As an example here’s a clip.
劇場アニメ『老人Z』（1991年公開）は沖浦啓之、黄瀬和哉、井上俊之、本田雄、松本憲生、磯光雄、森本晃司、福島敦子、今敏、森田宏幸、中澤一登、鶴巻和哉、飯田史雄、平松禎史など錚々たるアニメーターが参加している点も見どころで、特に沖浦さんが作画したこのシーンは何度観ても素晴らしい！ pic.twitter.com/UseSMawBLd
— タイプ・あ～る (@hitasuraeiga) March 8, 2020
At 20s you can clearly see what the background is and what are all the animated bits.
In: Technology
Oh I can begin an answer to this. In traditional hand animation, backgrounds are usually painted or drawn with a greater level of detail, because they presumably only need to be painted or drawn one time. The background is a separate piece of art than the character models. Characters, prop, and other moving items are drawn multiple times on multiple cellulose sheets, refered to as “animation cels”, that are laid on top of the background image to provide a foreground. These cels may appear brighter because they sometimes lack the fine detail of the background, a static image. It’s much simpler to draw the same character multiple times, so they tend to look simpler, with simpler brighter colors.
I noticed this rewatching a nineties cartoon called Gargoyles. Basically fixed background pieces were a different colour. So facing 10 bookshelves, one is a bit brighter than the others, and that was always the one that would fall. Sane with statues, walk sections, etc…
I wager it’s because the other background is static so it was animated 1 time. The bookshelf that falls is a seperate piece of the background and has been animated hundreds of times, in an era before colour correction technology was fast and cheap it was probably just easier to ignore, figuring old TVs and the size made it difficultfor a viewer to notice.
It all comes down to the moving elements being drawn differently than the background elements. In this old style of animation, the static backgrounds are typically painted, and can be very detailed. The moving elements are painted onto a transparent sheet (celluloid or cels) and overlaid onto the background. Cels aren’t as detailed as the background, and tend to use blocks of bright colour. The problem occurs when you need a part of the background to move. What animators would have to do is draw a cel over the background, to match as closely as possible. What you’re seeing is a cel, and not part of the background layer, which is why it looks different.
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