Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty



"He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes..."

- 1984

The setting, costumes, lighting, and sound of a production are critical in setting its tone and mood. One of the most fundamental stylistic choices is where to position these production values on the sliding scale of shiny vs gritty.

Stereotypically "shiny" elements include plastic, chrome, precious metals, gems, glass, light, fine woods, fine fabrics, bright colors, pastels, classical music, and ballads (the non-powered variety). "Gritty" elements include dirt, rust, dust, blood, iron, broken glass, darkness, rough plywood, burlap, deliberate monochrome, sepia, hard rock, punk rock, and heavy metal. But context is everything. Many choices fall somewhere in between the gritty and shiny extremes; hence, the "sliding scale".

This is one of those scales where productions tend to be uniform throughout rather than varying from scene to scene. Furthermore, there is a tendency for a work to head toward one end of the scale or the other to take advantage of the evocative power of shiny or gritty. The occasional contrasting scene is used just to highlight the overall tone. A contrasting tone may be used to emphasize a position on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Braveheart is a gritty but idealistic movie, while some Shojo Manga have immaculate settings inhabited by The Beautiful Elite but are very cynical.

Gritty tones are in general easier and cheaper to produce in live action than shiny ones, so low-budget or quickly-made films are more often in a gritty style. Big budget films, especially escapist films, sometimes go for shiny just because they can.

Gritty Animation and Video Games tend to be high-budget, since that's a lot of detail to draw and render. This is one reason Real Is Brown. Less "realistic" games and ones for less powerful systems tend to be either mid-scale or shiny; people who like shiny often like games that are retro or Retraux.

Apocalyptic movies such as Mad Max or Desolation Alley, noir comic movies such as The Dark Knight franchise, and war movies such as Full Metal Jacket or Saving Private Ryan provide good examples of the grittier end of the scale.

Historical romances such as Dangerous Liaisons and adventure films such as the James Bond franchise (especially the classic Roger Moore films) tend toward the shinier end. The recent Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come is an exceptionally shiny film, in spite of its often-sombre tone.

Compare with Slobs Versus Snobs.

Related Tropes:
Shiny:
 * Ascetic Aesthetic
 * Costume Porn
 * Crystal Spires and Togas
 * Ermine Cape Effect (you think royalty would look dirty?)
 * Everything's Better with Sparkles
 * Everything's Better with Rainbows
 * Gorgeous Period Dress
 * Lighter and Softer
 * Living in a Furniture Store
 * Raygun Gothic
 * Scenery Porn
 * Shiny-Looking Spaceships
 * Sugar Bowl

Gritty:
 * City Noir
 * Crapsack World
 * Darker and Edgier
 * The Dung Ages
 * Extremely Dusty Home
 * Real Is Brown
 * Scenery Gorn
 * Used Future
 * Wretched Hive

Note: Try to post the examples in the shininess and grittiness order, not at the bottom of each category.

Shiny End

Anime and Manga

 * Ouran High School Host Club. Except for one extremely gritty scene which is Played for Laughs
 * Digimon Xros Wars is very idealistic, very optimistic, and - in the later half especially - everything gleams as though polished for hours.

Film

 * The Star Wars prequels
 * The point of this being to show the "good old days" preceding the Dark Times of the Empire. This goes back to Star Wars' fantasy roots. Star Wars is, ultimately, Space Opera. The fantasy end of Science Fiction.
 * Leia's ship that gets captured at the beginning of A New Hope is also a good example. While the hallway is very smooth and shiny, the utility corridor she hides in with R2 is much more gritty.
 * Also the insides of Star Destroyers, parts of Death Star II, Home One, and at times, Darth Vader's suit.
 *  ~2001: A Space Odyssey~ 

Live-Action TV

 * The various Star Trek series. Even Deep Space Nine mostly had sets that looked neat and tidy. Perhaps that's just an unspoken credo of the Federation.
 * The 2009 Star Trek movie, on the other hand, has some very, very shiny parts (where all the iPod-esque walls and screens appear to be scrubbed by red shirts armed with with Federation-issue general-purpose cleaning solution every hour on the hour) contrasted with some grittier parts (grittier for the series, anyhow; busier, messier crowd scenes than anything previously seen in Trek, the outsides of the ships are clearly not scrubbed with the same rigor as the insides, child Kirk speeds in a jalopy whose only really shiny parts are the electronics, industrial-grade rails and plastic curtains abound, and Vulcan is made of dust storms ).
 * American soap operas in general are very, very shiny (e.g., The Young and The Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives)
 * Any and all children's sitcoms on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon.
 * Ugly Betty, as it takes place in the fashion industry.
 * Desperate Housewives, which takes place in an idealized (but still rather troubled) version of suberbia populated by imperfect Stepford smilers.
 * CSI: Miami; in addition to the exotic, fashionable city its set in, the actors have said it takes place in "a comic book world."
 * Pushing Daisies, which takes place in a fifties Retro Universe.
 * Mad Men: The Sterling Cooper offices are elegant examples of the International Style, the brand-new SCDP offices--particularly Roger's office--are enthusiastically Mid-Century Modern (i.e. That Style You See And Immediately Think "Sixties" No Not Hippie Stuff The Other Thing, Yes, Like JFK Airport), the Draper house is well-furnished (though not expensively so), even Peggy's small Brooklyn apartment is well-kept (well-worn, but hardly "gritty"...unless you would describe a well-maintained kitchen as "gritty"...), and the hotels and restaurants we see are mostly top-hole. And let's not forget the Gorgeous Period Dress. Of course, the series follows ad executives in the early Sixties (i.e. the era of the Three Martini Lunch and other such examples of excess), and additionally borrows heavily from the "visual vocabulary" of the era, so it's hardly surprising that despite the lean towards cynicism, the show is pretty much on the shiny end. Mind you, the occasional bit of dirt shows up, but it's not terribly common.

Toys

 * Barbie

Video Games

 * Robot Unicorn Attack Now this one is getting a bit too far.
 * Unless, of course, you are playing the Heavy Metal version.
 * Loco Roco Very bright with lots of pastel colors mixed with bright colors. Seems that everything has a life of their own.
 * Super Mario Galaxy
 * Kirby series. Very bright colors, except when it gets to some of the final bosses.
 * Mirror's Edge is very high on the shiny scale, with lots of clean white and bright sunlight, yet it feels also very oppressive and gloomy.
 * Umineko no Naku Koro ni juxtaposes a very shiny wealthy family and very shiny inhuman witches with horrific, gritty murders full of Gorn. However, the shiny aspects definitely win out for the overall production.
 * Final Fantasy VIII, for the most part. There are places like Winhill and the Horizon Bridge that are (or were) wrecked up, but other locations in the game and generally kept up and shiny (and in Esthar, Crystal Spires and Togas is in full effect.)
 * Space Channel 5 series. In fact one level is so colourful, an Epilepsy Warning had to be put in it!

Web Comics

 * Goblins stays on the Shiny end nearly all the time, especially for characters wearing metal armor. It only moves towards Gritty when blood is involved.

Western Animation

 * My Little Pony
 * Rainbow Brite
 * The Disney princesses.
 * Snow White has the least gritty mine and miners ever.
 * For purposes of illustration only. They rarely bathe. It doesn't look it, but clean was easier to draw.
 * Most Pixar movies, until the first half of WALL-E, tended towards the clean end (it helps that "clean" is generally easier to do in CG).

Somewhere In The Middle

Film

 * The James Bond films can tend towards either end of the scale.
 * The films of Harry Potter: Magic is sparkly; ancient castles are not; the vague Steampunk vibe is somewhere in the middle.
 * Although the 6th film is very washed out and bleak. The scene where Harry uses sectumsempra on Malfoy is so desaturated it is practically in black and white save for Malfoy's blood.

Live-Action TV

 * Australian and New Zealand soaps (e.g., Neighbours, Shortland Street)
 * Indian soaps
 * CSI: and CSI New York, though the latter was much grittier in the beginning: their original workplace was a 100-year-old stone building, complete with arched ceilings and a palpable element of despair (it premiered not long after 9/11)
 * Degrassi the Next Generation is more gritty than most teen dramas, but it can still be pretty shiny at times.

Video Games

 * Resident Evil 4's' famous art direction included a huge amount of detail in how the places looked, including the decaying village and military base, contrasted with the ornate castle.
 * World of Goo has elements common in both ends.

Web Comics

 * Gone With The Blastwave takes place in a completely ruined city, but the would-be Badass Longcoat soldiers manage to somehow stay fairly clean.

Western Animation

 * The Disney Animated Canon usually is clean without being too obvious about it, but does fall into the shiny end when the princesses are involved.
 * The Transformers

Gritty End

Anime and Manga

 * Certain anime such as Texhnolyze, MD Geist, and Violence Jack tend to really push the envelope for grittiness.

Comic Books

 * Frank Miller.

Film

 * Blade Runner was gritty for the most part, especially in contrast to the tacked-on happy ending.
 * Monty Python and The Holy Grail, although plenty of historical films at the time were made in reaction to Gorgeous Period Dress.
 * Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky is, if anything, even grittier.
 * The movie Se7en
 * La Reine Margot made even the gorgeous period dresses look gritty.
 * Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially the 1984 (yes!) film version.
 * Though the Ministry of Love is considerably cleaner and better kept-up. The Party knows where to spend its money.
 * Repo! The Genetic Opera, where we learn that the future is Goth and cities are little spots of grime surrounded by graveyards. And seas full of dead bodies. Then again, there was that pesky organ failure epidemic...
 * District 9
 * Most films and games that heavily feature zombies fall into this category.
 * Children of Men, which is set in a decaying world where no child has been born in many years.
 * Pirates of the Caribbean, very much so.

Live-Action TV

 * Irish soaps (eg Fair City, Ros na Run)
 * British soaps are the absolute champions of gritty (e.g., Coronation Street, Eastenders, Emmerdale, Shameless.)
 * The Wire was intentionally shot to maximize the run-down aspects of Baltimore. The studio executives were uncertain about this decision at first, but in the end went along with it -- to great effect.

Video Games

 * Machinarium: Game takes place in a mechanical city made largely out of decaying buildings made out of cracking stone and rusty metal. This world is completely devoid of living animals although there is some plant life present.
 * Half-Life 2 is gritty everywhere except in Combine buildings.
 * Gish. First 3 worlds are very gritty, taking place in sewers, caves and hell. Last two are shinier though since they take place in sandstone-colored Egyptian level and church.
 * Most, if not all, games that take place in a historical wartime setting (Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, etc.) take many pains to make things as gritty as the systems of the day can handle.
 * Most First-Person Shooter games in the modern day fall pretty deep into the gritty end of the scale.
 * Fallout series is very gritty in some places, especially considering that it takes place in post-apocalyptic environment.
 * Final Fantasy VII. Any town that wasn't razed to the ground during the course of the game or Crisis Core is choked with dust, crime, urban decay, and rusting technology.
 * Gears of War is not so much "gritty" as it is "soaked in dirt, blood, grime, and waste, then beaten repeatedly against the wall and left to dry in the middle of a sandstorm, then set on fire."
 * The Diablo games are gritty in the extreme, depicting a world invaded by demons who decorate with blood, limbs, impaled corpses and tortured souls.

Contrasting

Anime and Manga

 * Masamune Shirow tends to make the major cities in his works so shiny that they're reflective. However, there's always lots of grit outside the cities or just below the surface (introduce a bit of firepower into the mix and it becomes a moot point). The only exception is Dominion Tank Police, where everything was gritty.
 * Wolf's Rain has the dirt covered, dilapidated human cities that sharply contrast with the glittery, self-indulgent decadence of the Nobles' flying ships.
 * The contrast shows up in the natural world as well, with the many desolate, eerie, washed-out landscapes traversed by the heroes contrasting the occasional scene of gorgeous flowers, lush meadows, and crystal blue lakes.
 * Berserk, taking place in The Dung Ages and having mercenaries as the primary characters, is predominantly gritty, though the scenes taking place in Midland's royal court involved a good amount of Gorgeous Period Dress. Later episodes of the manga push the shiny end to a whole new level, though, as
 * Battle Angel Alita contrasts the dirty, chaotic world of the Scrapyard with the sleek and clean Tiphares.
 * Last Order takes it up to eleven, doubly contrasting the shiny appearances of the techno-totalitarian empires of Venus, Jupiter and the Orbitals with their rotten undersides on the one side, with the often dirt-poor and thus Used Future-based, but very noble and idealistic heroes on the other. And then there's Chaotic Neutral characters like Zekka, who doesn't fit in any classification.
 * Ergo Proxy has the painstaking cleanliness and sleekness of the City of Romdeau....and then there's the outside world...
 * Kaiba is filled with bright, colorful artwork that represents an extremely dark (not with respect to lighting) world. It occasionally slips into very dark tones, as well.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion. The Evas are shiny, but everything else about NERV is pretty gritty.
 * The Evas... not really, given the way they look, they are very like monsters, and EVA-01 especially can unleash its unusual violent character itself.
 * Code Geass, most notably how the shiny Imperial Enclave of Tokyo and the run-down Shinjuku ghetto, practically opposites on the scale, are separated only by a railway.

Comic Books

 * Metropolis and Gotham are often compared in the DCU, with the former being the shinier (at one point, Catwoman wonders if they ever turn off the lights at night) while the latter is normally very bleak (In The DCAU, the writers admitted to being freaked out by Gotham during a clear sunny day whenever they drew it, and only did so once due to the alternate universe setting it was being presented in.) Considering the types of heroes who operate in this city, it seems the city adapted to them instead of the other way around.
 * Metropolis adapted to Superman, Gotham made Batman.
 * This divide can even be seen with their supervillains: Metropolis has an nice sleek Evil Mega Corp, highly illegal, dangerous lab projects financed by said Mega Corp, power-grabbing conspiracies involving said Mega Corp, flashy massive disasters caused by the machinations of said Mega Corp, a gang weaponized by Apokalips, alien invasions, rampages by giant robots, sentient computer viruses, time-traveling neo-nazis with jetpacks, and random military attacks from rich, supervillain third-world dictators. Gotham on the other hand, has filthy, slum-level street crime, mafia bosses, drug trafficking, warring organized crime rings comprised of supervillains, senseless mass murder, police corruption, and loads and loads of clinically-insane psychopaths and freaks trying to make a name for themselves.
 * The comic book Baker Street started out very shiny and and a bit cartoony, but became steadily more gritty and realistically-rendered as the viewpoint character became more depressed by the horrible things that were happening on the way to the Downer Ending.

Film

 * The BBC vs. 2005 movie versions of Pride and Prejudice come to mind. In the BBC version, everything is shiny, even though it's the English countryside. In the movie, the Bennets' home is more realistically dirty.
 * Except not particularly 'realistically'... there seems to be some misunderstanding about what the book means when the Bennets are described as 'poor'. There's no reason to suppose from the text that they don't still have a team of servants to clean the house for them- that would be a remarkable circumstance for people of their caste- servants were cheap. (A genteel Regency-era home shouldn't be obviously more dirty than most modern ones- though it would be a lot harder to keep clean, thanks to soot and lack of modern appliances like vacuum cleaners- it would be a full-time job for at least 2 maids, but said maids could be employed for nothing but their meals and a cubby-hole to sleep in.) On the other hand, the film does at least show the levels of lighting feasible from candles realistically in the evening scenes.
 * The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy manages to hit every point in the spectrum. Arthur even points it out. "Well, it's a whole lot better than that dingy Vogon crate! This is my idea of a spaceship, all gleaming metal, flashing lights, everything."
 * The original Star Wars included dirty both Used Future farms, towns, and junk traders (and the Rebel base and its equipment) and the pristine corridors of Leia's ship and of the Death Star. The blockade runner even combined the two on the same ship: the engine compartments and life pod bays have a Used Future look to them, too.
 * The Matrix has a decidedly gritty real world, but the titular simulated world ranges from average to shiny.
 * RoboCop takes place in gritty Old Detroit, but the evil and shiny OCP corporation plans to develop a cleaner and shinier Delta City "where Old Detroit now stands".
 * Most adaptations of Dune: Caladan is natural and shiny, Giedi Prime is dark and dirty.
 * Slumdog Millionaire is gritty for the majority of the flashbacks depicting Jamal's childhood in the slums, which starkly contrasts with the sleek, stylized look of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire??
 * The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, contrasting the orderly life of Elizabeth and Will with the chaotic life of Jack and Barbossa, or the Lawful Evil East India Trade Co. with the Chaotic Neutral (mostly) pirates.
 * 28 Days Later takes a somewhat unorthodox approach to mixing the two. The look of the film overall is gritty (they shot it on digital camcorders for this reason), but a lot of the locations are of typically shiny and clean places (hospitals, a castle, convenience store etc). The look of the film and the locations eventually converge as the story progresses.
 * The Terminator series is mostly gritty, but the T-1000 and T-X are quite literally shiny.
 * Underworld contrasts the shiny vampires and their shiny mansion and their shiny clothes with the gritty, concrete-plywood-and-brown-leather existence of the Lycans.
 * The film versions of Henry V. Olivier's version was very shiny, especially considering that the film was a piece of propaganda to rally the English people during WWII. Branagh's version is much grittier. Olivier's Battle of Agincourt is most memorable for the charge of the French cavalry on a nice, sunny day with shiny armor and colorful pennants. Branagh's Battle of Agincourt is most memorable for the mud.
 * Olivier's priest talking about Salic law and such speaks pompously and tosses aside cartoonishly-large pieces of paper; Branagh's mumbles through the lines quickly. When Olivier's says "It's as clear as the day!", it's still buffoonish; when Branagh's says it, he says it sarcastically with a wry smile, which is greeted with a few muffled snickers.
 * In Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, the film starts in a town low-lit in a grungy sepia, with peeling paint, flaking bricks, and warped, weathered, wet wood. The rim of the Zone is even grittier: collapsing, waterlogged factories. You don't get grittier without war or zombies. The Zone, though, is lushly green and shot in full color, though filled with broken buildings, leaning telephone poles, and rotting hulks of vehicles.

Literature

 * Wicked Lovely contrasts a Red Light District known as Huntsdale (presumed to be in Pennsylvania) with the harsh beauty of the fey world.
 * Played up in The Hunger Games where a very gritty, dystopian Real World in the satellite states, where most people are basically starving/worked to death and are forced to fight to the death for the amusement of the people living in the shiny city in the centre. And it is really very shiny. Think random tech that doesn't even exist in real life and fashion obsessions.

Live-Action TV

 * Firefly varies quite a bit. By dint of being a western in space, it often lands on the gritty end of things, but episodes set in the Core worlds, with all the shiny spiffiness, tend to be much cleaner and pretty. This is deliberately contrasted in many parts of the series and movie.
 * The re-imagined series of Battlestar Galactica: the titular ship is rather grubby and unglamorous even before the Cylons start shooting at it: it's 50 years old and obsolete when the Cylons wipe out the Colonies, and looks even more beaten-up after soaking up everything the Cylons have thrown at it during the course of the show. . Contrast with the Cylon basestars, which are immaculate and extremely shiny both inside and out..
 * The grittiness of the series is highlighted every time the "modern", shiny city of Caprica is shown in flashback, and the And Man Grew Proud prequel Caprica will highlight that further, showing futuristic technology from fifty years ago that (as far as I've seen) no one uses in Galactica, such as electronic touch screen paper and holograms.
 * 50 years previous would have been some time before the first war with the Cylons, and given those things capacity at electronic warfare, is it any wonder that a lot of mod-cons have been traded in for something a bit less vulnerable (in the hacking sense)?
 * Babylon 5 does this a fair amount. Most areas on the station are crowded, but nice enough; the command staff quarters are nice, if sometimes a bit Spartan; the ambassadorial wing is VERY shiny (or its equivalent; it's implied that for Narns, at least, "shiny" still involves furniture of rough-hewn stone); and Downbelow is just a hell-hole.
 * In Andromeda the titular ship is very shiny (and the remnant of a shinier age) while everything else is gritty.
 * The TARDIS interior from Doctor Who, compare the sterile and minimalist console room from the old series with Ninth and Tenth's dilapidated techno-organic console, or Eleventh's cobbled-together steampunk decor.

Tabletop Games

 * Warhammer 40000 runs the entire spectrum, with the Eldar at the shiny end, Chaos at the gritty end & everybody else somewhere in the middle.
 * Slaanesh worshippers thrive on being shiny.
 * The Dark Eldar, like other followers of Slaanesh, are shiny. However, they strive to be gritty in order to express their love of inflicting Cold-Blooded Torture. So they put blades all over their armor, although they just end up looking ridiculous.
 * Nurgle worshippers thrive on being dirty.
 * Khorne worshippers thrive on Gorn.
 * Imperial power armor often show both at once. It's usually decked out with cool emblems, medallions, gold trim and Bling of War, but is also frequently adorned with skulls.
 * The Tau rival the Eldar in shininess, but their two most common auxiliaries, the Kroot and the Vespid, are decidedly not shiny.
 * Necrons are very shiny.
 * Orks tend towards the gritty appearance wise, but take a look at Kaptin Badrukk. He can show off with the best of them.

Theatre

 * The musical Wicked manages to combine both aspects with Shiz and the Emerald City being fairly shiny, but the Witchunters and Kiamo Ko being pretty gritty.

Video Games

 * In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Adult Zelda is shown wearing a much more elaborate dress than her younger counterpart is, even though by that point she had no home, no posessions, her kingdom is in ruins, and she has been on the run for seven years,.
 * Portal is shiny in the test chambers (and even there, there are broken parts) and gritty after the Wham Level. The first half of the game is shiny, the second half is gritty.
 * Chrono Trigger: Compare the Crystal Spires and Togas kingdom of Zeal to the run-down, After the End scenario of 2300 A.D.
 * Halo - The Covenant is all shiny silver and purple, and everything is sleek and rounded. UNSC equipment is blocky and gray/tan/dull green.
 * Eversion -
 * More like
 * Bioshock is an interesting example: it was once very shiny, but it was made gritty by a civil war.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog CD has this as its theme. The present day levels for the most part are usually in the middle when it is bright and shiny. The past levels are the same way, just more primitive. If you're playing the good future levels, they are really bright and shiny. Though if you're playing in the bad future(the one ruled by Dr. Robotnik's/Eggman's)it is total hell. Everything's got a dark brown, rusty and muddy look, the skies have a crimson/purple look, the oceans are polluted, and so on. Those futures are so bad that even the Doc's robots are miserable and broken down. Yes it's just that bad.
 * Starcraft features a war between the shiny Protoss, the gritty Terrans, and the even grittier Zerg.
 * The Zerg are biological, normal gritty doesn't actually come into it.
 * That's not grit, that's ichor. And the Zerg have plenty of that.
 * Deus Ex aggregates nice and tidy accommodations of Versalife corporation and UNATCO headquarters and the rather unpleasant urban neighborhoods (barring Paris that will look gorgeous even the world comes rolling to the doors of Hell).
 * Ditto for Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. The La Croix Tower explicitly stands out of the generally bleak and tarnished surroundings. As a matter of fact, the Downtown LA map where the Tower is situated features this in spades: the western half of the map features an Abandoned Hospital, an awful lot of dingy-looking buildings and houses, a crackhouse, the Last Round bar, a derelict warehouse, and an underpass used by the local vagrants as shelter. The eastern half of the map, while still somewhat gritty, features the Confession Club (which used to be a cathedral), the Skyline Apartment Building, and the decidedly upmarket Empire Hotel.
 * In one extent or another this is case in most of the strategy games, with the "good" fraction having shiny, or at least well-structured and regularly-shapped buildings while those of the "bad" one tend to be gritty, ominous-looking and/or battered or even cobbled together. The biggest offenders are, of course, Orcs (in Dawn of War they DO cobble their buildings together from junk), GDI/NOD are more into the Ordinary vs Ominous territory, and in Dark Reign 2 the contrast was laid out with the subtlety of a battering ram: JDA, the global law-enforcers, have silvery high-tech premises and their enemies Sprawlers huddle in rusty and angular dwellings.
 * Eve Online has shiny Amarr ships versus "flying junkyard" Minmatar ships. Conversely, Gallente ships have shiny, smooth, almost organic curves while Caldari ships are angular and much more utilitarian.
 * Fallout contrasts the shininess of the Vaults and Brotherhood of Steel-related locations with the ultra-gritty Wasteland. In the first game it is worth noting that the shinier a location, the more likely it was to be ultimately evil, while the gritter-looking places and people were usually mostly harmless. Fallout 2 is much shinier than the original, with far more built-up cities and far more slick gangsters in the form of mafia-style families and even a porn cinema, while Fallout 3 is more gritty, like the first game.
 * Assassin's Creed series varies it's locales quite a bit, from elaborately modeled palaces, churches, mosques and temples all the way to the run-down and dirty districts of the poor. In the second game, the protagonist can lift the town of Monteriggioni from The Dung Ages by investing in renovations and art. However, the shiniest and prettiest parts are invariably the "temples" and vaults of Those Who Came Before.
 * Final Fantasy VI. Oddly, the towns are just as shiny after the Apocalypse as before. Except for Tzen and Mobliz.
 * Taken to extremes in Dystopia where Cyberspace lies on the extreme end of shiny, and meatspace is on the medium-high part of gritty. This is especially noticeable in areas where cyberspace is shaped the same as meatspace. Punk architecture is usually more gritty than Corp architecture.
 * Administrative and scientific areas in Doom 3 are usually of a silvery tone, and polished metal prevails. Rust-orange colors and rougher materials are characteristic of maintenance sections.
 * Most of The Journeyman Project is shiny, except for the Underwater Base, Sinclair's lab, and the underground part of the Mars colony.
 * The settings in World of Warcraft run the gamut of shininess, ranging from the vibrant Eversong Woods to the gray and gritty Blackwing Lair. Some places combine both, like Deepholm and the recovering Western Plaguelands.
 * Mass Effect, being an extremely developed 'verse, has both ends of the spectrum. The Normandy, Ilium, Noveria and rich, developed worlds tend toward the shiny, while Tuchanka, Feros, Omega and poorer colonies get pretty gritty. The Citadel itself is fairly shiny as a rule, but it has its share of contrast between the uber-shiny Presidium and the grittier Wards.
 * Mass Effect, being an extremely developed 'verse, has both ends of the spectrum. The Normandy, Ilium, Noveria and rich, developed worlds tend toward the shiny, while Tuchanka, Feros, Omega and poorer colonies get pretty gritty. The Citadel itself is fairly shiny as a rule, but it has its share of contrast between the uber-shiny Presidium and the grittier Wards.

Western Animation

 * Insektors was basically about a war between Gritty and Shiny.
 * WALL-E consciously hits both extremes: it has a very dirty setting (the ruins of Earth) and a very clean setting (the spaceship). WALL-E himself is filthy and made up of spare parts, and EVE is shiny, sleek and streamlined.

Real Life

 * This is most definitely Truth in Television. Basically, the more concentrated the wealth and power, the shinier, newer, and better maintained the buildings, clothes, and people will be.
 * The Big Applesauce in Real Life. Everything more than ten feet above the ground is shiny. Everything less than ten feet above the ground is gritty.
 * Japan, or at least the major cities I've seen, mostly shiny in the center with some dilapidated areas being gritty dingy.
 * Las Vegas is very shiny on the surface, but quickly becomes gritty the farther you get from The Strip, or if you just go around the wrong corner.
 * Like New Orleans; it seems such a shiny happy place that people mistake it for a theme park, and mistake all the inhabitants for tour guides. That annoys many who actually live there. And it's so patchy that there isn't a 'good' and 'bad' side, but anyone without common sense, strolling through like the whole place is a theme park, is likely to get robbed at best or killed and rolled at worst.
 * Mexico tends to be shiny near the beaches in the tourist cities, but very rapidly becomes gritty as one moves away from the resorts.
 * Dubai. The world's biggest tower with "migrant worker areas" at its feet.
 * London and Paris, on the other hand, while they have areas at the end of both scales, the most famous parts tend to be both magnificent and filthy at the same time.
 * Unlike other natural disasters, tornadoes can cut a path through a town while leaving the surrounding area untouched. This leads to something that looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland next to a perfectly normal area.