by Wing-0 » Tue Nov 30, 2010 11:39 pm
I am picky sometimes, but not always. In Clamp's case, my rejection for their artwork stems more from how saturated I was during my teenage years when their works got popular in my area. Rayearth was cool, yes, but X, Tokyo Babylon, Clamp Campus whatever and all the things that came after, with xxxHolic (which I read as PornoHolic), just gave me a coup de grace.
I don't like Yun Kouga's works outside Gundam 00, and even then, I would have chosen a different character designer, but her work there was actually impeccable, with the characters being easy to differentiate by features, not just colors, something I don't like in Clamp's works (not to mention the anorexic female domination in them).
An example of a clean character design right now would be Gundam Unicorn's. The original character design is by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, character designer of the original Gundam series, but the adaptation for the anime was done by someone else, who did an awesome job, especially with characters like Marida Cruz, who is my favorite with her badass Kshatriya mobile suit.
Right now, the best character designs I have enjoyed, are from two Macross productions. Macross Zero has an EXCELLENT character design, but I don't remember who was responsible for it. Macross Frontier's is by Risa Ebata and another guy whose name I sadly forgot. Each character is easy to recognize because of how they look, not because of hair and eye color, like the case of so many other series.