Approaching the subject through both animation history and the phenomenology of perception, this video investigates the different ways two-dimensional animation renders eyebrows and eyes as visible through the hair or concealed behind it, and the visual effects each treatment produces. It was among the earlier Chinese-language video essays to focus closely on this question. The work was selected for the Eve Festival of Rags Drum 2022, Lab on Roof’s annual call for submissions.
Transcript
The timestamps follow the video’s six original chapter divisions.
00:00 — The Problem of “Perception”
00:00. One fairly widely accepted view holds that “animation is the art of line.” During the drawing stage, the spaces between the lines are blank, except where shadow guides have been marked. At that point, we can certainly understand animation as a perception composed entirely and purely of lines. In the finished footage, however, those blank spaces can rarely remain. They are filled by colored shapes endowed with their own material qualities, and thus become intervals. Beyond our perception of line, then, we as viewers must contend with the perception of color: with the relations between filled color shapes and the lines around them, relations of both layer and interval.
00:38. When a line exists as a black incision on a white ground, understanding how countless contiguous points can be perceived as the contour of a visual figure requires us to explore, in our own experience, this pre-objective (préobjectif) domain. This differs from film, whose subjects are “mummified” by the camera and whose subject-images possess a spiritual identity that can summon memory. When we watch animation made almost without editing photographic images of reality, our perception does not try to restore the lines and colored shapes floating upon or sandwiched between background layers on a cel to actually existing subjects, as though they were first-order abstractions of objects in the world. It instead intuits these contours and their contents—second-order abstractions—as descriptions whose grammar is first-order abstraction: a perceptual Gestalt constructed in the direction opposite to Gestalt disintegration.
01:40. One of the simplest and most famous accounts of basic intuition in Phenomenology of Perception helps me understand how we see animation. Imagine a white patch on a uniformly blue ground. All the points that constitute it—infinitesimal and continuous in perception—share a function that makes them a figure. The figure’s color is denser and more resistant than the ground’s. Its white edges belong to the patch, not to the adjacent ground. The patch seems to have been placed upon the ground without interrupting it; the ground continues naturally beneath it. Every part shows more than it contains. Our gaze comes to rest—disappears—within the white patch. In other words, we cast the focus of light upon it, so that the subject recognizes it as an object in focus, a figure on an upper layer rather than a ground beneath.
02:39. Where, then, does the viewer’s gaze disappear in the animation before them? If we assume that the line drawing on the key-animation sheet is its final destination, we will obtain only the perception of contour and of the closed figure enclosed by that contour. Instead, we must begin with the finished footage—with the images actually presented to the viewer. The qualities of both lines and color shapes demand attention, as does the hierarchy between them. The extraordinarily varied ways commercial animation handles eyebrows and eyes in relation to hair are one means of conveying precisely this hierarchy. We can now turn to a rough classification of those techniques.
03:24 — The Complexity of Drawing Practice
03:24. The character designer generally lays down a broad rule for how eyebrows and eyes are treated, but the animation director or episode director may adjust it from episode to episode. A character whose design sheet shows the brows and eyes concealed by the hair need not remain that way throughout the work. Conversely, even a character normally drawn with the brows and eyes showing through may be rendered opaque in a particular shot to convey an emotion. This is one of the elements that episode direction must weigh. Characters inhabiting the same work and the same fictional world may also receive different treatments.
04:03. A typical example appears in the third season of Dropkick on My Devil! Medusa’s brows and eyes show through her hair. Yurine, the protagonist, has a straight fringe that calls for her eyebrows to remain beneath its covering, so her design uses the opaque treatment. Hatsune Miku’s design, in turn, uses the show-through treatment. Yet for most of a twenty-minute episode, a given character’s treatment remains consistent, and the strategy applied across most of the cast is broadly similar.
04:42 — The Emergence and Lineage of the Opaque Treatment
04:42. Let me begin with Masayoshi Tanaka’s Chichibu trilogy—anohana, The Anthem of the Heart, and Her Blue Sky—together with DARLING in the FRANXX and the line of works running from Your Name. to Suzume. We should also consider Saki Takahashi and Kazutaka Sugiyama, whose character designs for Wonder Egg Priority and Mushoku Tensei were shaped by the character-design and directorial system associated with Tanaka and Noriko Takao. Their common feature around the eyes is an opaque treatment: hair does not become transparent to reveal the brows beneath it.
The earliest impulse in Japanese animation to conceal brows and eyes behind the hair arose from a plain naturalistic realism. The lineage of Isao Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka, and their 1968 film Horus: Prince of the Sun, stands near the beginning of this early naturalist-realist current. The show-through treatment, by contrast, entered animation in earnest during the 1980s. Its appearance followed a technical lead: tracing or scanning key drawings onto cels—or, later, into computers—before coloring them.
05:47. Across the decade between 2011’s anohana and 2021’s Wonder Egg Priority and Mushoku Tensei, the opaque strategy reconnects another realist lineage within a tendency, influenced by Hiroki Tanaka, toward drawing that is increasingly flat—or, better, increasingly stratified. Under this broadly flattening tendency, opacity itself assumes the character of a layer. The face is divided into hair and a layer of brows and eyes beneath it. That lower layer retreats from the surface into a deeper, more restrained place: something like an eye socket. Attention to each layer and to the relations between layers naturally heightens our attention to the material qualities of color—to the work of color design and compositing.
Compositing in the digital era may be the clearest locus of animation’s contemporaneity. At the end of image production, it remakes the entire visual experience through a kind of insurgent editing. In these circumstances, the return of opacity also comes with a redistribution of the expressive functions once performed by transparent brows and eyes. As lips and the other facial features are given greater volume and differentiation, digital color design and compositing supply more expressive possibilities—alternative means that replace functions the old treatment once had to carry by itself.
07:14. To return to Tanaka’s choice: letting the hair conceal the brows increases the image’s density. Density emerges through the division of layers. Hair presses heavily yet softly over the eyebrows. Its volume and weight are repeatedly stressed as emblems of youth, while the eyebrows half glimpsed beneath opaque hair become the scene’s elusive leading players. They stage the first intimations of maturing secondary sexual characteristics: the bodily perception of adolescence.
Embodied experience tells us directly that Tanaka’s treatment is not a straightforward continuation of early Toei naturalism or the realist movements of the 1980s and 1990s. It is not meticulous realism, but a layered accumulation of attention. To see one thing clearly within the visual field, we must bracket something else—push it into the position of ground, or place it on another layer. The tension of opaque brows and eyes in today’s highly stratified bishōjo animation lies here. Although the hair occupies the upper layer, our focus projects the visual vanishing point more intensely onto the brows and eyes beneath it.
08:34. Most people have an almost physiological tendency to attend to eyes and things analogous to eyes. Anyone versed in bishōjo animation since the mid-1980s will be especially prepared to feel that a performing figure, though looking in some definite direction, is unknowingly meeting the viewer’s gaze. A fitting metaphor for this intentionality is the stage. The brows and eyes are the actors. Fringe and hairline become props, boards, and curtains through which the actors pass. Most important of all, our gaze is at once spectator and spotlight, concentrating its projected visual light at the center of the stage.
09:20 — The Emergence of the Show-Through Treatment
09:20. If the opaque treatment was discovered and introduced in the name of naturalistic realism, what are we to make of its transparent counterpart? We first have to rebut a certain empiricism: the argument that strips perception of its mystery and reduces it to the possession of qualities. According to this view, if Horus: Prince of the Sun in 1968 and the almost twenty years of opacity that followed represent a realist choice, then the deliberate turn toward transparency in the 1980s and 1990s must embody a sensibility almost wholly detached from real bodies.
What this view often misses is that, on our actual bodies, hair seldom covers the brows and eyes with the strict opacity of one object occluding another. However thick the hair may be, we can still discover and focus upon the brows and eyes beneath it. In that sense, the show-through treatment may be precisely a way of expressing bodily emotion. Its close inquiry into hair as a fine but partially permeable material can itself be a strategy for evoking the real body.
10:38. Once we recognize the embodied experience that gives rise to this treatment, how should we understand show-through brows and eyes as a ground for the affection-image, now that perception has again become the problem? In observing another face—or even our own—we can understand actual brows and lashes as sharing a pictorial plane with the other facial features, rather than with the hair. When we focus our gaze, we likewise tend to gather brows and eyes into a single layer. The hair then becomes a foregrounded ground, like the BOOK layers placed before a character in traditional compositing.
As bishōjo animation diversified in both kind and quantity with the expansion of the OVA and television markets in the mid-to-late 1980s, technical and content-related conditions together turned brow-and-eye treatment toward transparency. Exaggerated hairstyles could hide the brows and eyes, burying the core expressive region of the face—the features upon which viewers most readily focus—in a lower layer of shadow. Hair and ornament could steal the primary focus from the face’s “speaking” organs and push them into the background. The show-through treatment answers by integrating the face, placing focused brows and eyes on the same plane as the protruding hair and exposing them fully. The speaking exchange of glances remains the leading performance; spectacular ornaments become accents at the edge of the same plane, or part of the performer’s costume. Once face and ornament occupy a common perceptual layer, the option of shifting focus between hair and features becomes much more fluid.
12:40. Consider a few early and influential examples: Tsukasa Dokite’s character designs and animation direction for the television series Dirty Pair; Kazuaki Mōri’s work on the OVA Dream Hunter Rem; Akemi Takada’s designs for the television version of Kimagure Orange Road, which lets the brows and eyes show through; and Mutsumi Inomata’s opaque treatment in the OVA Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko. The last two are similarly themed works from nearly the same period, both featuring “bikini armor,” yet their different treatments of brows, eyes, and hair produce markedly different viewing experiences.
13:29 — A Morphology of Show-Through Treatments
13:29. Transparency does not offer only one, or even a small handful, of perceptual effects. We can begin to classify it morphologically. The classification should not rely only on a drawing instruction that says “show the brows through.” Its basis must be the finished image after coloring and compositing have treated the material qualities of the colored shapes within the contours—and, finally, our direct perception of that image.
13:49. One common strategy follows the illustrative lineage of visual-novel standing portraits. Works such as ToHeart often color the eyebrows more darkly, using the hair’s shadow color or an even deeper second shadow tone. Yet the eyebrow line art and the solid edge of the hair do not occlude one another; both appear intact on the face. Hair and eyebrow are juxtaposed. The eyebrow’s perceptual depth is entrusted to the density of its color. Although line and hair occupy a single layer, deepening the eyebrow’s colored shape moves it forward and thereby completes its apparent displacement downward.
Notice the eyelashes. Because the boundary between sclera and skin is drawn with colored lines that merge into the surrounding fill, the lashes supply the eye’s outer contour and establish the boundary between eye, skin, and hair. This is broadly true across bishōjo animation. The hair passes over the surface of the skin, casting shade upon it, but is stopped decisively by the eye, which remains an unobstructed point of focus.
15:07. A second strategy runs throughout Revolutionary Girl Utena. Here the eyebrows, too, are treated as homogeneous with the hair. What demands attention is how hair is drawn where it enters the eye. Under this fully transparent method, the portion of hair that crosses the iris takes on the iris’s color. The sclera is completely covered, while the upper and lower lashes remain sharply visible as edges rather than being hidden by the hair. Hair seems to flow around the outside of the pupil; the pupil—and the gaze within it—appears radiant and impossible to occlude.
In the first of these two strategies, hair is strictly confined outside the eye. In the second, the viewer’s perception treats hair and eyebrow as organs of the same material. A combination of the two has become one of the most common contemporary solutions. The hair is not allowed to interfere with the eye’s speech: unlike the drawing in Utena, its solid line does not enter the eye. Yet the treatment of eyebrow, eye, and hair retains an insurgent disregard for literal layering. One major reason twenty-first-century eyes no longer permit the hair this interference is the rising precision and information density of character design—particularly the sudden proliferation of separated colors and colored drawing lines within the iris.
16:38. A third method uses color-trace lines to simulate the permeability of partial transparency. Kase-san and Morning Glories draws the section of the eyebrow beneath the hair entirely with color-trace lines. Unlike the unobscured section, this part has no solid line. The eyebrow under the hair is slightly darker than the hair’s first shadow tone, yet lighter than the eyebrow’s base color when unobscured. To a viewer focused on gaze and face, the brow therefore remains half manifest at every moment. It is neither entirely hidden nor clearly exposed as a solid line on the surface.
VLADLOVE, meanwhile, allows the hair to conceal part of the eye and treats eyebrow and hair together, leaving the eye on an opaque layer beneath the hair. This conceives the face in perspective: it evokes the depth of the eye socket and finds a way to express facial curvature upon animation’s flat plane.
17:47 — A Thought Experiment in Direction
17:47. Finally, I offer several shots from episode four of Casshern Sins as a useful thought experiment about the perception of show-through brows and eyes. Yoshihiko Umakoshi personally handled most of the animation corrections in the episode’s B-part, yet opaque and transparent treatments alternate there. No rigid show-through setting governs one sequence rather than another. The decision operates at the level of the individual shot, its smallest unit; within a single continuous shot, movement itself can modulate the treatment.
18:21. Whether we can see a character’s brows and eyes is not only an experience of meeting their gaze from afar or at point-blank range. It is also a shift in the direction of the affection-image. We can therefore perform one more thought experiment: make two versions of a shot, one transparent and one opaque, then splice each version back into the original footage. By experiencing the resulting images, we can grasp the true principle behind the many possible choices of brow-and-eye treatment: an omnipresent guidance of the light of perception.