Lately there has been a lot of complaining about the over abundance of Medieval European Style Fantasy in Anime. But I'm glad Anime gives me so much because even at it's most generic Anime takes on this Genre always look like a world I can believe someone would Fantasize about living in. Even when the subject matter gets rather dark like in Berserk or Goblin Slayer it's still not afraid to actually have a bright and colorful look do it.
American Media has been approaching this genre the same way they have Historical fiction. Besides the actual Tolkien and Lewis adaptations they are obsessed with looking "Gritty" and "Realistic", which I feel often results in looking uninspired and boring. And some might think Jackson's approach to Middle Earth was too gritty, well it mostly was for The Hobbit.
For an example I watched the first episode of The Shannara Chronicles on Netflix recently, and it looks so dull, like they'd rather be making one of those YA Dystopian movies that was a trend in the 2010s. Like you can have a culture in your fantasy setting have a "we're the Emos wearing black all the time" aesthetic, but that certainly shouldn't be the firggin Elves.
And every other Live Action Fantasy show I saw scrolling Netflix looked the same, The Witcher, Cursed, all of em.
Thing is you can be aesthetically dark in a way that's still visually interesting, like the Aesthetic Giger was hired to create for House Harkonnen in Jodorowsky's canceled Dune adaptation. But that's not what we're getting in these shows, it feels like they're gritty because they think that's how to be taken seriously in a post Game of Thrones world.
The Gritty and Realistic approach worked for Game of Thrones because it had successfully positioned itself as the Watchmen of High Fantasy. A show trying to look like Game of Thrones while not being so deconstructive in how it's written (Shannara's pilot seemed to be setting up some pretty standard heroes' Journeys) will clash far more then a dark story that looks bright and colorful will.
Let's take Narnia for example. In the case of Prince Caspian I consider the film version an improvement over the book. It is darker and even grittier in subject matter then the first movie, but still in fact operates with the exact same color pallet. It doesn't clash because Narnia looking like a world someone might want to live in is what makes bad stuff happening to it effective. And that is doubly true for why the original Berserk Anime worked.
But speaking of Anime, most of the Fantasy Anime of the last 10 or even 15 years is not stuff the Inklings would have been likely to like for other reasons, because of how much they run on Gamer logic. However 2018's Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms is an exception to that, it's a High Fantasy Anime Film that is free of those Gamer elements and really is a pretty good reference point for how I would want an Animated Film or Series set in the First Age of Middle Earth to both look and feel.
The Superhero genre has learned that it doesn't always need to be dark and gritty. To the point where now even most R Rated Superhero films are pretty bright and colorful like The Suicide Squad and the Deadpool movies. And then Birds of Prey was a good example of being dark a lot of the time but still vibrant. I wish both the Fantasy and Historical Epic genres could learn that lesson.
Perhaps some might argue the budget is to blame when I'm talking about TV shows. Shannara wasn't even a Netflix exclusive but originally on MTV. However I don't see how that so specifically effects Color. You see the thing with Shannara is that everything else you could call cheap and bland about how the sets and costumes look I could have tolerated if it was colored differently, or maybe even if the colors they do have weren't so muted. It might be because of my ADD but Bright Colors inherently hold my attention more.
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