Talk:Friendship is Magic animated media/@comment-27578467-20171121080558/@comment-27578467-20171122032117

First in reply, I'll admit the word 'immediately' applies more when comparing images from S1-5 and S6-7, but with a four-second window I bet I could place them into specific seasons pretty accurately based on art style alone. Things like color contrast in a given scene, use of stock characters in the foreground, level of detail (of literally everything), facial expressions (or rather the intensity and apparent complexity of emotions), size of irises (quite serious there, in fact this is usually the biggest tell), level of exaggeration in body movements/positions, scene complexity, what the background is composed of, etc., and this is just for screenshots. There are several other differences in the actual animations I could point out like how characters enter and exit a scene or how often the camera isn't focused on the character talking. For me there's a pretty distinct visual "feel" to each season, S1 being the most unique of the first five IMO.

Admittedly I'm not completely familiar with the system of production this sort of show uses, but I'd put forth that the art director is less responsible for many of the recent changes than other departments of Hasbro. For example, "faces" is a pretty modern internet meme that the show has clearly picked up on heavily in the last two seasons, along with a host of other memes that either I didn't notice in earlier seasons or didn't interrupt the episode enough to make me notice. I'd argue that increasing the level of complexity in facial expressions and object models is a directed marketing move to appeal to a specific internet-savvy demographic instead of a choice from the art director meant primarily to enhance a particular scene.