the characters and the background as separate entities once they exhibit different types of movement, thus it "imparts corporeality to objects"⁶. However, in the case of animation, "free from...settings" is not just rhetorical, but literal: layers of figures and grounds are inherently separated, thus allowing techniques that highlight the figure-ground relationship to be innovated. This tradition of layering carried on after digitalization. What initially was created for convenience proved to instill life into fictional drawings.

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Artifact 2 Excerpt from the documentary How Princess Mononoke Was Born(2001).

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1. Thomas LaMarre, The Anime Machine a Media Theory of Animation Thomas Lamarre (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009), 18.

2. LaMarre, 17.

3. LaMarre, 18.

4. LaMarre, 19.

5. Christian Metz, “Film Language,” University of Chicago Press, December 1, 1990, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3645302.html, 7.

6. Metz, 7.

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Limitations of animation: How realism was strengthened while confined.

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Limitations of animation: How realism was strengthened while confined.

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Yucheng Zhang

Although both comparisons involve live-action and animation, the animation of One Piece was more convincing than the live-action, whereas the live-footage of Waltz with Bashir was more convincing than the animation. Together they demonstrate how animation intensifies reality while confining it inside the screen.

In his article, Metz claims a theater cannot give "a convincing duplication of life" because it reminds us of our daily life¹. It is hard to imagine the character in a fictional world when they share the same space with us. Metz's analysis ends here, but the same claim can be made between cinema and animation.

Compared to the animated version, the live-action version of One Piece is "real" for faithfully re-producing a human through camera, but "unreal" for extending the human body into impossible shapes. The psychological inclination of seeing it as real contradicts with the rational perception that his movement is not real², whereas this was resolved by matching the movement with a less humane figure. Animation thus takes a further step to segregate the reality we exist in and the reality constructed.

However, since it cannot bring us the psychological inclination provided by the camera, animation is always confined inside the screen: We never expect any of it to be real on the psychological level³. This is why Waltz with Bashir was so impactful on its use of real footage. The juxtaposition of animation and documentary creates for us a similar psychological state as the main character's. Rationally we knew a massacre happened, yet the animation can't help us to establish a sense that it really exists. As he retrieves his memory, tension builds up, and finally we are given the real massacre footage.The rational belief and the psychological inclination was unified for the first time in 90 minutes. It was a realization for us and the character that something has really happened in the same world we live in. As pleased as we are fulfilling our fantasy through animation, it is the real footage that helps us see the world as it is. It is the real footage that breaks the screen.

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Artifact 3.1 Comparison between still images from One Piece(Animated) and One Piece(Live-Action).

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Artifact 3.2 Comparison between still images of animated scene and real footage from Waltz with Bashir (Directed by Ari Folman, 2008)

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1. Christian Metz, “Film Language,” University of Chicago Press, December 1, 1990, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3645302.html, 10.

2. André Bazin and Timothy Barnard, What Is Cinema? (Montreal, Quebec: Caboose, 2009), 6.

3. Bazin, 6.

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Whether it is crying out in disbelief at the end of Sairat or cheering for an attempted scoring in NBA Street, whether large or small in magnitude, whether collective or individual, it is indisputable that we have shown emotional sustenance towards moving image. Something inside must allow us to impose our emotions on them. Something must "exist", but what? By what means was realism conveyed through moving images?

Many theorists tried to solve the mystery of moving images. Bazin delves into the distinctive difference between a painted picture and a camera. He suggested that the mechanical replicating process of natural light transferred onto the film allows no human intervention, thus conveying a psychological inclination to believe in its reality(1). Metz attributed the sense of realism to "movement" and "segregation of space". "Movement" can only be perceived by the eyes. It remains the same, either on screen or in reality, thus blurring their boundaries(2). "Segregation of space" describes how the medium of film screen, unlike theater, doesn't impose upon us how the fictional events were played by non-fictional, fleshed out actors(3). Although not as a main point of concern, elements conveying realism were also mentioned in essays about colors: Gunning mentioned how bright colors creates a feeling of "otherworldliness"(4), contrasting with reality. Claims of realism were well-constructed for moving images filmed in camera, but would such claims still be valid once we take into consideration animation and games?

Animation stands common ground with cinema in how movements were created by a succession of frames. It also includes similar sound processes like dubbing and foley-ing. However, there’s no longer a psychological reassurance as suggested by Bazin(5). The scenes themselves are represented through color and brushstroke. They are artificial and pre-constructed. Cameras were only used for the sake of dissemination and convenience, and early animation devices like Phenakistoscope proved its unnecessity in the actual creative process. Metz’s theory raised even more questions about the exact position of animation, as it was inevitably simplified and exaggerated through the translation from reality. Is it something more “segregated” in space, or something less realistic in its appearance? Does its divergence from reality lessen the effort to “invest them with…fiction”, or does such divergence deprive the ability of treating them as real objects(6)?

Video games are also special kind of media because, unlike movies or TV shows, where you just watch things happen in a pre-set narrative, video games let you make the decisions. This makes them feel real in a very different way. Realism in video games doesn’t only come from high-quality graphics or sounds, but comes from what you do in the game and how you interact with it. According to Meskin and Robson, you are not just playing, you are performing (7). Games can feel real because they let you create your own highlights like a main character, things that can feel like real-life memories. Some games even become spaces where players perform drama and express themselves in creative ways. Video games feel real because they give you the power, handing you the controller. Even if the world is fake, your feelings and actions are real. That’s why games can be powerful and meaningful, even though they’re played on a screen.

As the medium of moving image changes, so many questions arise that it must be re-examined what parts of the theories still stand, what doesn’t, and what requires modifications. This exhibition will show examples of how one or more concepts mentioned in past theory——Sound, Color, Movement, Segregation of space, etc.——were utilized in anime and video games, constructing “reality” in the realm outside the camera's frame.

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‌Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) is a first-person shooting game released in 2023 by Valve Corporation, continuing as an update and legacy of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. CS2 has two opposing teams: Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists, and includes actions like bomb defusals and intense gunfights. The game is not only known for its high-quality graphics and awesome gun modeling, but how players interact with each other. This matches what Aaron Meskin and Jon Robson talk about in their article, where they explain how video games feel realistic through player choices and performance¹. In CS2, there is no fixed story; players don’t just follow a script, they make their own choices in the moment, like deciding when to throw a flashbang or when to rush and fire their shots. An emergent story can develop during each match at any moment, maybe a 0.1-second defusal, or an impossible 1v5. These moments are remembered and shared between players in real life or on social media, making the game feel more realistic. Meskin and Robson also talk about how the player's game can be judged like a performance². A skilled player who fluidly uses their utilities and can constantly hit head shots is often praised for their highlight-level gameplay. The two authors believe that these unscripted highlights are a big part of what makes video games special. CS2 is also part of a bigger world where people watch professional tournaments and stream games online. There is also a functioning market for skins in the game. The price can range from a couple of cents to millions of dollars. In a nutshell, the skill and shared experiences in CS2 redefine what it means for a game to be realistic.

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Still image of CS2 Marketcap (Bitskins)

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Gameplay of Counter-Strike 2 (jatupto, produced by Valve Corporation)

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Still image from Counter-Strike 2 (Valve Corporation)

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NBA 2K12 is a basketball video game created by Visual Concepts and published by 2K Sports, released in 2011 as part of the NBA 2K series. The game allows players to control real NBA teams and athletes and play in many game modes. The game looks very realistic, with amazing graphics and smooth cut-scenes that match what real NBA games feel like, while controlling the game fully, including things like player movement, bot difficulty, game length, and shot accuracy. Commentary by professional broadcasters like Kevin Harlan and Steve Kerr also makes the game feel like you're watching a real basketball game on TV. According to Baerg (2011), the player rating system can affect how people think about athletes³. In NBA 2K12, these ratings show players’ athleticism and skill, influencing how people play the game. The article also talks about how games like this come out every year with small changes, a process called “planned obsolescence”⁴. This means that in modern times, older versions like NBA 2K12 feel outdated, and players want the newest one, which is 2K25 now. The game is also called an “action simulation”⁵ when it mixes realistic stats with fast gameplay. The MyPlayer mode allows players to create a character and take them through a whole basketball career, starting from a rookie, which helps people feel more connected to the game and their character. In a nutshell, NBA 2K12 uses real voices, stats, stories, and frequent updates to construct a sense of realism and make players feel like they’re truly part of the NBA.

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Intro from NBA 2K12 (chipnabisco, produced by Visual Concepts Entertainment Studios)

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Still image from NBA 2K12 (Visual Concepts Entertainment Studios)

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Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about two actors, Pinny Gryllis and Sam Crane, who were out of work during the COVID-19 lockdown, wanting to keep performing. They decided to put on a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet inside the video game Grand Theft Auto V. This game is known for action and crime, not theater. This unexpected fusion of performance and video game creates a weird sense of realism that aligns with the following article in detail. In summary, Performance in Video Games stated that performance in video games isn’t just about winning, but also about role-playing and social interaction⁶. In Grand Theft Hamlet, the actors aren’t just playing a game; they are performing in it. They turned the violent digital world into a stage for drama. The article also talks about something called the “magic circle"⁷, a space where the normal rules don’t apply and new rules take over. In this case, the game world becomes a stage for Shakespeare, not for the usual violence and crime. The film also shows “mixed reality”⁸, where digital and real-life performances mix. The actors are inside the game, but their voices and feelings are completely real. Role-playing⁹, another key concept from the article, is when the actors assume dual roles as Shakespearean characters and as themselves, which makes the performance feel more personal, even though it is in a virtual world. Overall, Grand Theft Hamlet shows how video games can be used for more than just fun, but also for storytelling. By acting out Hamlet inside a game world, the actors prove that even a game like Grand Theft Auto V can feel real when used correctly.

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Trailer of Grand Theft Hamlet (Rotten Tomatoes Indie, produced by (Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls）

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Still image from Grand Theft Hamlet (Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls)

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(1) Meskin, Aaron, and Jon Robson. “Videogames and the Moving Image.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 64, no. 254 (4) (2010): 547–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23960987.

(2) Meskin and Robson, 556.

(3) Baerg, Andrew. “Sports.” In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 267–274. New York: Routledge, 2014.

(4) Baerg, 271.

(5) Baerg, 268.

(6) ‌Nitsche, Michael. “Performance.” In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 388–395. New York: Routledge, 2014.

(7) Nitsche,392.

(8)Nitsche,393.

(9) Nitsche,391.

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1. André Bazin and Timothy Barnard, What Is Cinema? (Montreal, Quebec: Caboose, 2009), 6.

2. Christian Metz, “Film Language,” University of Chicago Press, December 1, 1990, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3645302.html, 7-9.

3. Metz, 9-11.

4. Tom Gunning et al., “Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema,” Amsterdam University Press, March 6, 2015, https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789089646576/fantasia-of-color-in-early-cinema, 20.

5. Bazin, 6

6. Metz, 10.

7.Meskin, Aaron, and Jon Robson. “Videogames and the Moving Image.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 64, no. 254 (4) (2010), http://www.jstor.org/stable/23960987, 556.