A style bible nobody reads is just a PDF
Every studio has one. It is accurate at version three, sitting in shared storage at version nine, and no part of the production actually checks against it. The registry makes the canon something the pipeline reads, not something a person is supposed to remember.
Why canon drifts
The bible is a document, not a constraint
It describes the character in prose. Nothing downstream can act on prose, so compliance depends entirely on whether the artist read it recently and interpreted it the same way you would.
Nobody knows which version is current
Three copies exist in two drives and an email thread. The one your outsourcing partner is working from is whichever they were sent in March.
Drift is only visible in aggregate
Each episode is defensible on its own. Put six side by side and the palette has walked, the silhouette has softened, and no single change was ever big enough to reject.
What the registry holds
Structured entries the generation modules read at request time — not documentation about them.
Character entries
Seeds, silhouette rules, costume and prop constraints, and the traits that must survive a redesign — held per character and per production, so a spin-off can diverge deliberately.
Palettes and type
Exact colour values, permitted substitutions and typographic rules, applied to generation rather than described alongside it.
Version history
Every change recorded with who made it and when, so "the design changed in episode 4" has an answer instead of an argument.
Diffs between versions
See what actually changed between two states of a character rather than comparing two images by eye and hoping.
Multiple registries per studio
Client A and Client B keep separate canon with separate access. An agency running eight brands does not blend them.
Scoped access for partners
Give an outsourcing partner the entries for the characters they are working on, and nothing else from your slate.
A new artist or an external vendor produces on-canon work in their first week — because the constraints reached them through the pipeline instead of through a document they were asked to read.