Eden of the East 01: I picked up a prince
I was recommended this by Aeana after her and Mumei made fun of my list of can'ts and won'ts when it comes to taking anime recommendations.
Eden of the East huh? That's an interesting title in clearly meets your particular requirements. I hadn't actually considered it as a title to recommend because, even though I personally enjoyed the TV series which you have just started I wasn't a fan of the movies which brought the story to a close.
Animation
In some anime that I've seen characters have, uh, I don't know what to call it--when they have an emotional reaction, there's like unusual doodles. Like if they get angry, there's squiggly lines floating in the air. Or they blush in a very heavy way. Or their eyes get super screwed up. Floating teardrops. Etc. I'm sure you guys know it. It's incorporated here, sparingly, but I really don't like it as an animation flourish.
There's not really a set name for that particular approach to having characters display their emotions. Some people just call it 'cartoony' or 'exaggerated', although I suppose 'deformed character designs' would cover it as well. It's certainly not something you tend to see in the works with realistic character designs produced by Production I.G. (the animation studio behind the series) because of the obvious disconnect between realism and exaggeration.
I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that it's used sparingly throughout the show but it does crop up from time to time in an attempt to 'soften' the characters somewhat. I believe the creators were trying their hardest to make a work that appealed to both a male and female audience (in the simplest terms) and though they'd bring in the boys with the 'political stuff' and they could please the girls with a 'romance angle'. Such deformed facial expressions are relatively common in manga and anime aimed at a female audience although it certainly exists in a wide variety of works.[/QUOTE]
Although I like the designs and drawings, the animation is fairly cheap and seems to have relatively few frames. I think my expectations here are probably unfair coming from mostly having seen film anime which have a higher budget. I'd like to open up a random western pre-CG cartoon to see how the frame counts compare. Is there a name for styles that have fewer or more frames? How does this show compare to others?
Broadly speaking anime, especially television anime, has a low frame count. This was a model first set up by Osamu Tezuka with
Astro Boy in 1963 because he realised that they couldn't possibly hope to match the fluidity of Disney animation and so the best path forward would be to have very low frame counts, loop animations frequently etc etc. It's both a budget saving measure and a time saving measure because it takes a lot of time (and skilled animators) to create really fluid animation.
This approach is known as 'Limited Animation' and it's defined Anime ever since. A number of important animators devolped styles which allowed them to remain extremely expressive even with a low frame count. This form of creative animation also bred a wide variety of different styles within Japanese animation which is why a single episode of a TV series might contain a series which look wildly different to each other in terms of animation quality, character designs etc although how crazy that might get is down to the people in charge of making the series.
To get back to your original question,
Eden of the East looks about average for a TV series. The character animation isn't particularly good or particularly bad. There are certain studios such as KyoAni, Bones etc which tend to produce shows which look far better than
Eden of the East (although they aren't works which would interest you) and also a number of studios that produce worse looking titles. There are many other factors involved as well but this reply has already gone on too long.