Perception Everywhere: Experience and Inquiry into the Treatment of Brows, Eyes, and Hair in 2D Animation

By 河豚

This essay draws on animation history and the phenomenology of perception to investigate how brows and eyes are made to show through hair or remain hidden by it, and the visual effects of these treatments. It is probably among the earlier Chinese-language videos to focus specifically on this subject. The essay was selected for the Rags Drum 2022 pre-festival program.

English transcript

Times are approximate. On-screen author notes are distinguished from the narration; clip labels are listed after the transcript.

00:01–00:24

A fairly widely accepted view holds that “animation is an art of lines.”

At the drawing stage, apart from areas marked with shadow indications, the spaces between the lines are blank. At this point, we can certainly understand animation as a wholly pure perception of “lines.” In the finished film, however, it is usually difficult to preserve those blank spaces. Instead, blocks of color possessing qualities of their own fill them, turning them into “in-between” spaces.

On-screen author note · 00:01

Many people say this, but the question a serious viewer needs to ask is: “Is that really so?”

00:25–00:37

Here, besides the perception of lines, we as viewers also face the question of how we perceive the color fills, and the relationship between those blocks of color and the lines: a relationship of “layers” and “in-between” spaces.

00:39–00:54

When lines exist as black marks against a white background, how do we perceive countless continuous points as a contour that forms some perceptual scene? To understand this, we viewers must explore this pre-objective—préobjectif—field within ourselves.

00:55–01:38

Film recorded by a camera is “mummified”: there is a spiritual identity between the filmed subject and its image, as though summoning a memory. Animation is different. Its production scarcely uses images of reality as material for editing.

When we watch animation, our perception does not try to take the lines and blocks of color on cels floating above the background layer, or sandwiched between background layers, as a first-order abstraction of some real filmed subject, and restore them to that actually existing subject. Rather, it tries to apprehend a second-order abstraction of contour–content as a description whose grammar is first-order abstraction. That is, a perceptual Gestalt built in the reverse direction to Gestalt disintegration.

01:40–01:48

One of the simplest and most classic descriptions of elementary immediate perception in Phenomenology of Perception also helps us understand how we watch animation.

01:50–02:21

Suppose:

“There is a white patch on a uniformly colored background. All the points making up the patch—these perceptually infinitesimal, continuous points—share a certain ‘function’ that makes them a ‘figure.’ The ‘figure’s’ color holds the gaze longer than the background’s, and is therefore denser. The white edges ‘belong’ to the patch and have no connection to the adjacent background. The patch looks as though it has been placed on the background, without interrupting it.”

The background naturally extends onward: “Each part shows more than it contains.”¹

02:22–02:44

Our gaze disappears into this white patch. This means that we have focused the light on it, so that the subject recognizes the patch as an object in focus, a figure occupying the upper layer, rather than the background beneath it.

So, when viewers look at animation, where does their gaze disappear?

02:45–03:09

If we regard the key animation drawings, drawn in lines, as the endpoint of the gaze, presumably all we will arrive at is the perception of “contours” and the closed figures those “contours” enclose.

Instead, our attention should begin with the finished images—with the images that actually appear before the viewer. Both the qualities of the lines and those of the color blocks need our attention. Even the hierarchy of layers between lines and color blocks [needs our attention].

On-screen author note · 02:51

From the perspective of perception, even key animation drawings that have not yet undergone in-betweening and cleanup generally include all the linework for the brows and eyes as though they show through the hair, to make it easier to work out the in-betweens. It is at the in-betweening stage that the linework seen in the finished film is actually drawn according to the show-through treatment. Yet after in-betweening, the linework still has to be converted to binary black and white, then colored and composited. So the perception of key animation drawings—even the perception of line drawings—is very different from that of the finished film.

03:10–03:24

Across the enormous number and variety of commercial animations, the many different treatments of brows and eyes are also a means of conveying this hierarchy of layers.

Now we can properly begin the video’s broad classification and explanation of how animation handles brows and eyes.

03:25–03:31

Usually, the character designer lays down fairly general rules for this treatment.

On-screen author note · 03:27

Where there is no separate original character designer, the character designer also has to develop the preliminary character designs. Beyond this, the job includes drawing the characters in linework; drawing shadow indications to establish the general style of shadow animation; and preparing drawing references and instructions that include character turnarounds, expression sheets, and details of individual features. These drawing instructions will often also specify the final show-through treatment of brows and eyes. Some character designers also work with compositing and color design to refine the final effect, setting the work’s overall tone. More than so-called design inspiration, animation character design demands rigor and thoroughness.

03:32–03:55

But each episode’s animation director, who checks and corrects the drawings—or its episode director—will also make certain adjustments. A character’s design specifying that the brows and eyes do not show through the hair does not mean they remain hidden throughout the entire work.

And even for a character whose shots predominantly let the brows and eyes show through, the direction may hide them in some shots to convey a particular emotion. This, too, is something an episode director has to consider.

03:56–04:28

Different characters within the same work and the same fictional world can also have different treatments of their brows and eyes.

A typical example is Dropkick on My Devil!!! X, the third season of Dropkick on My Devil! Miku’s brows and eyes show through her hair. But the protagonist Yurine’s straight-cut bangs require her eyebrows to sit beneath the covering of hair. So Yurine’s design uses the hidden treatment, while Hatsune Miku’s uses the show-through treatment.

On-screen author note · 04:03

In Wonder Egg Priority, the show-through treatment of the characters’ brows and eyes depends on the lightness or darkness of their hair’s texture. Kawai, whose hair is dyed a light color, has a partial show-through treatment, while the others, with darker hair, are shown with their brows and eyes hidden. Kawai also has some special shots deliberately made without show-through.

04:29–04:41

But in most works, for the vast majority of an episode’s twenty-minute running time, the treatment of any one character’s brows and eyes remains consistent. The strategies used for most of the characters are also broadly similar.

04:43–05:10

To start us off, I want to discuss a group of works: Masayoshi Tanaka’s Chichibu trilogy—anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, The Anthem of the Heart, and Her Blue Sky—along with DARLING in the FRANXX and the films from Your Name. to Suzume.

There are also the character designs by Saki Takahashi and Kazutaka Sugiyama for Wonder Egg Priority and Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, respectively. Both designers were influenced by the Masayoshi Tanaka–Noriko Takao “character design–direction” system.

What these works share in their handling of brows and eyes is that they do not show through the hair.

On-screen author note · 04:59 · repeated

In Wonder Egg Priority, the show-through treatment of the characters’ brows and eyes depends on the lightness or darkness of their hair’s texture. Kawai, whose hair is dyed a light color, has a partial show-through treatment, while the others, with darker hair, are shown with their brows and eyes hidden. Kawai also has some special shots deliberately made without show-through.

05:11–05:29

The initial idea of keeping brows and eyes hidden in Japanese animation arose from a straightforward conception of naturalistic realism. The Isao Takahata–Yasuo Ōtsuka line, for example, with 1968’s Horus: Prince of the Sun, stands fairly close to the beginnings of this earlier naturalistic-realist tradition.

05:30–05:46

By contrast, the emergence of show-through treatment in the 1980s depended on prior technological developments: thermal-transfer tracing machines and the scanning of key animation drawings, which allowed those drawings to be copied directly onto cels—or, later, scanned into computers—and then colored.

05:46–06:09

We could say that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, across the span from 2011’s anohana to 2021’s Wonder Egg Priority or Mushoku Tensei, the strategy of hiding brows and eyes provides a connection to another realist tradition, amid a tendency in animation drawing, under Hironori Tanaka’s influence, toward increasing flatness—or, rather, toward “layers.”

06:10–06:38

Within this overall move toward flatness, keeping brows and eyes hidden exhibits a tendency toward “layers”: the character’s face is divided into the hair and a layer of brows and eyes beneath it.

The brow-and-eye layer returns from the surface to a deeper, more restrained recess, a place resembling an eye socket.

Attention to each layer and the relations between layers naturally brings greater attention to the qualities of color—that is, to the presence of color specification and compositing.

06:40–06:52

We could say that compositing in the digital era is the stage where animation’s contemporaneity is most pronounced. At the end of image production, it remakes the whole visual experience through a unifying intervention in the editing.

On-screen author note · 06:48

The Chinese expression 一揆, yikui, captures something of compositing’s function in each shot: “the same principle, the same appearance.” The compositing department’s understanding of the director’s intentions is also becoming an extremely important factor in how an animation team learns to work together. In Japanese, however, the same characters, read ikki, mean “uprising.” My use of this description here is entirely prompted by compositing technology’s being the most active and readily changeable part of the 2D animation process. This makes it a restless element that affects the other departments.

06:52–07:13

The return of hidden brows and eyes under these conditions actually accompanies a redistribution of the visual expressive function once served by show-through treatment. That function is dispersed among more three-dimensional lips and other facial features, while the greater expressive possibilities and alternatives offered by color design and compositing in digital production replace its original role.

07:14–07:40

Back to Masayoshi Tanaka’s choice. Arranging for the brows and eyes not to show through makes the image thicker, denser. Its density emerges through the division into layers.

The hair presses down on the eyebrows, heavy yet fluffy. Its volume and weight are repeatedly emphasized as a byword for youth. Beneath the hair that hides them, the eyebrows become the leading performers, now visible, now concealed. Their performance conveys an air of gradually maturing secondary sexual characteristics, a perception of the adolescent body.

07:41–08:01

Bodily experience tells us quite directly that Masayoshi Tanaka’s treatment of hidden brows and eyes is not a direct continuation of the tradition running from “early Toei’s naturalistic realism” to “the realist movement of the 1980s and 1990s.”

His treatment is not a form of precise realism, but a “layering of attention.”

08:02–08:22

In fact, within our perceptual experience of the visual field, seeing certain things clearly requires us to set other things apart and aside—or, as we might say, “push them into the background,” “put them on another layer,” and so on.

Here is where hidden brows and eyes in the age of Masayoshi Tanaka—hidden brows and eyes in this highly “layered” bishōjo animation, animation centered on beautiful girls—reveal their tension.

08:23–08:40

Although this treatment of the relationship between brows, eyes, and hair makes the hair the upper layer, our focus projects the point where our gaze disappears all the more strongly onto the brows and eyes.

Most people have an intensely physiological tendency to attend to eyes and things resembling eyes.

08:41–08:57

In particular, people versed in bishōjo animation from the mid-1980s onward will naturally have a sense of this kind of “looking”: “The performer looks in a particular direction, yet does not know that the audience is meeting their gaze.”

08:58–09:19

There is a very apt metaphor for this intentionality.

The brows and eyes are like actors on a stage. The bangs and hairline become the props, boards, and curtains among which the actors move.

Most crucial of all is our gaze. Our gaze becomes not only the audience but also the followspot, focusing the projected light of vision on center stage.

09:20–09:39

If hiding the brows and eyes was discovered and introduced through an aspiration toward naturalistic realism, then what about letting them show through?

What we need to refute is a kind of empiricism: an argument that “strips perception of its mystery,” reducing perception to the possession of a quality.

09:40–09:59

This position holds that, since 1968’s Horus: Prince of the Sun and the continuation of its hidden-brow-and-eye treatment over the nearly twenty years that followed belong on the realist side, the deliberately chosen turn toward show-through in the 1980s and 1990s represents a sensibility that scarcely evokes the real body metaphorically at all.

10:00–10:20

What this view often overlooks is that, on our actual bodies, the relationship between eyebrows and hair is usually not one of strict coverage, with one thing concealing the other. Rather, even when the hair is thick, we can discover and focus on the brows and eyes beneath it.

10:20–10:37

In this sense, show-through may well be precisely a way of expressing bodily emotion. This exploration of the fine texture of hair, with its particular capacity to let things show through, may itself be a strategy for evoking the real body metaphorically.

10:38–10:52

Now that we have some understanding of the material that evokes the bodily experience of brows and eyes showing through hair, now that “perception has become a problem again,” how are we to understand show-through treatment as a foundation for the affection-image?

10:53–11:16

Admittedly, from our observation of human faces, even our observation of ourselves, real eyebrows and eyelashes can indeed be understood as occupying the same layer more readily than hair and facial features can. And when we focus our gaze, our understanding also tends to combine brows and eyes into one layer.

The hair then naturally becomes background, like a BOOK element placed in front.²

11:16–11:34

But in the mid-to-late 1980s, as bishōjo animation grew more diverse in both type and number with the expansion of the OVA and television markets, the combined conditions of technology and content brought about a turn toward showing brows and eyes through the hair.

11:35–12:10

That is, those exaggerated hairstyles covered the brows and eyes. They concealed the facial features—the core expressive parts of the face, where people’s gaze most readily focuses—and lodged them in the shadow of the layer beneath.

Or, to put it another way, hairstyles and hair ornaments stole the primary focus from the face’s speaking organs, pushing them into the background.

The response was to bring the whole face together: to place the brows and eyes, once brought into focus, alongside the prominent hair on the same layer, fully exposing them.

12:11–12:39

For the viewer’s perception, the speaking brows and eyes, conveying emotion, could thus remain the leading performers onstage. The spectacular hair ornaments became decoration and peripheral territory on the same layer—or, we could say, part of the performer’s costume.

And because the face and these elements occupied the same perceptual layer, shifting one’s focus from hair to facial features naturally became much smoother and easier.

12:40–12:53

Here I will list only a few works that appeared relatively early and had some influence.

There is the television series Dirty Pair, with character design and animation direction by Tsukasa Dokite; the OVA Dream Hunter Rem, with character design and animation direction by Kazuaki Mōri; and the television version of Kimagure Orange Road, with character designs by Akemi Takada.

On-screen author note · 12:42

Only one of Dirty Pair’s two protagonists has a design in which the brows and eyes show through. This choice of strategy is directly related to the character’s hairstyle.

12:55–13:15

The Rem OVA, with its show-through treatment, and Genmu Senki Leda, whose hidden-brow-and-eye character designs and animation direction were handled by Mutsumi Inomata, both feature similar bikini armor and were made very close together in time. Yet the difference in their treatment of brows and eyes makes for a very considerable difference in the experience of watching them.

I have included them here for comparison.

On-screen author note · 13:00

There is considerable overlap between the creators of Rem and those of the two earlier works with hidden brows and eyes, Dirty Pair and Leda—Kazuaki Mōri and Tsukasa Dokite, for instance. Yet simply because their choices of brow-and-eye treatment differ, the viewing experience remains strikingly different, despite certain similarities in the tone of the drawing and a somewhat similar period feel.

13:16–13:28

On the other hand, show-through treatment does not offer just one particular kind of perception, or a limited handful of them.

We can begin with a rough classification of its forms.

13:29–13:52

Bear in mind that this classification cannot be based solely on the show-through treatment specified in the drawing instructions. Its basis must instead be the effect of the completed images: images whose color blocks, within their contours, have had their qualities worked on through finishing and compositing, and our immediate perception of those images.

The more common strategies fall roughly into the following kinds.

13:53–14:20

Because the character portraits in bishōjo games are generally based on illustration, works such as ToHeart, which extend that game tradition into animation, often choose a darker color for the eyebrows. Sometimes this is the hair’s shadow color, or its still darker second shadow tone.

As for the eyebrows and hair drawn in linework, neither set of line edges actually occludes the other. Both appear in full on the face: a juxtaposition of eyebrows and hair.

14:21–14:36

The eyebrows’ immediately perceived depth rests on the subtle depth of the color. Although the linework and the hair occupy the same layer, deepening the color brings the eyebrows’ color-block layer forward, then shifts it downward.

14:37–14:55

Notice how the eyelashes are drawn here. The lines at the boundaries between the whites of the eyes and the skin are colored to blend into the fills. The eyelashes therefore serve as the eyes’ outer contours and as the boundary separating the eyes from the skin and hair. In effect, this is achieved through the pupils and eyelashes.³

This applies to most bishōjo animation.

14:56–15:06

Here the hair passes across the surface of the skin, shading it, but is strictly blocked by the eyes. The eyes become an unobstructed object of focus.

15:07–15:19

Another strategy is the one used throughout Revolutionary Girl Utena. This strategy also treats the eyebrows as a homogeneous part of the hair.

What we really need to observe is the rendering of the hair where it extends into the pupils.

15:20–15:34

Following a full show-through approach, this treatment gives the parts of the hair entering the pupils the pupils’ own color, while the whites of the eyes are completely covered.

The upper and lower eyelashes likewise remain clearly visible as edges, uncovered by the hair.

15:35–15:45

This is how the hair flows around the outside of the pupils. The pupils—the pupils here, and the gaze within them—seem, at this moment, radiant and impossible to obscure.

15:46–16:17

Of the two treatments above, the first strictly confines the hair to the area outside the eyes. In the second, the viewer’s perception regards hair and eyebrows as organs of the same texture.

Combining these two strategies is also one of the more common choices for show-through treatment today: letting the eyes speak without interference from the hair, rather than allowing the hair’s solid lines to enter the eyes as they do in Revolutionary Girl Utena, while also adopting a unified treatment of brows, eyes, and hair.

16:18–16:37

The reason twenty-first-century treatments of pupils no longer allow interference from the hair—meaning hair passing across the eyes without covering them at all—is, to a great extent, the continual increase in the precision and density of information in character designs.

The sharp increase in color divisions within the pupils and in color-separation lines in the drawings can also be regarded as one of the main production-related reasons.

16:38–16:57

One approach that requires color-separation lines begins from the idea of simulating the way partial show-through can both conceal and reveal.

Kase-san and Morning Glories renders the eyebrows within the hair entirely with lines colored to blend into the fills. And compared with this portion of the eyebrows, the part not shaded by the hair has no solid outline.

16:58–17:19

Its texture is slightly darker than the hair’s first shadow tone, but a little lighter than the eyebrows’ own color when they are not obscured.

This means that, at any given moment, for viewers focusing on the gaze and face, the eyebrows are in a state of partial appearance: neither completely concealed nor clearly exposed on the surface as solid lines.

17:21–17:45

VLAD LOVE’s treatment allows the hair to obscure part of the eyes while treating the eyebrows and hair together. It places the eyes beneath the opaque layer of hair.

This is an idea for rendering the face in perspective—that is, for conveying the perceived depth of the eye sockets, and expressing the curvature of the human face in flat animation.

17:45–17:53

I also offer shots from episode 4 of Casshern Sins as a very good thought experiment about the perception of brows and eyes showing through hair.

17:54–18:20

The overwhelming majority of drawing corrections in this episode’s second half, or B-part, were done by Yoshihiko Umakoshi alone. Yet hidden and show-through treatments alternate throughout this part.

There is no strictly prescribed show-through treatment governing a particular stretch of scenes. Instead, the treatment is determined at the level of the individual shot as the smallest unit. Even within a single continuous shot, show-through can be adjusted and changed through movement.

18:21–18:31

Whether we can see the brows and eyes is not just an experience of meeting the character’s gaze from a distance or from mere inches away. It is also a sliding shift in the directionality of the affection-image.

18:32–18:43

Along the same lines, we can carry out another thought experiment. Make two versions of the same shot: one in which the brows and eyes show through the hair, and one in which they do not. Then splice these clips back into the original film.

On-screen author note · 18:32

I made these alterations myself using animation software, then recreated the coloring and compositing of the modified areas.

Comparison labels: Upper left and lower left: “Original footage.” Upper right and lower right: “Modified footage.”

18:45–18:56

Through our experience of these images, we can grasp what truly lies behind all these different choices of brow-and-eye treatment: everywhere, the light of perception is being guided.

Closing reference card and author’s statement · 18:56–19:01

Principal reference books

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty [France], The World of Perception.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty [France], Phenomenology of Perception.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty [France], Adventures of the Dialectic.

The main argument of this video is based on my own research into animation history. My views took shape over several open, shot-by-shot viewing and discussion sessions I held in my own discussion group.

On-screen clip credits and labels