Quoted By:
What would you say is the essential aesthetic of pokemon? The people, pokemon, and world in general all have a distinct, mostly coherent feeling to it, but how exactly?
A few descriptions/things I notice:
Features on trainers (clothes, devices) and any people really are sometimes comically bulky and large, other times sleek and athletic, or both at once (and yet it still works?). There's something that seems quite unique in the "fashion" here that I can't explain. It seems adventurous, though flashy and maybe even impractical at the same time.
On both Man and Mon, complex natural forms and patterns (eg. hair, scales) are translated from their inspirations into simple geometric shapes and curves; this captures their essential character (or exaggerated parodies) while massively simplifying them. This general idea is common for many cartoon/anime styles, but pokemon seems to pay special attention to these details. There's also an abundance of bright, strongly contrasting colours to decorate people and monsters. Is this just a child-friendly thing or something else?
The civilized world is a mostly happy, near-future setting with fantastic technologies at the forefront. Almost all of the great outdoors, the routes/caves/seas, are tamed with roads, fences, barriers, ladders, stairs, bridges, railways, and so on. It's worth mentioning that this clashes with the ancient/legendary pokemon, which are usually directly tied to a force of nature or at least suggest something primitive but powerful (think hieroglyphs, rocky ruins, etc.). Antagonists are usually part of a fairly cliched conflict, they're either a corruption of civilization or of nature that's doomed to fail for being "out of balance" in some way. And of course, here and there the classic Japanese look is mixed in (eg. pagodas and stuff). Is this more than the sum of its parts?
(cont...)
