Illustration by Ryo-chimo, featuring his own mascot character on the right

3 months ago I started writing a blog entry on one of my favourite ‘under-appreciated’ anime from the last few years, Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta (NOT to be confused with the mind-numbingly dreadful original Yozakura Quartet TV anime adaptation!). Other than singing its praises, I wanted to hit home the fact that the series was a giant step forward for a fascinating new generation of animators and a landmark series in the use of digital animation in commercial anime production.

But, as I was putting it together, it quickly became apparent that this little aside was becoming not as little as I thought, and that it had actually become a post unto itself! So now, after my research into the topic uncovered an interesting story to be told, I present to you a dive into web-generation animators, their use of digital animation and how one especially famous animator, Ryo-chimo, has paved the way for them to take the anime world by storm in recent years!

Web-animators, gif-animators

Before we delve any further, I need to get two terms that are often batted about in the Japanese animation fandom straight with you:

The ‘web-generation’ (web-gen) rabble are termed so because they are a pioneering generation who grew up with the advent of the internet and the rapid improvement of tools and software for digital drawing. This put them in a position where they could easily hone their skills as a hobby using Flash and drawing tablets, creating gif animation and putting their talent on display on websites and blogs for the world (and future employers looking to scout them) to see. ‘Gif-animators’ more specifically refers to those who created and shared digital gifs as the means of learning animation. These web-gen guys would often get scouted and pulled onto mainstream animation projects by some of the more avant-garde directors looking for new talent to spice up their projects with some fresh faces. This self-made kind of career is in stark contrast to the traditional avenues for entering the Japanese anime industry.

The fact that they didn’t originate from an animation school or through the rigorous training of a particular studio but learnt themselves and got where they were by showing off their individual talents makes these guys an interesting presence in the industry. Without learning animation through guided training or experience as a key-animator they rapidly develop their own styles from scratch or by adopting and playing with the styles of other animators they follow ( something which has been made far easier for them to consume by the flood of animators now running blogs and using twitter). The result is often that they revel in a flashy, idiosyncratic style yet are not as proficient in the fundamentals of animation – being able to draw convincing movement of their subjects in line with the models/designs of the production.

The latter is a common concern among many industry veterans, but the former is a boon to anime as these guys are often called in for certain scenes or episodes to make them crazy and stand-out-ish. When these webgen staff are herded together on the right project with the right oversight they are a force to be reckoned with, and that’s exactly what happened on Yozakura Quartet, the series that really made me notice the potential of these new faces. We’ll look at a few such anime throughout this post.

There are a few cliques of these guys active these days, like those revolving around producer Shouta Umehara at Dougakobo who worked on Yuruyuri, Love Lab and the Mikakunin PV, or the associates of Tatsuya Yoshihara, responsible for some of the more interesting animation from Muromi-san, Barakamon and, most recently, Yoru no Yatterman.

But the group of people I want to hone in on with this post is the old-guard, the forerunners who heralded the dawn of the web-generation. Kenichi Kutsuna, Ryo-chimo, Norio Matsumoto and Shingo Yamashita were the first wave to go pro from their hobby animations and gifs, scouted by animators such as Satoru Utsunomiya or directors like Osamu Kobayashi. These guys have really pursued and pushed the cause of harnessing digital animation technique in their creations. They have set the ball rolling by pioneering the use of digital animation work in TV anime such as Birdy the Mighty Decode and Yozakura Quartet Hana no Uta.

Digital Animation

I’ve mentioned digital animation a few times so far, and it’s because drawing digitally is inexorably linked to the new kind of movement and visual style that these web-gen guys are bringing into play across the industry.

Put simply, digital animation is animation created from a series of digital drawings drawn on a tablet in a computer software environment, usually Flash. The important thing to stress is that the role of Flash here is simply to replace pencil and paper as the tool to draw the frames that will ultimately be composed into the final animation product – it’s used as a drawing tool NOT an animation tool. There is no automatic in-betweening, it’s not used to colour the frames and it’s not used to actually render the finished animation; the digital animation is a series of discrete drawings. When people talk about flash animation in the west they think of auto in-betweened stuff used in children’s cartoons, which have an awkwardly smooth and dull kind of motion, but in Japan the animator still creates the movement totally by hand with drawings, and thank god for that!

Examples of digital drawings by Shingo Yamashita:

In fact, very often the digital drawings are treated the same as regular key drawings (called ‘genga’) – they are printed and scanned to be coloured and finally composited into the end product in a software package called RETAS. In-betweening and animation direction can work as normal, with the printed key-frames being sent to the other parties to work on, or the flash file being shared with them if they too are working digitally.

The only time I’ve heard of flash being used to render the animation right through was in the recent series Ping Pong, in which Masaaki Yuasa’s Science Saru production team seem to have developed a technique to use Flash’s auto-in-between tools to produce certain movements that don’t look totally vapid (but they’re certainly a little unusual):

Perks of Digital Animation

With all that said, there definitely are differences between analog and digital animation, mainly stemming from the fact that in flash you can very efficiently plan out, modify and test the timing of your animation cuts, because the timeline is shown right on the screen. This makes it much easier to plan out the sequence and play with the timing, replaying the animation back instantly to test how it’s looking. This easy playback also enables the animator to experiment more with a sense of dynamic ‘camerawork’ on their cuts. This is why many gif-animators have a highly-evolved grasp on how to create animation that feels like it’s totally free in a 3D space, with spinning cameras and lots of background animation.

Drawing within flash also allows much more efficient management of layers to animation, granting the ability to toggle on and off any number of layers on the screen at the click of a button rather than trying to coordinate sets of drawings. I don’t think this has really started to be taken full advantage of yet but certainly it enabled BahiJD to play around with scenes packed with many layers of Space Dandy to an exciting effect.

Another interesting stylistic thing you notice with a lot of digitally-animated sequences from gif-animators is that they’ll use forms of colour with minimal linework or even NO linework. This is especially true of their effects animation, which often portrays magic, flame, laser beams, etc. as borderless streams or shapes of colour. The simple reason for this is that in drawing digitally you can very easily use the solid paint tool to draw. These digital genga from Birdy illustrate the use of this tool:

This sort of globular, borderless colour is a distinctly new style that these guys are bringing to anime and allows for some effects to be created much quicker than having to draw the extent of the shapes with linework or paint. As it’s quicker to create, effect animation of this variety can often be made extremely fluid and fast.

Perhaps the most evolved example of this style comes from Shin Sekai Yori, by its number one user, Shingo Yamashita. This is the ED from that show, which he animated. It’s striking and unique because of the way it feels painted rather than drawn, and that comes from this approach.

Limitations of Digital Animation

That said, it also serves to highlight the downside to digital animation – the ability to be expressive in animation through changing-up the linework, like making it rough or gritty to add raw intensity to a cut. I can’t imagine things like Yoshimichi Kameda’s sumi-e brush style animation being possible on a tablet.

Kameda and others using rough and experimental shading and linework on paper create some truly powerful moments of animation and drawings that digital animation would really struggle to replicate.

A certain amount of finesse and subtlety  is also lost when drawing with a tablet. Although they are improving every year, the precision of digital drawing may never match the absolute control an artist has with pencil or paint on paper.

For some of these animators, particularly those in the ameteur stage of their career, there may actually be a risk that these ease of modifying the drawings across their timeline reinforces some bad habits. It allows for gif animators’ tendency to make characters move extravagantly and wildly for movement’s sake. There may well be less value placed on getting each key-frame right, and therefore the animation is less through-conceived and more created on the fly, the final product being more dynamic but with less gravity and impact.

Ryo-chimo & The Evolution of Digital Animation

Although many of these web-animators have had experience creating animation with flash for their own hobby gifs and side-projects, many are faced with entering an industry that remains largely powered by pencil-and-paper drawings. That said, it has come a long way in the last few years towards facilitating the use of digital animation in normal commercial productions. This change hasn’t happened on its own, animators have had to push for it, and no one has pushed harder or further than a man named Ryo-chimo.

Ryo-chimo in the top left feature in a Newtype magazine segment ‘This creator is amazing!’

Ryo-chimo (real name: Ryousuke Sawa),  is pretty recognisable as the vanguard of the web generation of animators, being one of the first to turn professional after being scouted for his gifs  (Kenichi Kutsuna is generally considered to be the first). From there, he very quickly rose to prominence as a central figure in the ongoing movement towards digital animation. He’s also one of the best examples of a preternaturally talented animator whose lack of a formal animation training background does not seem to have in any way impeded his ability to tackle any kind of animation.

In his youth he was an avid anime fan and otaku and this led him into illustration and animation as a hobby. After briefly working at a game company, he got his foot in the industry’s door back in 2004 when he was scouted by the illustrious Osamu Kobayashi for his new anime, BECK. Kobayashi saw the gifs Ryo-chimo had put together on his website and, being Osamu Kobayashi, thought it worth giving him an opportunity to see what he could do. In an almost unprecedented move, without spending any time at all doing in-between work, Ryo-chimo leapt straight into doing key animation in the first episode and became a mainstay animator of the series.

Soon after, he was invited to work on Sousei no Aquarion where he first worked with an animator he considers to be a god, Satoru Utsunomiya, who was largely in charge of episode 19. Satoru Utsunomiya deserves a lot of credit for scouting and providing opportunity to several important digital animators at this time, such as Kenichi Kutsuna, and being a proponent of the use of digital tools. During Sousei Aquarion he pushed the use of digital, 3D layouts (animation drafts), which are now commonplace in anime production. Thanks to Utsunomiya,  Ryo-chimo’s work here on episode 19 is actually the first time he was able to draw digitally in his professional anime career (which you can see his raw key frames for here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U08rIirZrTo ).

Ryo-chimo’s next big gig, also with Utsunomiya, was just around the corner: the awesome and experimental anime called Noein. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend checking it out. Not only does it have a very unique and fascinating sci-fi story, it’s also unusual in terms of its production,  opting not to to have a series animation director; each episode’s animation director’s own style crept through with their uncorrected take on the character designs. On this series he was a regular animator and essentially studied under Utsunomiya and the illustrious Norio Matsumoto. When given the chance to key animate a climactic battle scene in episode 12, he produced a sequence that really put him in the spotlight as a young star animator.

The smooth yet intense animation had a thrilling gravitas to it that made it one of the most memorable parts of the whole show. I remember sitting up and being totally struck by the power of the animation in this scene, and that was back before I was interested in animation specifically. Norio Matsumoto was the animation director on that episode and gave Ryo-chimo that part to work on. Apparently it was Norio Matsumoto’s idea to use the rough line-work in the scene that gave it that visceral edge. This explains why, on the surface, it’s not quite Ryo-chimo’s usual style, which favours minimalistic, very clean and nuanced linework.

The next indicator of Ryo-chimo’s greatness was probably his scene from Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo, which is his own, personal favourite bit of work to date. He animated the scene of Makoto running down the street followed by the camera. In an interesting twist on the sequence, she starts to falter from exhaustion and is overtaken by the camera, only to regain her strength off-screen and push herself back into the frame. It’s fun ideas like these that can really make animation interesting! The sequence showed that Ryo-chimo was able to draw convincing character movement to a high degree of realism.

Apparently he got the idea for the strong portrayal of her exhaustion using reference footage of him actually running down the street as fast as he could, with other film crew driving alongside him to film it. The cut was extended out to a much longer sequence that originally intended following his work.

From there, after a couple of years worth of more compelling animation, including a scene from Mitsuo Iso’s enigmatic TV anime Denno Coil,  Ryo-chimo moved up a level to the position of character designer/chief animation director of Birdy the Mighty Decode. Ryo-chimo was well established as a popular illustrator and he created some unapologetically attractive and charismatic character designs for Birdy Decode. Belying his origins as an otaku, his predilection for drawing lascivious and moe characters was on full display, but he also showed his ability to create characters with an indescribable vivid depth and personality . Very much in the web-generation philosophy he designs characters which favour simple linework and bold colours over the luscious detail and highlights associated with the previous era of anime.

His characters come to life with vibrant colours and striking expressions. This web-generation style is quickly rising to prominence as a dominant new, modern look for anime, with many other series like Rolling Girls, Yoru no Yatterman, etc, that have these younger people involved leaning towards it. But Ryo-chimo really paved the way with Birdy.

But he did more than just succeed as a character designer for that series, he also seized the opportunity to introduce the use of digital animation. To overcome a general sense of resistance from many at the studio (A-1 Pictures), Ryo-chimo went about assembling a team of people who were on-board with implementing the use of digital tools. With the backing he needed, he managed the first implementation and support of digital animation on such a scale, with whole swaths of the series being drawn in Flash. This really fully came about in season 2 and gave a number of these web-gen animators the chance to better show off what they could do with their native platform. The result was sequences like this:

Birdy also allowed for several other animators to be introduced to the use of flash and digital animation, perhaps most notably Tomoyuki Niho, who is now well-known as a web-generation animator (incidentally, Niho’s professional debut was on Noein). The series courted some degree of controversy in season 2 when the Ryo-chimo and the director decided that they would let the animators draw fully in their own style without supervision in episode 7 (and 12). The result was an action-heavy episode that presented radically different animation styles between shots, many of them looking totally unlike the usual presentation of the show. This segment was from Tomoyuki Niho:

The borderline abstract, angular geometrical forms are actually in his style, not the result of the show ‘running out of money’ or being grossly ‘behind schedule’ as was commonly asserted (I suspect there was some time pressure, if only due to the absence of the correcting power of a supervising animator). Whatever the case, the experiment was not well-received by the fan-base and the episodes were heavily corrected for the DVD release (here’s Tomoyuki Niho’s bit corrected).

Birdy’s experimentation may have been hit and miss, but when it hit it delivered punchy and jaw-dropping action sequences with a kind of speed and ferociousness I hadn’t ever seen before.

The next step in his career came with the chance to direct the 3-episode OVA reboot of Yozakura Quartet (Yozakura Quartet: Hoshi no Umi). For this, he got together many of his associates for a web-gen animator laden explosion of stunning animation and sleek, modern production work.

Following that success, a series was announced. Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta was brought to TV with Ryo-chimo as director, character designer and chief animation director (for all but one episode). Being a chief animation director (CAD) on an anime TV series is a phenomenal effort, but being the director AND CAD is just astronomical, and really quite a rare thing. Ryo-chimo must have not slept for months! No wonder he says his career focus is on short anime works now (as sad as that is to hear). Needless to say, he didn’t get to do any key animation on this series.

But with the level of ownership he had of this series, he was able to assemble a team of digital animators to further what he started with Birdy. For the very first episode he achieved the goal of creating an episode entirely with digital key-animation, something that hadn’t yet been done, to my knowledge. Unlike the rougher experiments on Birdy, this episode turned out to be a remarkably polished and charming gem, and webgen-styled through and through.  Detailed design and art-focus was traded in for playful movement and liveliness, but it was more carefully crafted and tempered than web-animators had been known for. Here,  Ryo-chimo proved the viability of the digital animation production process for commercial TV anime.

To make this happen, Ryo-chimo leant heavily on frequent collaborator and Flash-animator extraordinaire, Shingo Yamashita. Often called ‘yama’ for short, Shingo Yamashita is easily the best animator out there who uses flash for his work. He created my personal favourite bit of animation in Hoshi no Umi OVA, which is another one of those special bits of animation that awoke me to how awesome animation itself can be.

To this day it remains one of my favourite segments of animation for its wild, kinetic energy. Ryo-chimo bought him on board for Yozakura Quartet knowing full well that, to make it work, he would need someone with vast digital experience and talent to guide and supervise the relatively young digital animator team he had assembled. Shingo Yamashita bought his own colleagues on board for the project as well, forming a trio with Sakazume Takahito and Enokido Shun throughout the series.

The team he led, who also came back for episode 6 and other parts of the series, included the following names:

• 関弘光 (Hiromitsu Seki)
• 小笠原真 (Shin Ogawara)
• 亀澤蘭 (Norifumi Kugai)
• 加藤ふみ
• 黒岩志摩 (Shima Kuroiawa)
• 藤澤研一 (Kenichi Fujiwara)
• 伊勢鷹人 (Ise Takahito)
• 川野達朗  (Kawano Tatsurou, the digital animation director for the episode)

Many of these guys are now established digital animator names in the industry, appearing on web-gen friendly series like Love Lab, Space Dandy (episode 13 in particular), Yama no Susume season episode 13, Ping Pong, Naruto and Yoru no Yatterman. At one point or another almost all notable web-gen animators were involved in the creation of Hana no Uta.

But he did more than just reel in the right animators for the work, he implemented a digital production process at studio Tatsunoko which remains alive and well today. Much like what web-gen animators did for studio Dougakobo after Yuruyuri, his work with Tatsunoko on Yozakura Quartet brought about a revitalisation to the studio, whose works since have become known for their fun, energetic animation and visual cool-factor. A legacy of Ryo-chimo’s efforts, Tatsunoko Productions is one of the biggest users of digital animation and now provides their animators with tablets if it is their tool of choice (whereas you’d normally have to pay for your own).

You can see that Tatsunoko is fostering quite a bit of web-gen talent through their series since, such as Yoru no Yatterman, which features a large array of these guys, led by Tatsuya Yoshihara,  creating pretty much all of its stand-out moments of animation.

Ryo-chimo himself, meanwhile has created his own company, Time Note Animation, where he lists himself as an animator and illustrator. He seems to have parted ways with Tatsunoko somewhat and is now looking more at the animated short production space rather than commercial TV works. The most recent example of this was ME! ME! ME!, the short created for Hideaki Anno’s Animator Expo initiative, for which Ryo-chimo was listed as a planning advisor. He also appears to be a vocal proponent and teacher of digital animation, often giving lectures at animation schools on the topic or participating in industry events.

Wrap-up

Nowadays a lot of the most arresting and exciting animated scenes in TV anime are being brought to you by the new web generation and, thanks largely to the efforts of people like Ryo-chimo and Shingo Yamashita, they are increasingly able to create using their weapon of choice: digital animation. This is rapidly changing the face of anime as we know it, ushering in a new flavour of modernism which endows their work flashy, hyperactive animation and simple yet elegant character designs with vivid, iridescent colour schemes. The hangover of the detail and realism oriented 90s is being superseded by this bold new look and it’s breathing a fresh life into the medium, exemplified by series like Kyousogiga, Yozakura Quartet and P.A Works’ Uchoten Kazoku.

Digital animation has already introduced some new techniques that have added to the repertoire of animation, but at the same time, others out there like Yoshimichi Kameda are highlighting that there’s just some things pencil and paper will always offer over digital drawing. Right now the industry is benefiting from both sides of the story – digital animation styles are being experimented with right alongside analog animation and the new web-generation are showing their own brand of charismatic animation in the same series as some of the highly-trained veterans are producing astounding sequences with the utmost technical prowess.

So we’re experiencing the best of both worlds. But if the institutional training style of the traditional industry subsides to the tide of brash, self-made gif animators jumping into the fray, there’s a real risk that we’ll eventually lose animators of a certain calibre: those with the meticulous draftsmanship, unwavering professionalism and a studious attention to the art of movement that gave us films like Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh and Akira. Fortunately, studios like Ghibli, Kyoto Animation and Production I.G continue to carefully nurture and train their own animators in the more conventional way (and it really shows in their works too).

Over the last couple of years, I can see that my focus on this blog has pivoted from general anime enthusiasm toward celebrating a very particular strain of anime with a gushing, obsessive level of discussion. The kind of anime I’m talking about here isn’t just ‘good anime’, an anime that ticks all the boxes of entertainment, or even anime that I think are amazingly produced. Rather, it’s that anime that comes along once in a while and strikes a chord within me in some intangible and unexpected way. There was Love Lab with its effervescent characterful animation, Ping Pong with its wobbly, skewed aesthetic and Yozakura Quartet that blew me away with its fresh, vivacious webgen production, and of course many more that I haven’t been able to talk about yet. But the thing I’ve found with each of them is that their resonating charm was fuelled by the very personal creative impulses, ambitions and talents of the people behind them. The latest series to move me in this way was Erased, or Boku Dake ga Inai Machi.

Boku ga Inai Machi (or Erased) is an anime adaptation of a popular seinen manga series by Kei Sanbe, and seems to have been met with universal praise from viewers around the world. The author takes the basic ingredients of crime-thriller and childhood coming-of-age drama, throws in a hint of time travel and seamlessly blends them together into a riveting, and suspenseful story. After being framed for murder the protagonist, Satoru, is unwittingly thrown back in time to his childhood where he must reach out to those around him and muster his personal resolve to try and outwit a cunning and cruel serial killer. Much has been written about the show’s riveting story but most critics seem unable to put their finger on why they appreciated the production side of things. I am going to try put my finger on it! Looking into it, I soon found that, counter to the case in many anime, its excellence is largely due to the man in the proverbial director’s chair, Ito Tomohiko.

Director Ito has already proven himself worthy as a producer with his directorial work on Sword Art Online and Silver Spoon at A-1 Productions. An antithesis to studios like Trigger or Kyoto Animation, A-1 Pictures’ core, permanent staff are just a small group of producers and digital effect/CG artists – their animators are employed on a casual as-need basis. This is why there is no A-1 Pictures ‘look’ beyond their post-production finish standards and CG work. As such, it falls to the director to assemble the key creative team that will drive the style and quality of the production, and Ito was easily up to the task. But while these previous outings were polished and successful, Erased is perhaps the first time we’ve seen Ito rise well above the perfunctory and flex his creative muscles as director.

One reason for this might be that he has both a history and an interest in the thriller genre, and originally started in the industry at Madhouse working on serious anime with a suspenseful edge such as Monster and Death Note. Since moving on from Madhouse and being in charge of more light-hearted quintessentially ‘anime’ works he has expressed a desire to sink his teeth into something more in this vein. When one of his colleagues showed him the Erased manga years ago it obviously resonated with him as he set to work rallying Aniplex (A-1 Picture’s parent company) directly to launch an anime adaptation with him as director.

As a fan of thrillers, he has clearly relished the role. He made a conscious effort to ramp up the feeling of suspense and excitement in the show by drawing inspiration from Hollywood thrillers rather than following the approach of Japanese TV thrillers or similar anime. For example, while the show is set in real parts of Hokkaido, the stark and sombre way they portrayed their locations was strongly influenced by the Danish crime drama series The Killing, set in Copenhagen. Ito has said that the butterfly that appears throughout the show whenever Satoru jumps through time is an homage to another thriller work (but won’t say which one! – he did say it’s not Butterfly Effect though). Overall, there was a push to make Erased feel exciting and cinematic in a Hollywood thriller kind of way.

This push was made possible by Ito’s industrious style of directing, as someone who really throws himself at every production. When he took on Silver Spoon he visited agricultural schools and ate a lot of food to understand the setting of the series. For Sword Art Online, he spent a solid week going to net cafes after work and staying up late into the night playing MMORPGs to get a sense of how people interacted in online games. For the later series of Sword Art, to help portray realistic gun battles he went shooting. Let’s hope no practical experience was needed in portraying the dark kidnappings of Erased! But this all goes to show that Ito truly pursues every avenue to excel, tinkering with many realms of production that many directors are happy to overlook. This may be truer in the case of Erased than ever before.

One thing I noticed pretty quickly when watching the show is that it didn’t sound like just another run-of-the-mill anime; the voice acting felt refreshing and somehow more natural. Rather than the crisp, familiar voices of the industry staples, the protagonist was handled by film actors, both for his young and old versions. To make the two voices feel like they really belonged to the same character, all of young Satoru’s lines were read by his older counterpart, so that his adult inflections and tones could be better reflected. Going even further, in order to increase the natural, conversational feel of the dialogue there was a conscious decision to ensure that the voice actors were together to record their lines in, rather than allowing them to record their lines independently (a common occurrence in the industry for in-demand seiyuu). The sound effects too, were consciously used to add suspense, drawing from  western fields and the way they use bangs, rumbles or other noises to surprise and unsettle the viewer.

However, Ito’s stamp leaves its biggest imprint on the series’ visual design. Rather than being forged from the fires of animation like many notable directors, Ito hails from a storyboarding and production setting background, and that enables him to expertly and holistically control the look of the show from the ground up. He put a huge creative signature on the show by going against the grain of the normal adaptation storyboarding process, instructing his storyboarders not to replicate panels from the manga but to envision how the layouts and scenes can evoke a cinematic feel that would keep people’s attention hooked. He used a number of approaches to try and achieve this.

Attention was paid to the use of visual effects to keep the series from feeling flat – flicking to shots of the spinning wheel of film and other visually compelling shots were used to spice up the flow.

Perhaps his most apparent imprints on the look of the series is his instruction to staff to pay close attention to backlighting – how light from outside windows, streetlights, etc can cast visual depth into shots. This may be something he picked up an appreciation for when working on Guilty Crown, which used lighting to superb effect. The general aesthetic of the show bows to this edict wherever possible and gives it a strong cinematic flavour. At times the use of light and shadow is used to dramatically ramp up the tension, other times it simply adds to the realistic feel the show aims for by ensuring that the lighting of each scene is carefully rendered as it would be in real life – no scenes are simply bright for the sake of presenting the characters and many occur only under the light cast from a TV or nearby street lamps. The characters being enclosed by darkness in these night scenes gives a sense of dread and unease.

Ito didn’t just ensure that the series felt realistic and visually engaging.  As a storyboarder inspired to join the industry after seeing Evangelion, it certainly looks as though he carried the influence of Hideki Anno’s work throughout his career and it’s no less apparent here. Ito uses the space between characters as well as stark lighting to symbolic effect, treating layouts more as paintings and works of art than stages for the characters. By that I don’t just mean he just tries to make them pretty, but he crafts them to convey visual metaphor and evoke particular emotions. He’ll do things like place two characters on either side of a clear division between light and shadow, or use perspective and composition to emphasise which character is in control or more powerful. Similarly, he’ll use open spaces to depict emotional distance, and occasionally jarringly centred shots to show urgency or tension. This is something that Evangelion in particular is famous for.

Erased (Ito Tomohiko Storyboarded):

Evangelion (Hideaki Anno Storyboarded):

As a result, the series has a very conscious use of layout and composition to help underpin the emotion of the scenes. The childhood scenes pull the camera back so that characters appear small, placing them in large, open spaces.  This, combined with the very deliberate effort to frame many shots as though the children are being watched, gives a real sense of helplessness and danger.

His repertoire is taken a step further in Erased, introducing a very strong focus on the use of colours in shots to symbolise emotions. All throughout the series, he paints with reds and blues at every possible opportunity to reinforce the mood of the scene.

Early in the series, it becomes clear that red is associated with danger and isolation while blue is associated with safety and family as a kind of dichotomy between Satoru with a loving mother and the lonely victim Kayo whose only family are relentlessly abusive. As the series develops I think the director used this association to deliver extra suspense and tension in many of his scenes. Maybe even subconsciously, I suspect much of Erased audience felt a wave of dread when the background changed to red in the sequence with Satoru in the car with the killer because this colour association had been woven through the show up until that point. Of course, none of this is brand new in the realm of visual storytelling, but Ito ensures it is delivered with just enough nuance that you feel its impact without necessarily noticing it on screen.

Ito’s deft handling of storyboarding, layout and general direction may have developed while working under super-director Mamoru Hosoda, having served as assistant director on The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars.  Given his Eva influences it’s no surprise that his work contains the creative DNA of Kunihiko Ikuhara and Osamu Dezaki.  Like Hosoda, Ito takes a naturalistic approach to symbolic framing, preferring to place his characters in a real space, rather than the surreal and arbitrary stages of Ikuhara and Dezaki.  His use of framing seems to parallel some Anno’s cinematic inspirations, such as the use of minimalist camera work.

Layouts from Ito’s Kekkai Sensen 11:

Ikuhara’s style:

Hideaki Anno style:

His background may not be in genga, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate animation. Like Sword Art Online before it, Erased has its fair share of charismatic animation. Again, it may be his time under Hosoda that gave him some of this appreciation, or at least the production know-how to getting this animation created. He certainly picked the right chief animation director for SAO, and Keigo Sasaki is a similarly good fit for Erased, bringing consistent, polished art and moments of realistic, yet emotive character animation. The animation highlight of the series was undoubtedly episode 3, spearheaded by Takahiro Shikama.

Shikama was the director, storyboarder and animation director for that episode and he really shines, delivering what is, in my view, the best episode of the series. It’s certainly the episode that first made me feel like Erased was something special. His storyboarding work applies Ito’s direction to superb effect creating an episode that is brimming with dramatic tension at every step. He harnesses a number of animators to delivery some powerful scenes of animation such as the ice-skating race (handled by Shikama himself) and the romantic scene at the end of Satoru and Kayo being surrounded by running foxes (handled by Takahito Sakazume). Takahiro Shikama was a major player in the production of Sword Art Online, being the main action animation director for the first season. But this is the first time he has had the opportunity to show his mettle at the director level. I hope he gets the opportunity more in the future!

One area it’s clear that director Ito is not as confident in is the writing. Erased requires delicate portrayals of family life and domestic abuse, whereas Ito had trouble even trying to portray intimate moments between Asuna and Kirito (as apparently all the staff were single). So it’s very fortunate that he found a great screenwriter in Taku Kishimoto.

More than just a thriller, Erased scratches beneath the surface of events and evokes profound human drama in its storytelling. From the harrowed Hinazuki trapped in a miserable life of abuse at the hands of her mother, to the protagonist’s encountering true feeling and meaning his life through reliving his past, Erased is steeped in emotion. Taku Kishimoto is in charge of the story for the series and almost certainly is to thank for this, having written the entire script for the anime adaptation of Usagi Drop and Silver Spoon (also under director Ito). Erased is an-edge-of-your seat thriller made all the more intense because you feel so much for those involved that every dangerous development is like a kick in the gut; the killer isn’t just after a random kid, they’re after Hinazuki.

Interestingly, I don’t think the episodes that Ito storyboarded himself were the strongest. While he has a history of storyboarding work, on review, I don’t see him as being particularly talented at it (except maybe for Kekkai Sensen episode 11). Ito isn’t a great anime director because he is a great artist but, more in the vein of Kenji Kamiyama or Mamoru Oshii, it’s because he is full of high-level ideas and has the ability to harness the creative talents of those under him to weave those ideas through every level and every facet of his productions. He doesn’t fall into the trap of many anime directors, of focusing on just he animation, or just the story, but he is able to take a step back and see the whole picture, how every part of an anime production can be utilised in symphony to render a vision. I see real potential for Ito to fall into the hall of great anime director’s and avidly await his first opportunity to direct an original series.

Staff:

Director: 土屋浩幸 (Hiroyuki Tsuchiya) [9,15]

Writer: 梅原英司 (Eiji Umehara) [14,15]

Storyboard: 細田直人 (Naoto Hosoda) [10,15]

Monster Animation Director: 小柳達也 (Tatsuya Koyanagi) [Show-wide]

Last night I watched an episode of anime the visceral impact of which took the wind out of me and left me lost for words. I had to just watch the credits roll, silent and still as my spiraling thoughts slowly came back to me. After a night’s rest, I’m ready to get it off my chest: Re:Zero episode 15 was amazing!

Re:Zero has been a consistent surprise to me since it began last season. The product of famous action animator-just-turned-director Gorou Sessha and prolific yet forgettable writer Masahiro Yokotani, Re:Zero is a light-novel adaptation with a very light-novel premise: average guy ends up in a fantasy world surrounded by cute girls and a special power (the ability to restart his day when he dies). Like any healthy grown man, I was skeptical at first. But, ever since its first episode cut short the slow-burning cute and humorous antics by brutally eviscerating all the main characters it has chipped away at all of my doubts before finally obliterating them this week.

This episode kicks the latest arc of the show into gear, pitting our hero Subaru and his doting side-kick Rem against a disturbed cult and a giant ice-bringing monster who is probably the Jealous Witch herself. It’s easily the most suspenseful episode of the show, as, more than ever before, there’s a looming sense of impending doom and a true malevolent villain. On top of that, the emotion is as strong as ever, as Rem’s blooming love for Subaru and her hatred of the cult adds tragedy and yearning to the shocking events that unfold.

Re:Zero has been carefully building its characters from the start to fully capitalise on their foils, passion and drive in moments like this. It’s an anime that many other could learn from in that it has the confidence to slow down and give itself breathing space. There’s time for back-story, there’s time for Rem and Subaru to go shopping together or just talk about their day. Where other light novel series would keep Rem and Ram as cute fanservice maids, Re:Zero has let us witness them grow well beyond their archetype. Other light novel series would have their male protagonist unwavering in his resolve and personality, but Re:Zero gave Subaru a whole episode to wallow in self-pity after ruining his friendship with the heroine. And when this show needs to fire a punch it throws all the weight of its character development behind it and lands a truly crushing blow.

This week was one massive swing to the gut, a gripping ride of suspense, sorrow, fear, rage and an almost suffocating feeling of hapless despair. It hit me in a place that anime usually doesn’t even try to. I’ve seen more violent anime before, but I don’t recall many anime being so brutal to a character as sweet and cherished as Rem or going to such lengths to crush the soul of its main character.

The potency of this episode was further honed by some impressive animation work. The four main animators responsible for the episode are (listed in order of the amount of animation they contributed):

中村和久 (Kazuhisa Nakamura) [15] https://twitter.com/wfoxviper

木宮亮介 (Ryosuke Kimiya) [2,9,15]

又賀大介 (Daisuke Mataga) [3,9,13,15] https://twitter.com/matagadaisuke33

岩田景子 (Keiko Iwata) [1,8,9,15]

These guys are all  credited with both animation direction and key animation, meaning they had a great deal of responsibility and creative control over their sequences. While most of the episode was well executed, the most interesting animation-wise by far was the long scene in the cave with Subaru chained up and tormented by the maniacal cult leader.

This sequence was handled by Kazuhisa Nakamura, which is why he did the most animation on the episode. A new animation director for the show, and someone who is new to me, Nakamura displayed a strong understanding of how animation can be used to deliver atmosphere and impact.

Now I have seen my share of creepy cult anime villains waving their arms around and talking in an insane voice, but the way Nakamura crafted his movements is what made him creepy and unsettling rather than just comical. Nakamura had him cut unpredictably from jerky, nervous contortions into super-smooth, confident movements really gave credence to his vocal lunacy.

Similarly, Rem’s fury as she entered the cave and Subaru’s desperate rage as he watched her die was made so intense by the raw, visceral movements and drawings.

It’s hard to imagine 3DCG or even live-action conveying this scene with such fierce emotional power.

The closing shot of the episode was the final kick to an audience already down, a display of the monstrous power and evil Subaru is now helpless against. The staff involved knew they had made something special and gave it the ED-less credit roll, a well-earned cinematic send-off.

Mitsuo Iso is my favourite animator – that’s an unequivocal fact. Regrettably, it hasn’t been a good decade to be a fan of Iso. Since his work as director on the commercially unsuccessful Denno Coil, he has been an elusive, enigmatic figure, making only scant appearances uncredited here and there. Recently though, we’ve had good news from abroad: Mitsuo Iso has been found alive and well and a French company has dragged him into working on a new animated feature film of theirs, Les Pirates de la Réunion, le réveil des dodos! If you saw that news article pop up on your crunchyroll or ANN feed and didn’t know what all the fuss was about, then this post is for you.

To celebrate the return of the chosen one, I thought I’d gush all over my keyboard for a couple of hours so that the world can at least know the depths of my love for this man. Rather than a detailed break-down of his style and work, it’s more of an indulgent propaganda piece.

Iso is a testament to the fact that, contrary to the frothing gibberish that many western animation purists purport, more frames does not equal better animation. Anyone out there who flatly believes that the more fluid animation is, the better it is, or the more realistic it is, needs to stop and listen to the message Iso conveys through his work.

Throughout his long and industrious career Iso has delved deeper into understanding expressing movement than any other major animator I have seen, which has given him the ability to craft animation in a way no one else in the world can, and that’s no hyperbole. The way in which he shows movement that feels both realistic and organic yet intrinsically ‘animation’ is so perfect and so difficult to break down technically that it’s nothing short of magical. There’s no doubt he has a gift that can’t be learned. When his animation craft is woven into a climactic moment of the right anime, it has the ability to take your breath away.

In my early days of anime fandom, when I didn’t even know what an animation director was, one such scene floored me: Asuka fighting the mass production Evas in the End of Evangelion movie. I actually watched it again recently and that only confirmed its uncontested status as my favourite sequence of animation. I suggest everyone give it another watch (spoiler alert):

It’s not my favourite sequence because it’s the most technically impressive, because it has the best drawing quality or the most realistic movement – I could reel off plenty of examples that best it in any one category. It’s not one quality I can put my finger on but there’s something intangible and transcendent in there.

Perhaps it’s the sense of weight and gravity of the Evas colliding and swinging their joints, the visceral power of their lunges and the way they reel back from the sheer forces involved in the battle. Maybe it’s the way, even though Evangelion is a giant ‘mecha’ its every movement evokes the cathartic willpower of Asuka’s last few breaths – it’s a desperate, violent scramble for survival on a grander scale. Or maybe it’s the fact that every detail is accounted for – the speed at which debris fall, the way leaves ripped from trees are whisked around by momentum, the uniquely real spurting and splattering of blood or the trailing wisps of smoke from the clashing swords. It’s not one of these things, it’s all of them and more. It’s Mitsuo Iso. It doesn’t matter how much money or how many animators you could throw at a movie, we have one man to thank for the animation in this sequence and it could never be done without him. Never.

Every Frame is Key

With the “full-limited” style he developed and frequently used he shuns the traditional approach of having the key animator drawing the key poses in a cut and having in-betweeners draw the frames between. Instead, he exerts complete control over his cuts, doing every drawing himself. But there’s more to it than that, he doesn’t just do away with in-between animators, he does away with the whole concept of in-between frames – by treating every drawing as key. This means he is never drawing just to get from one pose to the next, but every frame takes the movement forward in a totally organic way. This avoids any semblance of the old animation problem of characters looking as though they are awkwardly snapping into poses and revolutionises our understanding of what it means for animation to be realistic.

An army of in-betweeners could make animation that moved at real-life speeds of 60 frames per second plus, but that wouldn’t make it any more realistic if the movement wasn’t happening in a realistic way. By the same token, if the characters are moving in a realistic manner, they don’t NEED to move at 60fps for it to feel entirely real and authentic. And even if a key animator had a prodigious grasp of anatomy and movement, if the movement is being planned out by only a portion of the frame total it will never feel truly real.

Mitsuo Iso’s animation is limited in the sense that he doesn’t draw 24 frames per second, but with a lot less drawings (limited animation) he is able to give the same impression as if it were full. He does this by having a masterful understanding of how things move at their very core. There is absolutely no redundant movement in his animation; each frame is a discrete evolution in the broader motion going on. As a result, things can constantly be accelerating, decelerating or changing course which gives his motion a sense of vitality, of being alive. That’s why his animation gives the impression of realism without moving with the same framerate.

Master of Motion

But it’s not enough to make things be constantly moving arbitrarily (as many other animators are guilty of); Mitsuo Iso also has a genius understanding of how things should move. His animation doesn’t come from repeated textbook learning but from some deeply innate knowledge of how to translate what he observes in real life into a sequence of drawings. This is where the magic of Iso comes into play.

When he animated that End of Evangelion scene, the Evas moved with weight the of giant robots and also the will of humans.

In the ghost in the shell sequence, the spider tanked crept around like an arachnid yet also moved with a robotic, mechanised purpose.

And don’t worry, he’s not just a mecha animator! His portrayal of every-day human movement is so natural it can be profound such as the crying scene in the Digimon movie, or the running in Umi ga Kikoeru.

To top it off, he is one of the best effects animators out there, portraying explosions, smoke and water with a kind of enigmatic authenticity that is hard to match. His climactic scene in FLCL or his explosion in Blood+ are good examples of this.

At the end of the day, Mitsuo Iso’s realism doesn’t mimic real life it recreates it. Instead of a dull straight-forward reproduction of real movement, he harnesses the power and potential of animation to create evocative sequences that merely use a grounding in reality to further enhance their impact and visceral beauty.

A True Creator

Like many other accomplished animators before him, Mitsuo Iso began to spread his wings to soar above the whole creative process, with a resounding effort at pretty much everything with the renowned Raxephon episode 15 where he handled production, writing, storyboard, 2D  digital effects and key animation – an unheard of feat for TV anime. He bought along the same philosophy that informed his key animation career and wanted to show that you can make a high-quality product within the confines of limited budget and schedule by cutting out the challenge of trying to interpret and execute another person’s vision. This is taking his demolishing of in-between frames to a higher level. He proved his point with an a moody, cinematic and completely satisfying episode. He also proved that he was cut out for creating stories, not just telling other people’s stories with his animation.

This change in tack for his craft led him to being in charge of his very first major project: Denno Coil. Iso came up with this one from the ground up, as creator, director and screenwriter. A fascinating blend of neighborhood-roaming childhood coming-of-age and near-future augmented-reality science fiction, Denno Coil was unique, thoroughly entertaining and richly animated. Unfortunately it was not a resounding success, failing to make an impact or garner strong sales despite a generous TV time-slot. Although mostly hearsay it also indicated that Iso may not be suited to the director’s chair, his perfectionism and instinct-driven style poorly matched to entrusting animators under him. This may have caused a falling out with the previous brother-in-arms, Takeshi Honda, who was the chief animator for the series.

It is also probably the reason he vanished into a distant myth ever since. However, with the news that he is coming back with a feature film, all heads should be turned as no one can doubt the capacity of Iso to create something amazing.

Further Reading

• Watch all his animation at Sakugabooru: https://sakuga.yshi.org/post?page=1&tags=mitsuo_iso
• Read interviews and analysis from AniPages: http://www.pelleas.net/aniTOP/index.php/mitsuo_iso

Staff:

Director & Storyboard: 立川譲 (Yuzuru Tachikawa) [Series Director]

Writer: 瀬古浩司 (Hiroshi Seko) [Series Composition]

Animation Director: 亀田祥倫 (Yoshimichi Kameda) [Series Chief Animation Director]

If you have an appreciation of animation, Mob Psycho will grab your attention and mercilessly pound it into absolute submission. I’m still in intensive care, but they’re letting me write this post under heavy sedation and monitoring. If you don’t appreciate animation you might see it as an anime with a ‘weird art style’ that’s still somehow awesome. But whatever your background, I think we can all agree that Mob Psycho 100 has a certain kick to it that perhaps no other anime does, and the force behind that kick comes from its animation production.

As intended, the writing is dry, the characters unpalatable and the story, at least in this early stage, no more than a premise for shounen gags. Don’t expect to be deeply moved or intellectually engaged by this series; it knows exactly what genre it is and throws everything at being the very beast shounen comedy it can be. Being descendant from the same original creator, Mob Psycho definitely has a likeness to the previously successful One Punch Man. The shounen topic, the style of comedy and the comic faces are closely aligned. Both series also have great animation, but Mob Psycho is a very different beast in this arena.

Unlike One Punch man, the show is relentlessly kinetic. Ever since the early days of TV-anime, most anime have a status quo animation style and all the creative energy and gusto would be thrown into the ‘money shots’. One Punch man was rightly lauded for its animation quality, but it still followed that pattern, that praise almost entirely referring to its frequent but fleeting action sequences. Sure, some of Mob Psycho’s greatest moments of animation come from the scenes where Mob uses his telekenetic powers, but the difference in energy is less clear-cut.

All throughout, this episode of Mob Psycho is stylistically restless, bursting at the seems with new ideas, and raw, unfiltered animation of totally different faculties. There’s some clear strains of Kanada-esque, or even Imaishi-school limited animation, some rich set-piece movement in the vein of Hironori Tanaka, web-gen digitally drawn effect work reminiscent of Shingo Yamashita.

The crumpled, hyper-emotional gag expressions remind me of the drawings from classic comedy anime GTO or, more recently, Azazel-san.

There’s an abundance of ambitious and unfiltered key animation work on display. There’s even some animation done using oil-painting on glass.

So, in this episode at least, there’s no status-quo – it’s a complete piece of animation. But there is a stylistic presence that stitches it all together, and that is of chief animation director Yoshimichi Kameda.

Mob Psycho is yet another break-out career moment for the ascendant Kameda, the man who is the embodiment of the primal ‘charisma animator’. I have been following him intently ever since his arresting action sequences as a young key animator in Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, his rough, charcoaly lines, coarse shading and unique effects proving to be the most iconic and memorable animation from the series. False prophets have come and gone, and countless animators have emulated his style, but Kameda is the only one out there that has Yoshinori Kanada’s particular brand of charisma – the drive to push the boundaries, to constantly exceed and upend expectations and with free and flamboyant animation. Like Kanada, his animation has the power to drive the production, not the other way around.

Kameda always goes over the top. He always gives you a bit more than you ask for (Laughs). If you imply that you want him to do his absolute best, to give it 100%, he’ll go away and return with 150%. I think he works best when you ask him to operate at around 80% capacity. –director Tachikawa

That charisma approach is at the beating heart of Mob Psycho, and his pioneering sumi-e brush aesthetic is clearly in play throughout the episode.

Animation aside, director Yuzuru Tachikawa’s storyboard and layout work give this episode a fast-cut pace and rich composition that means the character cels and the background art don’t feel starkly separate. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with having cels stand-out, but it’s refreshing to see an anime that follows a different path.

The dynamic, near-formless animation created under Kameda combined with Tachikawa’s layouts mean that Mob Psycho has few obvious traces of a standard TV animation production. It’s less of an anime and more of a manga that’s come to life.

Phew, that was close! I was almost a tragic victim of irony. You see, I was just about to sit down and polish off a new blog post extolling the 2D hand-drawn mecha animation and surprising levels of enjoyment I was getting out of Regalia: The Three Sacred Stars when BAM, the show’s production committee dropped the bomb. They announced that they are taking the extreme measure of suspending the broadcast of the series after episode 4, delaying the release of the blu-ray and planning to re-air the series from the beginning again in September. Their reason? They didn’t feel that the show was meeting the quality that they wanted to deliver. If even the show’s own production committee gave their show a bad review, I’d feel a bit silly holding a favourable opinion.

That said, I thought I’d have a look around Japanese blogs and see if they were as scathing as the series’ sponsors. I found a lot of comments about the story being confusing, sure, but there was no chorus of controversy, no outrage. Fans of moe were responding amicably to the cute girls of the series, and fans of mecha animation seemed to be quite impressed by the fact that they were pulling off hand-drawn mecha. I don’t think anyone had delusions that this was more than a mediocre outing, but it seemed to entertain. It entertained me for the same reasons: cute girls and cool mecha. There are certainly worse shows airing right now both in terms of animation quality (D Gray man Hollow) and writing (QUALDEA CODE).

The fact that this wasn’t a response to any backlash from fans makes the already rare move of intervention from the committee all the more surprising. To be sure, there were signs of a schedule that was beginning to falter, a danger flag this early in the series. The series is split quite neatly into two streams, character animation helmed by Kimitake Nishio and Kentaro Tokiwa and mecha animation handled by Kanta Suzuki. While the mecha animation appeared to be going strong, and I’ll get into that a bit more later, the character animation was showing the symptoms: jittery movement belying a lack of in-between animation, occasional poor drawings slipping into the key animation, bad compositing and lazy layouts. The signs were there but it hadn’t yet hit the tipping point into the dark place of missing cuts and glaringly unfinished animation.

The only way I can reconcile this play by the committee is that the symptoms didn’t fully indicate the extent of the problem. Perhaps they bent over backwards just to get this episode complete and the schedule ran away from them to the point where the next few episodes would have been rendered unairable. But even then, schedule hell is not a rare thing in the unforgiving world of TV anime.

Most anime in this situation take the hit of one or two very bad episodes to try scramble back into a feasible timeline. Even big-name shows like Shingeki no Kyoujin suffered this fate, with many cuts in important action sequences replaced by shots of background art. Ping Pong aired an episode with several missing cuts, and there are many other examples of this happening. But they usually fight tooth and nail to get the episode on air and make it work somehow. This is probably because TV timeslots in Japan cost money – skipping a week isn’t just an inconvenience to the audience, it’s a hit to the proverbial wallet of the sponsors. Regalia may have been able to wrangle a less disastrous deal with the TV stations, but it’s still a very big decision to take it off air, especially for this amount of time.

Given that so many other series have continued to linger on television blissfully unaware of the fact that they’re terrible, why the punitive measures from the committee, and why go so far as to blame the poor quality of the episodes aired to date? If I put my cynicism aside for a moment I wonder if there is some sincerity behind the announcement, perhaps the production committee had high hopes for a great anime and their pride forced their hand. It’s probably the right decision, but it’s certainly a brave one and almost certainly an expensive one.

There’s another mystery here and that is, where did it all go wrong? Sure, anime schedules often end up on a knife’s edge, but this looks more like a fundamental quality issue rather than a lack of time – something is not working right in the core production staff. The main producer, 永谷敬之 (Takayuki Nagatani) went to twitter to clarify the committee’s vague comments about ‘poor quality’ and revealed the following:

• The issue is not with the story, which will remain fundamentally the same aside from some new scenes
• The problems are in the quality control of the animation quality, the production area, and the sound direction.

I think this sort to clear up a general confusion among fans that perhaps the story was to blame, since it seemed confusing and many of those fans weren’t too phased over the animation standard. It’s interesting that sound direction was specifically called out – I noticed a number of viewers found the sound effects a bit of an earful. They certainly leaped out at you more than many other series, with loud, offensive scraping and crushing noises being slung around during the action sequences. Personally I thought they were refreshing as they really sounded like unnatural, giant contorting hunks of metal. I think I might be alone on that, just me and the sound effects creator Yasumasu Koyama, or sound director Yoshikazu Iwanami. Oddly enough, these two guys are some of the most pervasive sound staff in the business, so much so that they were both given cameos in Shirobako.

I think the key point he wanted to make is that this isn’t about being punitive and playing the blame game – there is an overarching problem with the production not one staff member.

One person who definitely can’t be blamed and can walk away from the show with his head held high: mechanical designer/animation director Kanta Suzuki. With a background as a notable action animator and successful mecha designer/animator, Suzuki has an increasingly rare gift in handling hand-drawn mecha. His mecha sequences in the first three episodes have all been exhilarating and brought some new to the table. Seeped in homages, and even bringing in some old-school talent such as the superb Masahito Yamashita, he has well and truly tackled the task of animating hand-drawn mecha and pinned it to the ground in forceful submission.

There is the possibility that he spent too long on these first few episodes and thereby doomed the schedule, but I see no evidence of that.

Of course, the director is ultimately responsible for the work. I suspect that Director Susumo Tosaka lacked the experience or talent to bring a show to life that had ambitious elements like 2D mecha. His only previous work at the show-wide level was ‘Series Director’ on Infinite Stratos 2. I thought Infinite Stratos 2 was terrible, and he wasn’t even the highest ranked director for the series with oversight by Yasuhito Kikuchi. With such a limited resume, it’s a wonder how he was given the opportunity to direct an original anime like this.

It’s pure speculation, but my guess is that the two chief animation directors were at the very least perfunctory in their roles but the director did not handle the reigns of communication, collaboration and organisation inherit in animation production. The lack of in-between animation, and poor polish in post-production are, to my mind, signs of a director without control. It may be telling that the director did not make comment or announcement himself, perhaps suggesting that it is not a decision he made or pushed for.

At the end of the day though, Regalia was not a show that was a failure in the eyes of many viewers, so I can only see the decision from the producers to postpone and revise it as a bold move to save the show born out of a want to make it a good anime rather than a mediocre one. I’ll raise my glass to that! Although I only mildly enjoyed the show thus far, I will definitely be awaiting its return in September, with corrected animation, improved production values and, probably some changes to production/direction staff. When it comes back, I’ll write about the mecha animation!

In simple terms, what you see when watching an anime is the culmination of two different visual elements – the animation, which is the things that move, and the art, which is the static backdrop. After the director approves the layout for a cut, which is like the rough blueprint of how each shot will look, the anime production model generally splits these elements into two separate streams, with both the animation production and the art department using the layout as the basis to develop their side of it. The person responsible for delivering the art is credited as Art Director, usually a series-wide role. The art is often hand-painted on large sheets using a variety of techniques or is sometimes drawn digitally.

When complete and scanned digitally, the two streams are reunited by the photography/compositing stage of production which will then lead into any finishing effects work. Why am I telling you this? Because this season two anime in particular made me break my usual focus on animation appreciation and made me take a good hard look at the other side of the fence. They made me, dammit!

The two anime in question are Orange and Prisma Ilya 3rei Hertz, and their art snatched my attention for totally opposite reasons. Put frankly, those reasons are that Illya was utterly pathetic while Orange is very good. But before I get into kicking heads and patting backs on these two, I want to speak more generally on how anime uses background art.

Anime has been traditionally known as being geared towards effective layouts rather than pure animation and one of the ways this manifests is in a strong focus on the art stream. Anime considered to be ‘high quality’ and anime with large budgets also tend to have high-quality background art. Movies such as Miyazaki’s Ghibli outings, down to television anime like Attack on Titan or even Kill la Kill create rich, attractive works of art as a canvas for their animation. If you want to ogle at such high-grade backgrounds, head over to http://anime-backgrounds.tumblr.com/, from which I pinched some examples:

In some cases, the background art is given even more attention, becoming a driving artistic component of the series. A good example of this is Ghost in the Shell, where Mamoru Oshii ensured that every deeply detailed background helped build the richly textured and absorbing near-future world of the story. In Revolutionary Girl Utena director Kunihiko Ikuhara’s entangled his backgrounds with his narrative, using abstraction, architecture and visual metaphor to speak to the audience.  This striking use of background art has become a defining trait of his.

Generally speaking, anime can at least put out settings and background art that act as an unobtrusive back-drop. Mediocre series from several prolific studios take this route, producing basic, bland still art that’s almost schematic in nature. When they need a house in the background it’s just a house; the backgrounds are technically not lacking but do not portray a lived-in and realistic feeling or any sense of artistic beauty or creativity. This kind of art direction is doing its job if you don’t notice it at all.

I’ve only rarely seen anime with art poor enough to actually make itself jump out at you for the wrong reasons, and when it happens it’s like a rude slap in the face, totally taking you out of the scene. The anime slapping me without restraint this season is Illya. It first hit me when Illya and friends walk into Miyu’s beachside ‘mansion’.

I say mansion, but it actually looks like more of a repurposed storage warehouse decorated by a photoshop artist. This is the kind of ugly monstrosity of a house I probably designed in The Sims when I was a kid. This  vast, empty entrance hall with its absolutely illogical design and awkward symmetry actually gave off an unsettling surreal feeling. For what purpose would such a room have been designed? An amphitheatre-like internal balcony, spare of all furniture save for a single cupboard, the lack of decoration, the fact there are no supporting columns, the placement of the rooms, it’s all so unnatural. I could go on, but I think it’s pretty clear that no one would build a house like this.

It’s also clear that the artist who did it copied and pasted objects into some kind of 3D schematic instead of drawing it. The windows, doors and railing posts are all identical, even down to the shading. That process isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, but it is when it is so glaringly evident as this. The castle of the Ainsworth family is just as bad, only on a much grander scale:

Every part of it looks like it’s been copied from another part and I don’t believe for a second that anyone with such extreme wealth would build a castle so ugly and lacking in any kind of architectural personality. Maybe they could only afford a kit-home castle. Gross.

By the time later episodes introduced the snow-laden abandoned school I was legitimately disturbed by what I saw:

You’ll need to click through to the full size images for these ones to see the problems:

On top of that, the layouts are totally dull and uninspired, seemingly framing scenes in such a way as to make the background art and composition job as simple as possible. Wherever they can, scenes are made flat, straight and symmetrical, often lined up with one or more structural geometries in the backgrounds. There is a clear attempt to avoid any difficult three-dimensional perspectives.

The composition and touch-up in post-production also seems intent on doing as little work as possible, with no interesting shadow, glare, glint or transparency effects being used. Illya has wowed me with its action animation in the past, and it usually animates itself passably, but if you look past the cute girls for a moment you’ll realise it’s a very ugly series.

Fortunately, the anime Orange achieved the opposite, bringing genuine beauty to the realistic setting of mountain-straddling urban Japan that borders on breathtaking at times.

Orange is also set in and around a Japanese school, which makes it all the more easy to compare and contrast with Illya’s abominable attempt.The difference is gobsmacking because Orange’s setting actually looks like a school rather than an unfinished soviet war prison.

Notice a few key points on Orange’s art:

• You can see through the windows into the room detail.
• The windows show reflection and glare.
• The curtains are actually slightly transparent and they are all drawn at slightly different positions, kind of like how they would be IN REALITY.
• The ground isn’t just a flat concrete texture as far as the eye can see but has stains, marks, manholes, joints, etc.
• There is glare of harsh sunlight and shadows cast naturally throughout all of the background objects rather than starkly applied only when a cel or object clearly calls for it. The absence of sun or shadow in Illya’s world is a big part of how lifeless it feels.
• All of the signs, noticeboards etc are not copied in from some other templates but drawn as part of the background.
• The scenes are often shot at interesting angles not aligned dead-on with building edges and faces.
• The blackboards have clear chalk-rub smears.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Orange good, Illya bad.

The man in charge of Illya’s art is Hiroshi Morikawa, associated with Studio Kaimu, who has an extensive history generating backgrounds but is brand new to the role of art director. This is a change – Takeshi Tateishi, associated with the preferable Studio Tulip, handled the previous two seasons. A note on Takeshi – he has two ANN entries (1 , 2) but is actually the one person.

The change is certainly noticeable – although IIlya has always had the same kind of approach to art direction, in this latest season it has demonstrably fallen in terms of quality. The episode credits for background art reveal that it’s largely handled by three studios, the aforementioned Kaimu, and the Korean companies DR MOVIE and GACHI PRODUCTION. The involvement of DR MOVIE and GACHI PRODUCTION doesn’t say a lot in and of itself, as they are widespread in the industry and are secondary artists supporting Kaimu (GACHI PRODUCTION even had a hand in production art on an Orange episode). However, the last time Morikawa, Kaimu and these two companies comprised the art department for a series was Subete ga F ni Naru and that show had similarly bland background work.

This time, Morikawa has been elevated from just a background artist to the art director. I also suspect that, as Illya’s Studio Kaimu credits lists no names under it, it largely refers to Morikawa himself. A stretched one-man lead background artist with no experienced art director oversight and only offshore companies to back him up is a recipe for disaster.

Was the change in art direction to try and tackle the alternate winter world in a different way? Maybe. To be fair to Morikawa, the few ‘money-shot’ depictions of snow-covered forests didn’t look too shabby. Or perhaps it was an economic measure. I suspect Morikawa comes cheap, given his obvious skill for copying and pasting objects, stretching textures and using few staff. This would certainly save a lot of effort and time compared to hand painted artworks such as those used on Orange. Whatever the reason, it backfired and  it’s a bad look for directors Masato Jinbo and Shin Oonuma. The higher-ups of the Illya franchise need to have a good hard think about whether they still care about the series or not, because it sure looks like they don’t.

At the end of the day here, the real difference is that the art direction in Orange is geared toward a fine art approach, which is probably considered to be the norm for anime. It’s particularly good at it, but it’s not the talent of the artists behind this show that so starkly differentiates it from Illya – the fact is that Illya takes a wholly different approach. Illya’s art direction is about constructing a perfunctory back-drop – it just has to be a place with the requisite details and objects present. The episode director asks for a scene in a school and he gets the bare-bones recognition level school we see. There’s no art in it at all, it does not portray a world or support the atmosphere of the show, it’s just there. However this season of Illya is even worse – it’s not ‘just there’, it’s glaringly, overwhelmingly bad.

Director: 立川譲 (Toshiyuki Takei)

Storyboard: 立川譲　重原克也 (Yuzuru Tachikawa  Katsuya Shigehara )

Animation Director: 亀田祥倫 (Yoshimichi Kameda)

Yoshimichi Kameda is undoubtedly the pedestal animation force behind this series. Although he was responsible for the character design, he did not take up the credit of chief animation director that usually accompanies this. Generally the chief animation director is the single overruling source of truth for close-ups and facial shots of their character designs so they spend their time furiously correcting and supervising the work of the episode animation supervisors below them throughout the whole show. For a series like New Game, the precise appeal of the beautiful characters is a major selling point, making this role critical. Mob Psycho has no such aspiration, instead Kameda’s drive for the series was to allow it to thrive on chaos and disorder, whipping a cacophony of different animation styles into a charismatic chorus, a heaving, messy swell of excitement. He is best placed to do this closer to the front lines; serving as animation director for an episode allows him to supervise the animation, not just the drawings.

Episode 8 is the only episode since the first that he taken up arms, to orchestrate the animation of a Mob Psycho episode. The results are astounding. Much like the greatest of the great charismatic animators before him, Kameda has again surpassed expectations, blowing to pieces the conventional anime style and making it his toy.

Kameda has proven himself a great animation director because he has been able to weave each of the animator’s individual styles into a cohesive tapestry of animation. In my view, there is no one grand-standing piece of animation – all of the more prominent animators’ styles are celebrated with equal gusto. Usually when you get a charismatic animator on an episode, their segment stands out like a sore thumb. This episode makes it into my list of greats because only a show like Mob Psycho with an animation director like Yoshimichi Kameda could we get an episode so invigoratingly animated that the individuality of the animation doesn’t feel at all idiosyncratic.

Both in terms of his drawings and his movements, Kameda’s animation style is rough, gritty and visceral. In his break-out work on Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, that grit, that rawness made the sequence where Roy Mustang incinerated a certain character (spoiler dodge!) unforgettable. It took the glamour out of death and perfectly reflected his vengeful frame of mind. In Mob Psycho, Kameda’s roughness both compliments the playfully dirty design manifesto of the series but also, more importantly, takes the glamour out of his battle sequences. While other shows portray sleek, cool fights, Mob Psycho degrades and brutalises those involved in the skirmishes. This plays nicely into Mob’s stand-point of not wanting to fight and hurt others.

Kameda obtains this roughness in his work through a variety of techniques, including the use of an Ukiyo-e brush and rough pencil work. One thing is for sure, his genga are the anything but clean:

This style has clearly been imparted to the key animators who worked on this episode, who have implemented it in different ways. Bold, brush-like lines, sketchy pencil marks, scraggly linework and dirty smears are pervasive throughout the episode. There are several moments that nail the style so perfectly that you get the sense that Kameda made divine intervention as supervisor and roughed up the genga himself. Such moments are fleeting but very carefully interspersed at impact moments throughout the action so that you feel the force of Kameda without him betraying the style of the key animator.

Probably the tidbit of animation that grabbed me the most this episode was this:

The way the hackled lines undulate with a kind of electric energy, as if yearning to explode into formless scrawl is a powerful statement of Mob’s wrath. Again, I feel Kameda’s hand in this but I’d love to know how this cut turned out this way! Sakugabooru has it included as part of Yutaka Nakamura’s scene, but I can’t be sure.

I was fascinated to see Yuuto Kaneko at the top of the genga list for the episode (meaning he contributed the most). Kaneko is one of the most ascendant young animators associated with studio Trigger who came onboard as part of the Little Witch Academia training project after jumping ship from GAINAX. He proved himself by becoming a core animator on Kill la Kill, and reaching the status of a stand-out animator on Kiznaiver and Luluco. He also contributed to episode 3, but this is in my view his best work to date. In particular, this sequence was astounding.

Although much noise has been made about Yutaka Nakamura’s piece at the climax of the fight, this segment was perhaps more interesting animation wise, the rough deformation and sketchiness of it being classically Mob Psycho. Kaneko has adopted a strength from his Trigger brethren Akira Amemiya and Imaishi that plays neatly into Kameda’s aesthetic – the crayon-like thick lines, chalky effect dashes and pencil scrawled smears are incorporated into his animation to spectacular effect this episode.

Another segment that caught my eye was likely by Akira Yamashita (presumed so because he tweeted about drawing the delinquents with a picture of a particular pose). If this is is indeed his work, it’s also very impressive and revels well in the dirty feel of the episode. The crass contortions of the faces is so fun to watch in motion and his drawings feature a lot of rough line detail and charcoal style.

Of course, I can’t forget to mention the climactic finish to the sequence, handled by none other than Bones resident star animator Yutaka Nakamura. Nakamura rarely fails to produce exhilarating animation, and this is far from an exception, with some smooth background animation, an explosion of effects and weighty, realistic kinetics as Mob throws his opponent down. To top it off there’s a fade to formless sketch as  mob’s fury hits its pinnacle.

Topping the web-generation episode 5, this takes the cake for being the best animated episode of Mob Psycho and even managed to squeeze in our first taste of legitimate plot with the introduction of the evil organisation, Claw. I am not expecting that crown to be passed on until the final episode, which will almost certainly be spearheaded by Kameda again and sit in BONES’ all-out sakuga finale hall of fame.
Key Animation：

金子雄人　篠田知宏　宇佐美萌　宗圓祐輔　武藤信宏
増田伸孝　前田義宏　鈴木優太郎　島田佳　舛田裕美
宮島直樹　加藤滉介　五十嵐祐貴　石橋翔祐

光田史亮　わしお　山下滉　長坂慶太　工藤糸織
佐藤由貴　阿部尚人　高山朋浩　佐藤利幸　中村豊

ボンズ作画部
橋本治奈　平田有加

Sometimes an anime struts along that is charismatic from beginning to end, a complete package that is so much more than the some of its parts . And sometimes a more run-of-the-mill series can break form and produce a wondrous episode that you can neatly lift out and up onto a pedestal. But once in a while this glory lasts only a fleeting moment – a shot, a cut or a scene that punches through and reaches a short-lived apex. These posts are dedicated to those honorary instants.

I have already lauded the animation power of Mob Pscyho through my reviews of its standout episodes 1 and 8, but there was a particular beat in episode 10 that stretched my jaw to the floor. I’m talking, of course, about the fire scene. Fire is one of those raw, innate pillars of effect animation that we have all been exposed to many times over our years of service in the anime fandom. Alongside water, lightning and smoke, fire has been the pursuit of many a talented animator and it’s tempting to think it’s been rendered in every possible way already. From the sparse and boldly coloured forms of Yoshinori Kanada and Masahito Yamsahita’s flames to the intense realism of Mitsuo Iso’s carefully crafted billowing fire, this is a field with a rich creative history. Yoshinori Kanada’s fire dragon is one of the most iconic, oft-homaged pieces of animation ever created.

So it’s rare that quality fire animation can jump out and make an impression these days. It certainly did here. This sequence, lasting only a couple of minutes, stole the show! The roaring, intense heat of the fire enveloping the characters, and at times the whole screen, could really be felt. And it’s not just the way the fire looked and moved in any conventional sense – it’s the way it really felt like it was sucking the characters in to this epicenter of unimaginable inferno, whipping around them and blasting them like a furious storm.

The opening cut, handled by animator Kazuto Arai exemplifies this, with the fire bursting down the hallway and washing over Terada drowning him, and soon the audience, in a sea of heat. The aqueous movement of the fire was very deliberate, with the animator using shots of the crashing waves of the ocean for reference.

Straight after that we’re into the more sketchy style with more conventional flickering flame motion. After being awash with flames we’re now in the hearth, surrounding by burning flame. This part is more conventional but straddles a good balance between realism and animation abstraction and has a more classically ‘mob psycho’ feel to it with its rough pencil lines.

The next shot is distinctly digital genga apparently from web-gen animator, Shin Ogasawara. I have always had a soft-spot for web-gen effects animation. The fact that is is digitally drawn means that it is not drawn with lines forming shapes but directly painted with digital brushes. This means that it’s so much easier to create fluid and intricate effects animation such as splashing colours and leaping sparks. This strength of digital animation is used to good effect here creating a layered and fast shot of the fire that helps to convey its intensity.

And finally the inferno retreats to a fireball as Terada entraps his opponent. This is the best animation of the scene, with fine, detailed linework and a swirling, pulsating movement that’s so reminiscent of Hironori Tanaka that it’s thought to be uncredited work from him. He has a habit of going credit bare on many series, so it would not surprise me for him to turn up here. The tail end of this fireball scene raises the bar again, however, with a segment that is a cut above the rest in terms of intensity.

Although the movement and linework is similar to the previous gif, can you feel the difference in animation power? There’s just something more visceral and violent about this fire; it burns brighter and with more fury.  Although there’s definitely still clear defined grades of colour, the linework is less crisp, instead the colours flow into each other in an undulating blur of heat. This is probably as close as you can get to actually being burnt watching anime. The depiction of the figure within the flames is also different, less fine lines and more thick, dirty graphite flickering out of form. I sense the magic of Kameda here. Although he’s not credited with genga this episode, there’s something about the scrawled figure and the ashy debri after the fireball dissipates that makes me wonder! Perhaps he just supervised this part of Tanaka’s (or whoever it was) work.

But what is so interesting about this is that this furnace was depicted by so many animators. In your typical anime this whole sequence would be probably be given to an effects animator specialist and that one animator would create the whole feel of the fire. But Mob Psycho’s mantra is to use different anime styles and techniques to keep the audience on their toes, never knowing what the visuals are going to do next. I suspect the choice to split this up and let several animators realise their own creative ideas of how the fire should look was very deliberate.

Arai gave the feeling of suddenly being overwhelmed with his crashing wave of heat, Ogasawara depicted its powerful speed while the animators of the fireball sequence, whoever these nameless heroes may be, really ramped the intensity up to the next level.

Storyboard & Director: 沼田誠也 (Seiya Numata)

Animation Director: 坂井久太 (Kyuuta Sakai)

Animation: 沼田誠也 (Seiya Numata), 坂井久太 (Kyuuta Sakai)

It was late at night after a long week. Lying on the couch with my partner powering through a few episodes of anime,  my eyes were starting to close on their own as sleep overcame me. It was at this point that I was introduced to the 13th episode of the boisterous TV anime adaptation of Needless. Suddenly I was wide awake, eyes pried open and fixated to the screen. Right off the bat, there was something very different about this episode, something uniquely exhilarating.

I didn’t know this going in, but when I looked up the staff after the episode finished I was astounded to see that the episode was pretty much the handiwork of just two people, and those creators were none other than the devious duo of Seiya Numata and  Kyuuta Sakai!

Before Seiya Numata was swallowed into the eternal pit of no escape that is Milky Holmes, he was a star animator making waves across the industry with attention-grabbing cuts on a myriad of works such as Tora Dora, Gurren Lagann and Higurashi. His ability to pull of dynamic action made him a popular choice for handling fight sequences. His scenes often divided opinions due to his unusual style, but he certainly made a name for himself. His fight from Toradora turned a lot of heads.

Personally I’ve never really been a huge fan of his brand of animation style with its gelatinous warping and stretching, but I admire his magnetism as an animator. He is a devotee of the original charisma animator Yoshinori Kanada, frequently referencing his work and chasing a kindred creative freedom. Alongside Jun Arai, he forms a central pillar to Needless’s aesthetic, which is an uninhibited ode to Kanada and his epoch. Numata exerted a lot of influence with the role of ‘Design Works’ throughout the show as well as ‘Technical Director’.

And it’s difficult to talk about Numata without mentioning Kyuuta Sakai, his sister-in-arms who he brought into most of his projects around this time and has a strong personal friendship with. Sakai is probably a name fresh in most people’s minds as she is the accomplished character designer for the brand new hit Re:Zero. She is now pretty much exclusively a character designer/chief animation director and thrives as an illustrator.

Probably a key uniting factor between the two is their shared fondness for drawing sexy young girls, and the term ‘lolimator’ was coined for them during their days together. If you don’t believe me, the first Needless ED, also featured in this episode is their work and one of the most carnal, intoxicating hits of fanservice I have ever been fortunate enough to witness.

Before Sakai went to White Fox with her work on Steins;Gate, these two were inseparable, and this episode of Needless is one of the best things to come from their early union. The episode is directed and storyboarded by Numata, and, excluding oversight from the chief animation director, entirely and exclusively key-animated by the two of them. It’s a concentrated hit of the Numata and Sakai pair!

As a result, the episode stands out clearly from all the others. Numata’s storyboard and direction immediately make an impact, forgoing convention to deliver an episode that is uniquely tense and weirdly intimate. Numata takes the idea of a stage-play approach and runs with it, focusing on the dialogue and expressions of the characters to the exclusion of all else. There’s no attempt to hide this approach – the episode opens with the room darkened like a stage and all the characters placed under a literal spotlight. Many cuts are plane with an audience line of site, and dramatic lighting is abused like nothing else.

The style actually reminds me of early Akiyuki Shinbou with it’s Ikuhara-esque shots and focus on striking colour design. Numata applied bold neon colouring to many of his sense to deliver the sense of exaggerated drama and also a cool-factor. Some of the shots definitely delivered.

In addition to the darkness enshrouding the scene and the striking lighting, Numata applies a focus on intense facial expressions in close-up which includes detail such as sweat forming and rolling down people’s faces. This all makes for a potent sense of tension and claustrophobia despite the vast open room the events occur within. The moment in which the main villain makes his entrance in particular casts a palpable sense of dread making for one of the most suspenseful moments Needless ever had.

The animation itself is surprisingly active given the fact that it was only key animated by the two of them. Numata works his usual magic with the action highlight that features frenetic movement, spinning camerawork and distorted drawings to ram-home a sense of force. The portion of the fight that is completely upside down is one of those quirky moments that really defines Needless.

One of his most memorable cuts from the episode is not from an action scene but rather this pretty inexplicable cut of Setsuna’s nose bursting into a nosebleed with the intense rage overcoming her. This is an example of Numata’s contorted style works really well as her face twists into this sharp glare of focused fury. I challenge you to find my an anime character looking more angry than this.

The cuts that were presumably handled by Sakai meanwhile were simple fluid animation. The smooth moments stood out to help build up the sense of excitement and differentiate the episode from the normal limited kanada-school style of the rest of the series. There’s also this indescribable sense of style to her movements. Stepping up to being a prolific animation director indicates that she was a powerhouse animator back in her day on the front lines. She apparently has a special skill where she holds both pencil and colour pencil in the one hand and can swiftly use the colour pencil to add shadow lines.

My rewatch of Needless has been an enjoyable affair on the whole, but this episode turned it up a notch, from mildly bemusing to genuinely exciting. Seiya Numata’s unconventional design sense and bold stage-play approach combined with the animation goods delivered by partner-in-crime Sakai make this a grandstand episode.

This episode is not only one of the most condensed examples of Numata and Sakai working together, especially when you include the ED that was exclusively handled by them, but it also appears to be the climax of Numata’s extensive involvement in the series with no major credits on any episode thereafter. He is technical director and a design contributor on the show throughout, but no front-line involvement as an animator. Beyond just Needless this is the most interesting work I have seen of Numata’s in terms of storytelling and direction.

If you’ve seen Koutetsu no Kabaneri I think it’s safe to assume you noticed that a few times every episode, a particular shot would rear its head as particularly beautiful and well-drawn. I know a lot of people, myself included, found the effect a little jarring – in addition to blowing me away with those special shots it made me realise how bland it looked the rest of the time. That said, it got me wondering, how did they achieve the effect, and perhaps more importantly, why? I did a bit of digging, and what I found has given me a lot more respect for what they were trying to achieve and the skill and effort that went into these ‘make-up animation’ shots.

The story of Kabaneri’s animation style all starts with the drawings of one man, Haruhiko Mikimoto. Mikimoto was a major formative player in the 80s anime aesthetic, working extensively alongside Shoji Kawamori, he was responsible for the character design work for the original Macross and the subsequent sequels up until the Macross 7 series. He also designed the characters for GAINAX’s seminal Gunbuster OVA.  As a designer who is pure illustrator rather than of animator origins, the degree to which he was embedded in the anime look during the 80s was certainly unusual. He was even credited with animation director (Character Director, specifically) on Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which is definitely rare for a non-animator, and kind of unheard of nowadays. He has a gentle art style that lends itself to beautiful girls, with an element of realism and a soft beauty, his designs stand the test of time.

Since his heyday he has bowed out of the anime industry to some degree, but has remained active as an illustrator and manga artist. Fleeting chances at a major comeback have slipped by over the years, the most recent being the designer for the adaptation of his manga, Tytania. Sadly, that series fell far short of being a grand success. He had previously stated that he thought he may not get any more opportunities to design in anime due to the fact that he pursues the use of shadow and delicate line-work to express his characters which runs counter to the direction of the industry, tending to favour simple designs with crisp lines.

This all changed, however, when the director of Kabaneri, Tetsurou Araki, reached out to him for his individual style to mark a triumphant return to the medium. To help his revival of his classic look, he discussed with director Araki what they could do on Kabaneri and came up with the idea of not using the standard 1 or 2 grade shadows but instead using ‘0.5 grade shadows’. Before getting into the hype ‘0.5 grade shadows’ buzz term, let me quickly touch on what shadow grades mean.

Basically most anime is done with 1-grade shadows, back in the 80s and the 90s to some degree, the design work and aesthetic was such that it was popular to ramp that up to 2-grade shadows. This means you have 3 dimensions of shading that the key animators have to apply to their drawings. 1 grade usually means a character can have one shade of shadow, 2 grades means they can have a deeper level of shadow within a shadow. These grades have different predefined coloured lines/shading within the genga.

In this image, you can see that the character is drawn to 2-grade shadows. There is a shadow shading on the hair (1影) and then a deeper shade (2影). They have also used a highlight shade (ハイライト).

You might be confused then as to what 0.5 grade means. How can you have half a grade? Apparently, so was Mikimoto, who originally thought that shadow would be used sparsely and with somewhat faint colours so as to not make them too bold. However, the idea was to diminish the clear definition of shadow lines altogether. Put very simply, the concept of 0.5 grade shadow is that instead of producing anime with rigid, line-defined areas of shadow, the animation would have the feel of an illustration, using soft gradients and brushes to apply shading.

As you might imagine, this is a massively ambitious shift in the production norm and very difficult to apply. If you are familiar with the work of a key animator you would know that their work is taken by someone else to be digitised into computer format before being coloured. The lines of the animators guide the colouring staff as to how the shading and highlight should be applied. This means that the key animator cannot simply apply gradient and brush shading directly in their key-frames. To tackle this approach, director Araki had to reform the production process itself with the creation of a brand new production credit, the ‘make-up animator’

A kind-of similar credit already exists, and is also used in Kabaneri, called Special Effect (特殊効果). Special effects also involves touching up the digitised drawings but is generally used for mechanical objects such as guns or mecha. Director Araki allowed Kabaneri’s special effects artist, Chiemi Irisa (入佐芽詠美) to share some examples of her work on twitter, offering a rare glance of the position at work. What a different show Kabaneri would have been without this!

But the make-up animator credit is different in a number of ways. The most obvious distinction is that it’s being applied to characters, sometimes in motion, rather than static objects. As you can imagine, illustrating people and mechanical detail require a very different skillset. However,the differences aren’t purely cosmetic (pardon the pun) – the make-up animator has a much bigger part in the animation production process.

Normally, the key animator’s drawings are in-betweened and digitised and then passed on to touch-up and colouring. Once the colouring is done, the Special Effects role steps in and adds detail, as seen in the above picture. The make-up animator, however, takes the reigns from the in-betweening stage, being responsible for the digitisation, colouring and then their own brand of beautification. Various techniques are applied to transform a normal cut into more of an illustration following the ‘0.5 grade shading’ philosophy. Brushes, special linework, and gradient colouring are digitally painted to evoke the gentle, delicate artistry of Mikimoto’s original illustrations.

The example below shows this being applied.

In this case, you can see that the genga is already quite detailed and uses 2-grade shadows, plus highlights. These shadows and highlight lines defined by the genga are strictly coloured in the next section by the make-up animator. The final image shows the completed frame with the ‘make-up’ effects applied.

This example clearly shows the application of digitally painted brush, shine and soft lines on the face, hair and eyes. They really are applying make-up to bring out the beauty of the character and the 0.5 grade shading is a clear part of that. In the final image, the shadows are no longer clear-cut levels but naturally gradient. The result is quite stunning and does reflect the soft beauty in some of Mikimoto’s illustrations.

This work was done buy a team of Make-Up Animators led by Sachiko Matsumoto  with a series-wide credit of chief make-up animator. Sachiko has been thriving in a the photography/compositing area of production for some time, doing great work on Guilty Crown back before WIT was spawned from from I.G. The surprising shift to a more drawing-based role that even involves work with in-between drawing is made possible by her original fondness for drawing and her art school graduation.

Sachiko looked deeply into Mikimoto’s illustrations, observing the radiance that comes from his blurred colours and the soulful highlight in his pupils, and the way his hair feels like one long, gentle stream. She also drew inspiration from Osamu Dezaki’s harmony cuts, where the shot turns into a painting with cel and background seamlessly coming together into one artwork. This inspiration is very clear in some of the made-up shots.

If anyone remembers the remarkable, completely over-promising trailer for Kabaneri? If not, I’ve inserted it below. The extensive use of make-up animation and special effects in every shot of this trailer was a massive part of its wow-factor (and subsequent over-hype).

The studio invested in a new piece of software called 「TVPaint Animation」for this work on the trailer. The software is for digital genga, providing a lot of advanced tools including a range of brush effects.Only a small team of people with digital genga experience were at WIT studio and they had a lot of trial an error with learning the software. When the production started on the full show, they were pulled together to form the make-up animator team.

Kabaneri’s Make-up Animators

松本幸子　市万田千恵子　藤井苑美　広瀬いづみ　山﨑千恵

中愛夏 (from episode 9 onward)

The limitations of the make-up animator approach is that it would be a prohibitively expensive undertaking to do it frame-by-frame for whole sequences. Where the trailer could afford to deliver a concentrated, uninterrupted hit of highly touched-up animation, the series fell well short of this. Despite the hype surrounding this new credit, the reality was that it could only be applied to certain key moments, mainly money shots of the characters. The team worked on about 10 cuts per episode.

While those cuts certainly look fantastic, I think the overall experience for a lot of people was a jarring one. Those spotlight moments, it turns out, also tend to illuminate how bland and flat the show looks like without its make-up on. I have no doubt that, especially given it’s poor production values further into the series, their workload would have been better refocused on the basics of dynamic and expressive animation. That said, I cannot fault it as a marketing technique – the trailer certainly rammed this series into many people’s ‘must-watch’ baskets, and I have no doubt that those made-up ‘money-shots’ of Mumei did a lot for her bishoujo marketability.

Director Araki is guilty of putting hype and sales pitch over making a good anime, but he’s also guilty of boldly trying something new in the production lifecycle, and trying something new for all the right reasons. The make-up animation wasn’t thought-up to make production easier or more efficient, it was dreamed up to take the look and feel of 2D animation to a new level of beauty and prowess and to conjure the tender beauty of an old pro’s illustration work. Sometimes in the anime medium, whether an attempt like this was a technical success or not is far less important than the fact that people cared enough to try.

And who knows, maybe make-up animation may well become another staple weapon in the young Wit Studio and director Araki’s arsenal when they tackle their next big project.

Interviews Read:

• https://www.roover.jp/articles/b4SWl
• https://www.roover.jp/articles/LdBTP
• https://www.roover.jp/articles/JzwUL
• http://www.animatetimes.com/news/details.php?id=1462415212

A murder scene seemingly foretold by the events depicted in a Boys Love doujinshi; a mysterious, prescient voice that talks through a radio; a key without a lock; an unexplained mass-suicide; a conspiracy to manipulate the human race with global mind control; a young girl who enacts black magic through an invisible man – if any of this is grabbing your attention then this may be the anime for you. A dark, twisted and irreverently convoluted science-fiction mystery, Occultic;Nine is a wild ride that is well worth your precious time. However, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking otherwise if you had only seen the first episode or two.

Occultic;Nine is probably the most polarising and under-appreciated anime of the current season, and it has nothing to blame but itself. Yes, the rumors are true. The series is very hard to watch in its early stages. The characters are either dry or deeply annoying (especially boob girl and talk boy), and the show drowns you in what feels like a barrage of nonsense. In its first two episodes the series hits its audience with layer upon layer of detail and obscurity. Because it’s so fast an frenetic with how it lays the groundwork of its story, it doesn’t feel like it will ever calm down and reach any kind of cogent ‘point’. I’m here to tell you that it does.

Once all the pieces are put into place, the show very quickly starts to unravel itself, and when it does it hits a glorious stride. Plot thread after plot thread are harmonized in a coalescing symphony, building a really gripping momentum. Since about episode 5, I have been hooked, with each episode revealing another exciting turn of events and bringing characters together into a single plotline. It’s hard to go into detail without spoiling anything, but it’s certainly true that a lot of the stuff in the first couple of episodes I thought were pointless drivel are turning out to be really interesting. Every detail in this show has significance.

There’s something really unique about the way this show tells its story. It’s not the often gaudy visual style it leans on, the unusually fast dialogue, or the offbeat sense of humour – it sits deeper than all of that. Occultic;Nine hits a rare sweet-spot of answering burning questions in its patchwork of mysteries at the same time as throwing a kink into the story, a twist that adds a whole new dimension to it all. Being able to unravel a mystery at the same time as building it is the storytelling magic that makes Occultic;Nine so enjoyable. This series is written by the author of Steins;Gate, but the way it unfolds actually reminded me more of a different author’s work – Baccano. I loved Baccano for much the same reason – there’s such an energy in stories that feel like they’re ever expanding while also gaining focus.

Accolades for this go to the light novel author and Steins;Gate creator, Chiyomaru Shikura and company MAGES., namely ‘Morita to Junpei‘ 森田と純平　(real name: Junpei　Morita ). This is not, would you believe, the 60+ year old voice actor no prior writing or production credits, as ANN has concluded, but a wholly different person of the same name (born in 1981). Morita to Junpei has, at a high level, done a stellar job unwinding this tightly packed story into a short anime series, although he will certainly regret the info-dump approach of the first episode. I say ‘at a high level‘ because the story is often let down by is script.

It’s a good thing voice actors aren’t paid per word, or this series would never have got off the ground. It makes no apologies for being an absolute talk-fest at times, cramming in an obscene amount of high-speed dialogue. When the show gets in the talking groove for too long you quickly zone out and eventually the words all blur together into this kind of distant, screeching background noise. The scenes in the cafe are particularly guilty of this. In that godforsaken cafe, conversations seem doomed to end up as competing, inane monologues.

Fortunately, when the show isn’t being a talk-a-thon, it’s delivery is absolutely top-notch. Despite it’s overall mystery notes, it has a real penchant for its scary scenes and can quickly make you think you’re watching a top-tier horror anime (if such a thing exists). As a horror buff I really appreciated how these scenes got under my skin. The fear didn’t come from over-the-top violence, jump-scares or ridiculous monsters  but from genuinely unsettling situations and ideas. Everything to do with the ‘kotoribako’ is just awesome. I’ll never look at a box the same way again.

Again, these frightening sequences were delivered with well-honed aural and visual production deisgn. This sequence in episode 6 was my favorite example of this. The creepy squeaking noise of the box, the way the luminescence of the torch sways realistically, the way the kotoribako slightly shifts its form, oozing blood as it does, barely able to contain the atrocities within.

Moreover the suddenness of the whole situation is deeply unnerving – in plain sight in the middle of Tokyo such a horrific thing is transpiring. This episode was the effort of Masashi Ishihama, well known as the director of Shinsekai Yori. An excellent post about his style and talents has already been written over here, so I won’t digress. Other director/creator highlights include:

Noriko Takao (高雄 統子) on episode 7 ( former kyo-Ani now Idol M@ster director), who made the brief psychometry scenes leave a lasting impact with a rush of rich, intriguing and creative visuals.

And Mamoru Kanbe (神戸 守), the director of Elfen Lied and So Ra No Wo To, who took the idea of being edgy and experimental a little too far. This is an unfortunate example of when the visual voice of a production shouts over the top of its content instead of supporting it.

On the whole, Occultic;Nine’s visuals trade nuance for impact, creating a world with rich colours, lavish detail and unpredictable cinematography. The animation from A-1 Pictures is unfailing in quality, though rarely becomes the star of the scene. The storyboard, layout, and finishing touches often come together to make the show deeply engaging and a thing of beauty.

Occultic;Nine seems to be doing a very good job of alienating its potential audience, thrusting itself to the very fringes of the late night TV fandom. That’s why I felt compelled to tell as many people I can that it has a lot to offer if you can look past its first impressions and persevere through some of its more inane moments. If you enjoy a good mystery, or even just an intricate plot, this is well worth forging ahead with.

So I watched the first episode of A-1 Picture’s ‘Granblue Fantasy the Animation’ last night. Not sure I’m a fan. Like so many other anime these days, Granblue appears to be a victim of its own ambition. On the surface of it, it has all the hallmarks of a big-win production – ornate, beautiful characters, battle sequences, lots of lavish detail. But put into practice, these building blocks of greatness don’t fall into place. There are signs of production stress all throughout – symptoms of the issues that caused them to delay the release of the anime by a season. This is all too common in TV anime today, but the reason I am picking on Granblue Fantasy is because its issues are harder to put a finger on. It’s not like there are blatantly disfigured drawings of the characters or incomplete cuts. Rather, there’s just this jarring sense of something not being right – it doesn’t feel like quality animation.

This is because the detail in the raw drawings are not the issue. As drawings, they are fine, but by the time they hit our screen they often come off looking flat and awkward against their backdrops. This is an issue that’s often a lot harder for people to pinpoint than shoddy pencil draftsmanship. It’s the product of a web of processes and techniques, of approaches to animation, and the art of compositing in photography. In this case, the drawings come off looking flat and out of place because these factors have failed to produce a sense of depth to the scenes, or of natural distance between layers. When the opposite occurs and skillful photography seamlessly binds artful animation, anime can take your breathe away with rich, cinematic depth.

Photography in Anime Production

Most of the sense of depth in anime is injected in the photography stage of production. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s make sure we’re all across the basics – what is photography in anime? To convey this, I’ll run through the whole process briefly to show how it fits in. If you already know how things work, feel free to skip this section! In the first instance, I’m also going to talk about the process as it was back in the days when it was produced by physically filming cels. It is easy to think about the concepts of photography by relating it back to analogue era and then seeing how new digital technologies now replicate the same approach within computer software.

The storyboard is broken up into a series of cuts (generally marked by a change in camera angle or transition). The key animator usually draws the layout for a cut, which is like the blue-print for the composition of the shot/sequence – what actors/objects will be in it, where they will be placed in what layers, and what the background is going to be. From this point, the fine arts team work on the backgrounds, while the animation department works on the key frame drawings and the in-betweens.

In anime nowadays, there is further work on the key animation, with varying amounts of touch-up, animation direction (senior animators correcting the drawings to the character designs and tweaking the movements). Once the drawings are done, they are handed over to painters. Traditionally, they meticulously painted each frame onto celluloid (clear plastic sheets), cleaning them up at the same time. These finished product are referred to as cels. Nowadays, this painting is done digitally after scanning the drawings. Either way, these cels are then delivered to photography.

Originally the photography department loaded the cels into the animation stand. The animation stand is a production apparatus and system that allows the cels to be systematically loaded into a rack over the top of each other, forming layers. A camera is mounted above the stand, facing down, to capture them on film. Between each layer, lighting can be applied to stop shadowing creeping in or for other effects. In the most primitive form, you load the background sheet on the bottom layer, and then have one cel in a layer directly above it (say a person standing at a bus stop). If the bus needed to pull up in front of the person, the bus would be added in the rack over the top of the other two, creating a third layer. The work of utilising these layers and their interactions is called compositing.

Each frame is then captured on film with a mounted camera. Between each shot, the cels can be re-ordered, swapped in or out, or simply moved horizontally or vertically. The two sources of motion that can be seen of anime are therefore changes in pose with different cels, or relative movement of cels and/or background. Again, this work is referred to as compositing.

In addition, there are a whole suite of effects that are applied at this photography stage, such as making more distant layers blurrier than others, and adding other digital effects. One example might be making everything overlaid with a pale white colour during a snow scene, or applying enhanced shine of the sun of metallic surfaces or the glimmer on the water. These effects are handled by the photography team because they must work across all layers, bridging them together with holistic consideration for lighting and distance.

Although it may appear to be 3DCG at first glance, this effect from Mushishi was achieved by applying effects to hand-drawn cels during photography.

To summarise, the photography department take on the completed, coloured drawings and all other elements that are featured in a particular cut (such as background art and 3DCG) and combine them into a recording, adding any effects that can act across all the layers. These days, the elements are combined in computer software rather than an anime stand, but the approach and scope has largely carried through – dealing with the various layers, moving them between frames, and handling lighting and effects.

One of the new challenges in photography these days is compositing with both 2D and 3DCG animation and not creating an uneven sense of space and depth between them. This is getting better and better. Take a look at Fuuka, in this band scene. Coordinating the 3DCG of the instruments and 2D animation of the characters would likely have been difficult, but even a relatively poorly produced anime like this can pull it off.

Anime has started to become proficient in having 2D and 3D layers interact as shown by the characters playing 3DCG instruments.

Photography as Animation

Part of the final product we call animation is actually the direct outcome of photography – movement achieved by shifting the layers relative to each other to produce motion.

Take this walking shot. The key animation defines the convincing walk cycle, but it is the photography work that actually depicts them as moving forward by pulling the background across behind them. More specifically, this cut implies that the camera is panning along, following them. Going back to the example of the animation stand, the camera does not need to be moved, just the layers it is filming.

On the flip side, the background can be left static, and the cels or other layers can be shifted frame-by-frame to indicate that they are moving. This gives the effect that the camera is fixed while the actors or objects are moving.

Either way, it is the work of photography that creates the real motion by shifting layers, while they key animation creates the pose cycles that make it convincing. Clouds parting, doors opening, objects falling, mouths moving, many small pieces of movement within a scene are not brought to movement by an animator but by photography.

The movement of the castle in this cut from Howl’s moving castle is done by moving static 2D drawings.

Only through careful compositing can you pull off all of these kinds of camera movements and layer movements in a convincing way. If the audience perceives an incongruence in the relative movement of layers or the space between them, the intended effect can be off-putting and feel cheap. Picture the example of a car driving along a road – in the worst case the viewer might not get the sense that the car is moving. Sure, you can work out that that’s probably what’s happening by the images involved, but it certainly won’t feel realistic or natural.

In addition to hilariously bad key animation, this cut from Higurashi Kai feels wrong because the relative movement of layers is unnatural – the cel layer feels detached, as though it’s just floating.

Another thing that compositing can get right to bring out the space between layers is the relativity of movement during pans. If all layers moved together it would look like they were sliding awkwardly together across the backdrop. Instead, the pan of the camera is implied by the layers moving, and how fast one layer moves over another creates space between them. Notice in the Inuyasha gif above, there are two background layers that are moving at different speeds to imply depth – if the fence and the cityscape moved together it would not have felt succiciently three-dimensional to be believable.

Cinematic Depth

The keyword that I just reached is depth. While there are certainly contrarian examples that I’ll get to later, generally speaking anime aims to replicate a sense of reality and a cinematic flavour. In other words, it wants its shots to feel like they are occurring in a full-bodied, three dimensional natural world and to present them so that the audience can feel drawn in. Anime striving for cinematic tones will attempt to imbue their shots with visual depth – when you look into them you feel like your glance can penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the cut into infinity.

Orange (top) has very good compositing that gives a cinematic sense of depth while Granblue Fantasy (Bottom) feels flat and unrealistic at times due to poor compositing. When looking at the top example your eyes feel like they can penetrate the shot, whereas Granblue doesn’t feel natural to look deeply into.

Through effective compositing, photography must then create visual depth with only a few flat layers. Unfortunately, human visual perception is a funny thing, it’s easy to trick but also hard to convince. The first way to get around it is using proportions – obviously layers that are meant to be further away should be proportionally smaller. Getting this balance right to portray correct distances is important to the viewer feeling that the layers are in a believable spatial relationship.

Another often used trick is done with lighting, by creating differentials of vibrancy in the layers, depth is very quickly established. Going back to the anime stand, this could be controlled with the actual lighting in the machine. These days, digital lighting can be easily tweaked in similar fashion. A common way to instill depth that I’ve observed is to have exaggerated lighting, with say a diagonal ray of light hitting half the room. This allows you to easily cast characters in certain amounts of light to produce a palpable sense of space. Much more common now is the use of blur at different layers to simulate camera focus and therefore imply depth.

One of the best ways to make something feel cinematic is to have the camera move forward, pulling the audience into the scene. This is called movement into depth, and is a lot harder to nail in 2D animation than in full 3D animation or when filming a movie. Returning again to the animation stand, the camera is fixed above the mounted layers. You can’t simply move the camera down towards the layers, or the space between them will instantly leap out as being unnatural.

Thomas LaMarre discusses this in his fantastic book ‘The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation’ and uses a great example:

Say that you want to create the sensation of a person walking toward a barn under the full moon. You begin with a background sheet with the barn and moon drawn on it. You might try changing the focus of the camera (zooming in or out), or try moving the camera closer or farther away from the picture. The problem is that, as the barn gets bigger, so does everything around it in the picture. The moon, for instance, also grows larger— rather than remaining the same size, as our conventional sense of the world dictates. Piling on additional layers doesn’t help with this problem. You might try drawing the moon on a separate sheet. But the same problem will arise. The problem does not lie in the number of layers but in the relation between layers

The camera essentially stays fixed and you need separate layers for the distinct  levels of distance. You would then need to move these layers closer to the camera at different rates to portray the right sense of distance and speed of movement. This movement into depth is something that Walt Disney was apparently obsessed over early in Disney’s leap into cinema, going as far as to patent (though arguable not invent) the multi-planar anime stand, which allowed for the layers to be shifted not just horizontally but also vertically for this very purpose.

Even with this stand, it is a difficult effect to achieve, and requires especially precise compositing to impart the proper sense of space. Due to limited resources, anime has traditionally shied away from these movement into depth shots. This has begun to change recently with the exploration of 3D backgrounds and improved integration of 3D and the 2D layers in compositing. One anime film to seriously explore this potential was Ghost in the Shell Innocence. Mamori Oshii has a clear cinematic approach to animation production and it is plain to see he relished the opportunity to break through the surfaces of his layers in his compositing.

Other applications are starting to sneak into every day TV animation. K-ON! had a strikingly well-executed 360 degree pan around the band as they played their instruments, and examples like this are becoming much more common.

K-ON! impressed with a technically challenging 360-pan in the second season’s OP, using a 3DCG backdrop.

In general though, the anime looks to other avenues to deal with space and depth in compositing.

Animating Space

This isn’t all the magic of the photography department, of course; it is clear that the animators play a key role in suggesting depth. Although a layer is just  2D drawing, the way that drawing is posed, and the way the model changes between each frame does impart depth as well as motion. The first principle of course is to animate movements multi-dimensionally. For example if you have a character walk, don’t have them walk a flat x-axis, but also change their proportions so that they are moving slightly towards and/or away from the screen. This obviously adds an extra level of complexity in animating, but immediately gives the cut depth.

Yasuo Otsuka, famous as being a linchpin figure in the formative years of the anime industry and bringing animation to life with dynamic timing and expert detail, used a technique called the ‘peg hole’ technique (named as such due to the fact that he literally rotated subsequent genga around the hole at the top of the sheet). This technique added a roughness to the arc of movement of a character – instead of running in a straight line they would pivot into and out of the motion. It adds both a sense of energy and weight to his sequences, with the feeling that his character’s vitality is only barely bounded by gravity. The other effect is that it looks like his cels are grounded to the backgrounds, placing them nicely into the natural world and thereby delivering an innate kind of depth.

Yasuo Otsuka’s ‘peg hole technique’ adds both energy and a sense of natural, grounded relationship between layers.

Yoshinori Kanada is famous for the cool poses and playful timing he uses in his key-frames, but what’s sometimes overlooked is the fact that those poses included exaggerated perspective, often referred to as the ‘Kanada Perspective’. Wherever possible, the poses would have arms and legs spread out towards or away from the camera, going from one extreme to the other throughout the motion. These poses worked within wide angle lens and fish-eye distortions to expand the stage. This perspective made for wildly dynamic action sequences because they felt like they were frenetically moving through a space.

Yoshinori Kanada’s drawings create their own space with exaggerated, angular poses and perspectives.

Where I’ve discussed depth perception previously as being the feel of space between layers, addressed through compositing, here, Kanada’s layers forcefully create their own space. By their perspective posing, the layers have carved out depth within themselves, avoiding the need for careful compositing.

The eponymous Itano circus is another avenue for animating space. Popularised by Ichiro Itano, they have become a staple in anime.  Trailing schools of ballistics traverse the full breadth of the scene, with self-propelled trajectory and speed. The geometric patterns these trails form etch out their own fields of space, as deep and vast as the animator can will it. A reason these scenes are so great to watch is the way the ballistics drive the photography; their geometries and paths very easily establish both depth and speed. The physical camera may be still but is carried rapidly and wildly through the trajectories of the missiles.

The Itano circus elicits space and speed through the ballistic pathways.

Shinya Ohira is a master at animating with a view to compositing, using a myriad of layers in complex interaction with distinct timing and multi-planar movements to give his shots an unparalleled cinematic quality. When he draws a character running, they don’t just follow a run cycle across the screen, they lunge to and fro in multiple dimensions, coming closer to the camera and farther. He also favours characters running into the shot from behind the camera, or into the camera. These kind of shots not only serve to place you in the scene but can also implicitly portray movement into depth.

Shinya Ohira’s animation creates a world of depth through many layers in complex interaction

Ohira is one of the only animators I have seen who animates a whole world within his cuts, a world of space infinitely deep and wide.

Ohira creates depth through multi-dimensional movement of many layers, but, as I have discussed, true sense of movement into or out of depth is always going to be extremely difficult to obtain while you have a static background layer. One way to get around this is to do away with the static background and animate every layer. This is known as background animation.

One of the first people to really start unveiling the potential of background animation in anime is Masahito Yamashita, whose part in the climax of Urusei Yatsura Beautiful Dreamers grabbed a lot of people’s attention. The sequence followed Lum flying through the school, with the feel of the camera following. The fact that you felt like you were zooming into the world along with her gave the sequence that depth and cinematicness typically missing from anime.

Masahito Yamashita’s turned heads with his thrilling background animation in Urusei Yatsura Beautiful Dreamer 

Others have built on this over the years and it has become a go-to tool in anime’s repertoire to deliver wow-factor sequences. Interestingly, 3DCG backgrounds are starting to replace this particular art-form. While I admit they are probably better suited to most such applications, there’ll always be something special about this kind of cut. I suppose the fact that every line and shape is drawn frame-by-frame means there’s an unconscious energy in the  unpredictability of it all; at any time, our perception of space can be turned on its head – the edges of the walls or the stairs could bend and and warp into new perspectives. When we see a background we can trust that it’s going to be static, but in these shots there’s nothing you can trust to do what you expect, it’s all in the hands of the animator.

Background animation can deliver movement into depth but it also seriously undermines the potential for depth between layers. Instead of the detailed, painted backgrounds, suddenly the background has to be simplified into looking like a cel (for all practical, commercial purposes anyway). This means there’s no obvious distinction between background and foreground. In one sense, this serves to make the shots feel flatter. Although the camera is moving into depth, our eyes don’t penetrate into depth in the same way.

Flat Compositing

When the feel of depth between layers is suppressed, this can be referred to as flat compositing. This is an intentional style in which both background, foreground, and all layers in between are given equal prominence on the screen. Instead of aiming to draw your eye in to some point of depth, your eyes are encouraged to wonder and take everything in holistically.  Background animation usually implies flat compositing because the background feels like a cel in the same way as the characters acting over it might (in fact in many cases they are the one layer). In other cases, it’s about harmonising background and foreground.

Urara Meirochou brings it background to the fore with a harmonised vibrancy

Flattening in composition minimises the sense that the background is further away than the foreground, one of the fundamental notions underpinning the more traditionally cinematic approach. A key facet of this is depth is colour. As Urara Meirochou (and many other anime in recent) years attest to, when the background art is coloured with equal vibrancy to the foreground it removes the most intrinsic sense of depth and brings both into a single layer of perception, flattened. Many other anime carry this look very well.

There’s flat, and there’s superflat. A term coined by the artist Murakami, he drew from a number of Japanese sources to define an art movement that highlights the beauty of flattened depth. Hopefully I can explain what that means in the context of animation! One of the first things he cited was animation by Yoshinori Kanada – his ubiquitous fire dragon erupting from the volcano from Haramgeddon.

Kanada’s fire dragon defines form through shapes of colour rather than clear linework, a facet of Murakami’s superflat art movement.

The style of Kanada’s fire dragon feeds into a major element of Murakami’s superflat look, and that is the supression of outlines that define depth. The painted colours of his dragon are drawn with geometries that signify body and form without the use of clear lines. It’s a beautiful abstraction but our minds can still unpack the relative colours into the three-dimensional figure.

This flat kind of compositing is very explicitly used in the Dirty Pair movie opening. Essentially the idea is to portray the scene as flat, drawing your eyes to patterns and colours to unpack the space between layers that were projected into the flat surface at the screen.

Super-flattening in the sense of Murakami’s work goes a step further by breaking the rules of perception and flattens multiple perspectives of an object into a single orthogonal view point. SHAFT’s Bakemonogatari exhibits striking compositing that follows this superflat style – notice the sheer flatness of the imagery. Even thought there are clearly layers from a functional anime perspective there is no inherit sense of depth. Furthermore, even though we are looking dead-on at the shot, it hints at diagonal perspectives all throughout its artwork. The objects like houses and desks do not feel oriented in a real 3D space but exhibit 3-dimensional traits in their flattened form.

Bakemonogatari’s compositing  and artwork flattens a sense of different perspectives in a ‘superflat’ manner

Both with Bakemonogatari’s superflat, schematic art and Urarara Meirochou’s equalised background and foreground, they feel very different to look at than your typical anime. That’s because most anime chase that cinematic perspective, setting your eyes up for a journey into the depths of the shot, whereas this flat compositing has your eyes drifting and meandering across the image, taking it in laterally.

Parting Words

With the healthy growth of the sakuga community over the last year or so, there has been a kind of awakening in the western anime community. Suddenly, people understand the talent behind animation and appreciate the value of creative and technically difficult movements. From my experience though, the discourse around the final presentation of an anime, the gravitas of its visual appeal, can lack the same sophistication. The visual side of anime production tends to be talked about as either ‘art’ or ‘animation’, however the overarching approach to tying the two together is just as important.

Both animation and art need to be consciously tackled with the goal of producing a sense of depth or an attractive kind of flat aesthetic, and then photography must harmonise all of the elements with well-crafted compositing. That’s how you get anime that pack the most powerful visual punch, when animation, art, 3DCG are all singing in chorus.

Frankly, this is where the role of the director steps into the limelight. With the sakuga communities’ general focus on key animation, it may often seem as though the director is more of a paper-pushing producer than anything else. However, the best directors can exert their creative power by harnessing all of these elements to reach a final vision for the visuals.

If anything, I hope this post might prompt someone to think further about the interplay between art, animation and photography rather than focusing on them independantly.

I recently rewatched Ore Imo and thought I’d better get something off my chest:

I really like Ore Imo, you could even say that I love it!

But don’t mistake me; I don’t think Ore Imo (appreciably short for Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai or There’s no Way my Little Sister can be this Cute) is by any means a perfect anime, or even great. I’m talking here about an abnormal, irrational kind of love, much like the central romance of the anime itself.

Don’t worry, it’s not that I have a thing for my sister anything (I don’t even have one), and I’m not some kind of incest fetishist either. No, it’s just that OreImo has a strange way of taking me in and pulling my heart strings. Even years later, upon my recent rewatch, that affection came flooding back, much to my surprise. It’s been a few years, and I’ve naturally grown into a hard, seasoned anime verteran. I expected to shake my head a wonder how it was I ever liked this trash. Instead, it clicked with me all over again.

A lot of people hate the feisty Kirino, but she’s up on the waifu mantle for me. And many critics will rush to buy first class seats and clamber aboard the ‘show is trash’ train, but I found it to be far more moving and clever than most other run-of-the-mill light novel series. But why?

My hunch is that it’s all in the characters.

Throughout the first half of the series, you can be forgiven for thinking that the anime and its colourful cast boils down to sensationalist, skin-deep bait. Kirino is deeply implausible on paper – a 14 year old otaku, model, ace student and school athlete who also sleeps and is mortal. Bullshit, right? What’s more, she comes across as a shallow, self-centered bitch right from the start, taking the tsundere archetype and running away with it to new frontiers. Kyousuke is a self-proclaimed ‘ordinary high-school boy’, basically advertising himself as trope on legs. Then there’s Manami, the tranquil childhood friend, Kuroneko the straight-laced, no-frills goth-loli. As for the bother x sister overtones, that’s gotta be a bait that’ll amount to nothing, right?

Wrong. All wrong. OreImo is all about people being dishonest, with others and with themselves. But it’s not just the characters in the show who don’t know what each other are thinking – we don’t know either. The author makes a point of making sure nothing is at appears, and by the end of it, you’ll come to know them as unique and fascinating individuals whose sometimes strange actions are born from honest truths. A little larger than life, sure, but by no means shallow or cliche.

Don’t take Kirino’s outbursts earlier in the show at face value – there’s more to her bitterness

What’s interesting is how this depth is organically explored, because it’s almost the opposite to convention. Take the character of Kirino – normally a storyteller would start her out as a blank canvas, then craft her into a more interesting character through the experiences of the story. Whereas, Ore Imo had all its character development happen years ago, off screen. The start of a love story, dramatic falling out between friends, life-changing events all transpired in Kyousuke and Kirino’s childhood that they have both since buried with their own barriers and the sands of time.

The angry, bitter Kirino and the lethargic Kyousuke at the start of the show are already twisted up into a knot of denial and, in Kirino’s case, unrequited feelings. The rest of the story is then not about them growing, but almost unwravelling the last few years and coming to understand themselves again.

Occasional hints are dropped that make you question the characters words – why is Kirino so infatuated with little sister eroge?

But first, a little back story for those not across it:

A key later episode provides the missing link, how they went from childhood besties to distant co-habitants of the Kousaka household. When they were young kids, Kyousuke was boisterous, confident and the ace of the class in grades and sports. Kirino didn’t just look up to him, she was infatuated with him and he instilled in her an unshakeable personal drive that shaped her adolescent life. As she pushed herself in her studies and her track team activities, Kyousuke meanwhile fell into a rut, quitting running and letting his grades slip into mediocrity. Gone was the person she aspired to; she’d spent years trying to stand proudly next to him only to find that, when she had reached that point, that person no longer existed in Kyousuke. She blamed Kyousuke’s childhood friend Manami for his descent, but more importantly, it made her hate and resent what she saw as the shambling shell of Kyousuke.

Through this history and gradually seeing some of their innate personality traits you can begin to appreciate Kyousuke, and yes, even Kirino. But you can’t talk about them without talking about their strange love story,

The central romance between Kirino and Kyousuke is not just thrown in for shits and giggles; it is an ever-present, looming force from the very first scenes with roots running deep into the characters hearts. To the author’s credit, I’m sure he set out to deliver a taboo love story from the very  beginning and had the balls to see it through, even against the push-back from publishers and the chagrin of many fans. The author sticking to his guns and writing his story I think goes a long way to explain why OreImo has an edge that many light novels lack.

-… the author apologizes for being a troublemaker (and comments that the other writers must be sick of him), but says that he doesn’t let that pressure affect his writing or change what he wants to write. He says that “occasionally I have no choice but to change what I want to write, but I decided from the get-go that I wouldn’t write something ‘lukewarm'”. (i.e. That he wouldn’t write just to please others, or in response to pressure.)

(http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost.php?p=4729794&postcount=3883)

Throughout this journey, I found Kirino and Kyousuke to have more chemistry than the vast majority of other anime couplings out there – a fiery, confused and chaotic chemistry no doubt, but a real, visceral sense of attraction and tension. Most romances in anime feel like an arranged marriage, an inevitable pairing of convenience between the hero and heroine simply because that’s the way things go. That or they’re the product of a typical harem situation, where a flurry of jealousy is confused for a love story. Many shoujo on the other hand may ham-fist emotion into their romances with comically over the top trauma or ‘edgy’ dark pasts.

Either way, it’s usually surface level stuff you could pull out of a hat. Kirino and Kyousuke however, have a love that comes from somewhere altogether more complicated and rooted in real situations.

This bears fruit in their loaded interactions, where words don’t match actions and actions don’t match their body language let alone their true feelings.  Kyousuke’s willingness to go to extreme lengths to defend and make his sister happy are justified by a simple ‘because I’m her brother’, while his front of ambivalence towards her personal life is belied by deep-set forlornness when she goes overseas or they have a fight. Kirino’s seemingly vile anger, is a mask of her own feelings so convincing that even she buys it most of the time. She blushes as she scorns her bother with lines like ‘ go get hit by a bus’, ‘creep!’, et cetera. This aggression is her way of both fighting back her disgust at her own forbidden, incestual feelings, and lashing out at the person Kyousuke has become at the cost of the boy he once was.

Throughout the second season, Kirino and Kyousuke’s interactions are rife with double meaning and subtext that they don’t even fully grasp, creating thrilling tension.

This leads us to the hot-topic tsundere element. Sure, Kirino is a tsundere, and sure, she has the lion’s share of tsun, at times being one of the most gratingly abrasive anime girls to ever grace the TV screen, but you’ve got her all wrong if you think that’s all there is to it. She’s a tsundere who not only can’t be honest with others, she can’t be honest with herself on a level that’s practically self destructive. In the darkest corner of the lowest chasms of her heart, she is in love with her brother, but she is so scared by the thought, repulsed by the idea and spiteful towards the person Kyousuke is now, that the feeling is tied up and wound a hundred times within her.

The thing I like about her character though is that the love isn’t neatly sealed away, it’s tangled all through her, a  messy knot of emotions that sometimes gives her drive, sometimes leads her down surprising paths like becoming an otaku, and creates this tension within her that manifests in her tsundere actions. When she’s being bitter, it’s not just a distraction tactic, or mere reflex to embarrassment – it’s genuine anger from that dark vortex inside that even she doesn’t want to face or understand.

-By the end of the story, his favourite character is Kirino, but it wasn’t that way at first and he was just as annoyed with her as Kyousuke was at the beginning. But having her hide her true romantic feelings was part of the setting, and so he struggled to bring out the charm of this hated heroine little by little over the course of the narrative. And then, as all these developments started adding up, the amount of people who came to like her increased, and that made the author happy.

(http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost.php?p=4729794&postcount=3883)

Once this knot inside her is unstrung, her verbal lashings no longer carry the same edge, instead landing softly and feeling like playful banter. If early Kirino told you to go get hit by a bus you’d probably feel a chill down your spine, but when it comes from late Kirino you’d probably laugh and fire something back. On paper, she acts the same, but you know she doesn’t feel the same and her tsun side is almost now just habitual. And of course there are those moments that every tsundere fan lives for, when the clouds part and heaven casts its golden rays for that fleeting moment of dere.

Kirino’s tsun comes from a deep, dark place, but those moments where she manages to let her real feelings slip out are truly one of natures miracles.

Kyousuke may identify as a boring everyday highschool boy, but even before we find out that he used to be a passionate, driven child, he frequently lets slip more attitude that many main male characters who are outright TRYING to be interesting. This is especially true when it comes to Kirino, who can unlock his innate zeal. Whether it’s riding all across Tokyo on a publicly indecent loli bicycle just to get her to a concert on time, acting as a talent agent to help win her a rare figure prize from a cosplay competition, or publicly confessing his love for his sister, Kyousuke is an unstoppable force when it comes to her. It doesn’t just attest to his love for her, but also reveals his true nature.

These two spend so long fighting with each other and their own feelings that I couldn’t but root for them with full force. They deserve true love after all the false hatred. Kyousuke’s confession was a worthy moment, but I was more amazed at the quiet, understated scene later in the hotel room. It was just them talking, no screaming, no crying or running through the city – but they were finally talking honestly with each other! A touching moment of peace.

I could go on about the other characters, especially the wonderful Kuroneko, but by now I think I’ve played my hand: OreImo is not all that it appears, and most critics have taken it at face value. There’s far more depth, nuance and truth in this work than so many other critic darlings out there. The depth that is there is massaged to the surface by remarkable voice acting performances, and strong production values that perfectly express Kanzaki Hiiro’s superb character designs

Sure, there’s also plenty of dumb stuff in here, especially unnecessary harem elements, and it’s never going to be considered intellectual literature, but I do think it has a surprising amount of heart to it.

At the end of the day, there’s something about the gutsy and deceptively earnest way Tsukasa Fushimi pulled off his characters and relationships that makes you think ‘There’s no way my trashy otaku LN series can be this good‘.

In the late 90s, after Gegege no Kitarou 4 went digicel after the 64th episode, the Japanese animation industry quickly transitioned from being filmed with a camera to being scanned and composited in computer software. Over the last decade, there has now been some further evolution with stylus and tablet often replacing pencil and paper to with the new generation of animators. Although we have lost some finishing touches along this technological journey (and gained some!), the fundamental principal has never changed: piecing together a moving image from layers of hand-drawn frames. That’s the underlying tenet behind the anime we all grew up with.

Some people make a mistake here and see 3DCG animation as the next logical step on the horizon, a kind of inevitable technological break-through for animation. Perhaps this is a western perspective that is in tune with the movements of our own industry, which has always been quick to jump on new innovations, first using Flash automation to eliminate the need for inbetween frames, then pushing forth into fully computer generated animation. Over the last few years, more and more Japanese directors are embracing this and creating wholly/largely 3DCG animation such as Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Knights of Sidonia and Houseki no Kuni.

It’s a trend I have been diligently ignoring for the last couple of years in the hope that it would just somehow go away. Recently though, I had the misfortune to sit down and watch an entire episode of such a creation: the first episode of High Score Girl. It was a grim reminder if how not into the whole thing I am.

But that’s just my opinion – plenty of people out there are singing to the tune of 3DCG (Houseki no Kuni in particular got a lot of praise), and I’m not here to tell them they’re wrong. But I do want to make one thing crystal clear:

This kind of animation and traditional 2D animation are not the same thing.

I mean, sure, they’re both just making something move. But that’s like saying photography and painting are the same thing because they both produce a picture. They’re both animation, strictly speaking, but I argue that they’re wholly different art-forms.

As a sakuga fan, I’ve talked often and deeply about the power of animation. But more, specifically, sakuga is the power of traditional 2D animation. I’d argue that true sakuga in 3DCG anime is virtually impossible. You can have as much technological innovation and creative ideas as you like, but at the end of the day it can only strive to emulate the brand of charisma that 2D animation can evoke. You see, in traditional animation, every frame can be a world of its own, with limitless potential to create its own space and illustrative beauty.

In 2D animation there’s theoretically no need to stick to the model – in fact, even if you wanted to you, it’s practically impossible. Each frame can and will have a life of its own, a cat could become a plane from one instant to the next, or one if its whiskers could could bend with an almost imperceptible tweak. The point is that there’s no limit – each moment is a canvas of infinite potential which can tell any kind of story about what came before and what is to come.

This potential is used especially well by the Japanese industry where animators have long been given the freedom to experiment with it in commercial productions and not have their personal styles over-corrected into dull uniformity. This road, paved with the deeds and misdeeds of many a pioneering animator, has lead to an environment where animators are truly creating every frame and not just replicating a drawing in a set pose.

From the rawness and boldness etched with every tiny line, the surreal warping of proportions, perspective that defies any real logic, or even just the finer details of intricate beauty that they might pour into a money-shot, the hands of animators can do anything. The most charismatic animators know this well and can tell a breathtaking visual story as they fly from one frame to another, each one introducing new ideas and unexpected twists.

Even when they’re imitating life, most of the best realistic animators use this freedom of the frame and the space between frames. They understand that animation doesn’t have to look precisely real, to feel genuinely believable. They might exaggerate small, subtle movements that our minds pick up on as realistic, or hone in on the most powerful expressive movements that our hearts can relate to – the stifling of tears, the heavy breathing, or the spring in our step when we feel elated. In the same way that a simple drawing can inspire great beauty, animation can concentrate and make abstract these innate gestures, amplifying them into powerful emotion.

Only masters with control over each key drawing, and every precise detail can tell such a story with mere motion.

3DCG can’t really do any of this, at least, not in the same way.

You see, with 3DCG you create a model and then you move it for each frame you want. Sure, you can pose it however you like, and you can add some funky touches to spruce up different frames if you want, but at the end of the day that’s why you’re using 3D -so that you don’t need to recreate each moment from scratch. It’s more akin to a puppet show than it is to 2D animation. Some companies are getting better at fooling us with dynamic timing, and effects to mask the fact that they’re just posing a virtual dummy, but it doesn’t matter how good they get – they will never be able to create the same kind of sequences that 2D can.

When you’re posing a model, it doesn’t matter what you do, you lose the ability to instill that visceral feeling of a hand crafted moving image with all its natural flaws and human touches. Our minds and the natural world are complex beyond imagination and explanation, and the pencil/stylus in an animator’s hand is a raw conduit to that.

Then there’s compositing. In traditional ‘cel’ animation you’re dealing with creating a sense of depth through discrete, flat layers. It’s a challenge and an art in and of itself that I discuss at length in this blog post. With artful use of compositing, you can create wholly different visual experiences with the same layers and the same anime can flirt with different approaches between cuts. The rich colourscapes crafted by ‘superflat’ styles, or the cinematic depth created with simple lighting and shading, the space between layers is another great playgound of potential.

In 3DCG, you can happily zoom in, out and spin around your model with ease – it’s not a layer, it’s an object in virtual space. As you might expect, this makes tricky, dynamic camera work and even lighting effects a lot easier. Directors might feel like they have more freedom, but in truth they’re missing out on the potential that 2D anime photography can offer in terms of interweaving characters and backgrounds into a singular artistic vision. This is because you’re filming a real (albeit virtual) object in a defined space, instead of crafting the space yourself with every shot.

2D animation may be more logistically challenging and technically constrained, but its artistic potential is virtually limitless within these bounds, and when it does hit a high note it’s something truly magnificent.

I’m not here trying to say that 3DCG anime shouldn’t exist, or that people are wrong for liking it. And there’s certainly a lot of talent that goes into creating these works. I just want us all to understand that they are not one in the same. 2D animation isn’t an old way of doing things, it’s a wholly different artform, and one that I and many others love dearly. If we allow 3DCG to be the future and not just an alternative, anime will lose something forever.

What I would like to see, is the two approaches continue to evolve side-by-side and overlap in interesting ways.

I’ve been really enjoying this new season of Attack on Titan so far. Of course, we’re only two episodes in and I know that’s not saying much when we’re talking about a WIT production, but it’s already streets ahead of last year. Season 2 seemed to be deeply unsure of itself, intent on recapturing the spirit of the original blockbuster hit series but also desperately worried that the audience would fall asleep if it didn’t keep them entertained with constant action and campy effects.  Attack on Titan has always worked best when it embraces its strengths as a unique character driven storie, only punctuated by moments of furious action. I was afraid that assistant-made-director Masashi Koizuka would never understand that, but he seems to have reflected on the missteps of last year.

This latest episode definitely got that mix right, taking the time to advance its plot in detail, and dwell on the personal impacts of the violent encounters on its strangely loveable cast. And violent encounters there were, with Levi and his squad’s shockingly sudden and ferocious face-off against rival soldiers through the streets of the city being probably the most impressive sequence of action animation the title has ever pulled off.

It still didn’t quite match the dramatic impact of the original episodes, but it was the first time in a hell of a long time that Attack on Titan had me teetering on the edge of my seat and in awe of the raw speed, power and skill on display.

From an animation perspective there were two particularly stand out cuts, which really took things to the next level.

But the cut that I found more exciting that I’ll focus on a bit was the very next beat.

For want of a better pun, this is right up my alley. Both of these sequences are blatant, unapologetic showing off in the best way possible, taking the ideas at the heart of the show’s action animation – sheer, adrenaline fueled speed and dynamism – and pushing it as far as it can go.

From the very first season, Attack on Titan saw the 3D maneuver gear combat as not just a unique challenge in producing the show, but also an opportunity to create action the like of which people hadn’t really seen before. The thing they had to get right was making the audience really feel the acceleration and momentum that these characters were thrusting themselves into. We have to be right there with them as they swing and propel themselves between buildings, launching from the shoulders of hungry titans or pivoting from ledge to ledge.

The most obvious and probably critical tool in Titan’s arsenal is the use of 3D backgrounds. Most anime use static background layers, even in their actions shots. 3D backgrounds are a lot more work to produce and are generally only be used for important cuts where the camera has to rotate (like how KyoAni used it in Keion’s OP). Of course, you can still create riveting action sequences with 2D backdrops – just look at Masahiro Andou’s work in the currently airing Sirious the Jaeger. But if you want to create the kind of battles that Titan has, you need the camera to truly move with the character, keeping pace with their extreme speed and aerobatic techniques.

Animated backgrounds used to be the only way to do this, but 3DCG backgrounds are far more suited to this kind of task as they allow detailed renders that match the fine art qualities of a normal 2D background to move with the camera in absolutely realistic ways. The realistic sense of space and proportions of the background while in fast motion ensure our disbelief is kept suspended while all the little details – individual tiles, bricks and windows flying past the screen work to make our eyes understand the velocity with a grounded sense of scale.

I’m making it sound easy, but it obviously takes more work than most projects are willing or able to invest and this week’s Titan has done it exceptionally well. Especially in the latter sequence; the dense lived-in feel of the buildings down the alley and the way the bar approaches at the end is just great.

But it takes a lot more than 3D backgrounds to make a moment this exhilarating. Picture that gif without Levi and the effects in it; you could tell it was fast, sure, but you wouldn’t feel the speed. It would be boring, to be honest.

The remarkable thing about this sequence is the fact that the animator (Arifumi Irai) went to the nth degree to do everything in their power to portray the thrilling motion. Every frame seems to have some hidden facet to it that, in sum with the others, brings the whole scene to perfect fruition.

As Levi bounds from wall to wall, his body is stretched and contorted, his hair blows back, his shirt presses against his chest; the forces of momentum, gravity and air resistance are all on display, underscoring the physicality of it.

The layered and detailed effects that occur in mere instants are not grandstanded but are humbly used just to ramp up the overall intensity and heat of the chase. These frames are quite impressive on their own but they barely have time to feel like key frames. I also think this frame of Levi’s face reflected in a passing window is a great example of how much detail went into storyboarding and creating this fleeting sequence.

Here Levi leaps onto a wooden scaffold, jumping over a box, avoiding an explosion, scraping his gear along a stone wall and finally flinging off the end. Honestly, it could have just been a wooden surface – the box and the rice bags aren’t essential. And I didn’t even notice the detail of his gear hitting the brick until I freeze-framed it. But again, it’s the extra effort that went into these furnishings that make the scene remarkable and not just good. Interacting with the objects around him gives Levi’s flight a certain kineticism that it wouldn’t have it he was just free-flying in open space.

It’s probably a good time to talk about the impressive undertaking it would have been to animate these cuts with the combined factors of high speed, rotating camera, and layers of effects. Remember that Levi and the sparks and flames surrounding him are just 2D layers totally divorced from the 3 dimensionality of the backgrounds. The buildings in the background will perfectly match every whim of the camera, but when it comes to the drawings, the animator needs to make sure the angles and proportions of their subjects evoke the same effect.

Only very careful planning and strong technical skills can ensure that from frame to frame Levi is realistically in step with the velocity of the camera and the vectors of every object around him. Dealing with any one of these is often a technical challenge, but all three must be quite maddening. Nonetheless Imai was more than up to the task.

The use of relative smearing in that last screenshot is also interesting – the speed being emphasized closer to the camera is an added dash of faux realism alluding to both speed and dynamic depth.

All of these aspects are put to work in the next part – Levi scrapes and rebounds off the ground with true momentum, creating a fuhror of effects as he then dodges a blast before firing his gear at the screen which is strongly emphasised with smears to give it that extra degree of dynamism. Make no mistake, this is a kind of fast, frenetic and furious action that we have rarely seen in anime before period.

It’s got enough thought put into it that it could have been a storyboard for at least a whole episode of a typical anime yet it was over in just a matter of seconds. It’s taking this expanse of deeply considered ideas and work and then compressing it into a fleeting moment that I believe truly makes us feel the speed in the way the creators hoped.

From what I’ve heard, the entire sequence was not only solo key animated but also single-handedly storyboarded by the series’ lead action animator, Arifumi Imai. It also took him about a month to complete the storyboard for it – which really is longer than a lot of anime get for entire episodes. It’s not at all surprising that this kind of sequence was both envisioned and executed by one talented individual – I think difficult sequences this complex need the hands of someone who has the perfect picture of it in their own head.

So, all praise to Imai. I just really hope that the series has another of his solo efforts up their sleeves for a a later episode!

Spoiler warning: Significant spoilers for Full Metal Alchemist

It’s been a long while since I watched Full metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Names of characters, the beats  of the story and most of the dramatic climaxes have faded to a distant haze. But one brief moment of the 60-odd episode saga still leaps to mind with perfect clarity and that is the death of Lust by Roy Mustang’s barrage of fire attacks.

It was about a third of the way through the series, and by this point these sinful villains had put the heroes through all manners of torment and, with the regenerative power of the philosopher’s stone seemed to be utterly indestructible. This moment marked a turning point with the sheer power of Roy’s sustained attacks overcoming their supposed immortality and finally defeating one of them for good. It was important to the story, but that’s not what made it so memorable.

It was one of those moments where the power of animation took a good scene and made it an unforgettable one. And the impact of this one short scene on viewers and even the industry as a whole can’t be understated – after all, it was a rare instance where it wasn’t just die hard sakugabros who got weak at the knees. Fans of all kinds were united in awe by Yoshimichi Kameda’s unique, visceral and powerful animation and it was the true launchpad for his career that now has him as one of the most well-known charisma animators of our time. I dare say the sakuga community gained a few members that day – it certainly left an impression on me too.

But what’s so good about it? Kameda took a character’s death scene and cut through all the usual shounen anime niceties of neatly drawn, attractive characters to focus on sheer, untamed intensity of being burnt alive using whatever methods he could. He threw out the book and used rough, contorted but extremely detailed drawings, and depicted withering figures in the flames with pure shadow, barely recognisable as human. It’s probably fair to say that TV animation hadn’t seen something quite like this before.

The first couple of cuts waste no time in making a statement with the realistic disfigurement underscoring the real violence of the sequence – while fire in anime is too often treated as some kind of orange magical essence that reduces a characters HP until they’re arbitrarily defeated, here it burns away the skin to muscle and bone and singes the hair. Already his drawings show carefully defined gritty details well beyond the level of the rest of the anime up until this point.

But this is only the beginning; Lust is again and again engulfed in a furnace of flames, burning away her form until she becomes this writhing, flickering contortion. Here Kameda is no longer using lines and shading for Lust, depicting her purely with ink and brush. While it’s relatively common for this kind of cut to do away with standard linework for other techniques, Kameda’s execution with the brush is unique and exceptional. His drawings strike just the right balance between form and distortion so that this scorched horror is still strikingly human. Combined this with the jittery, flailing motion he creates with his frames and the overall effect is as unsettling as it is exciting.

His animation throughout this sequence has such unrestrained intensity to it that impact frames might seem redundant, but he still breaks them out as yet another tool in his arsenal to take the power of Roy’s inferno to the next level. And they are a sight to behold, a primal clash of light and dark.

Lust’s final screaming lunge – a last furious, escape from the jaws of a fiery death is the real money shot here that sells the whole scene, using Kameda’s creative gusto not just for wow factor but for vivid emotion.

Here, Kameda’s raw, messy drawings are imbued with the very essence of desperate rage. Again the conventions of character design and crisp linework are left behind in the dust, but now more intimately, as every scrawl and stroke becomes a perfect etching of agony, hatred and desolation.

Looking into Lust’s eyes in the caps below you can really feel the anger emanating from her. I don’t know about you, but it reaches right into my heart. I don’t think drawings like this can be taught, it’s Kameda’s pure artistic vision incarnate and a profound demonstration of his talent.

The use of the flickering trail of the reflection in Lust’s eyes is a clever way to add speed and force to her charge.

It’s also a fine example of his use of the calligraphy brush (sumi-e brush) to add a visceral, textural aesthetic to the genga. You can see this used for her hair in the screenshots above and also in the genga below (from a different episode altogether)

While he’s very capable of nuance and telling through motion, the sheer impact of his drawings carry the lion’s share of Kameda’s power. Each of his key frames is a piece of art in its own right, especially in this sequence, which remains one of his best to this day.

It almost goes without saying, but he was credited for in-betweens this episode so it’s fair to assume his sequence was completely animated by him. I think the concept of in-betweens doesn’t even really apply to Kameda’s efforts anyway – that would imply there’s some comprehensible logic separating his frames.

The thing about Kameda’s animation on FMA is that it did away with the staples of action anime, the crisp linework, stringent on-model animation and elegant choreography. That stuff is all fun of course, but it feels like a mere farce when Kameda  enters the stage. All the designing, planning and teams of directors in the world don’t hold a candle to the innate talent of this one man let loose. His animation is rough, wild and unconventional but it’s not trying to be. The vibe I get from his work is that he’s not throwing in techniques just because they’re different or to imitate his sakuga forbears; he just earnestly throws everything he has at a scene to make it as good as it can be. And it works.

In his animation is a kind of truth that is almost impossible to grasp, and that is why he’s the real deal, a truly dynamic charisma animator in the spirit of Yoshinori Kanada.

Anime historians loathe to settle on one ‘first anime’, going to great lengths to traverse back to the most ancient relics of Japanese animation. But I’m going to have to pick a practical starting point that doesn’t have me dusting off my tools and traveling to Japan on an archaeology expedition. A popular choice for kicking off anime history articles tends to be the film Hakujaden (Panda & The Magic Serpent), and the arguments for it are pretty compelling. For a start, it’s the first commercially produced animated Japanese feature film and Asia’s first full colour animated feature.

Far more important though is the fact that this film established an industry for full-blown animation production, the industry that remains alive and kicking today. For the first time, animation was being produced in Japan not just by small independent companies doing short films and odd-and-ends jobs or by the military, but by a big company with a large workforce and a full production system that had plans to be around for years to come. I chose Panda & The Magic Serpent not because it is the first piece of animation from Japan, but because it’s the point from which Japan’s animator workforce exploded and the fascination with animated entertainment became ingrained in the national repertoire. If you want to read about Japanese animation before this film, I recommend John Clement’s great book, Anime: A History.

Released in 1958, Panda & The Magic Serpent is Asia’s first colour animated full-length feature film, and it didn’t pull any punches, delivering an impressive production quality across 214,154 drawings. Planning started back in 1956, when it was announced as an animated adaptation of the Hong-Kong/Japanese co-produced film Madame White Snake, based on the Chinese folktale Legend of the White Snake .

Toei head, Hiroshi Okawa, would make this the first of what would be many feature-films created by his new animation subsidiary, Toei Douga. While the live-action film was co-produced with Hong Kong, this animated version would handled entirely within Japan. The following two years leading up to the film’s release represent a monumental push for the new company to not only create a distinguished animated movie but also simultaneously train up an entire generation of new animators – the foundations of an industry. Panda & The Magic Serpent is the story of Toei Douga.

Founding of Toei Douga

Toei Company itself was under the umbrella of the Tokyo Yokohama Rail Company. The company owned cinemas around many train stations and wanted to use them to target women and children as a demographic. Following the attention garnered by the colour release of Snow White in Japan in 1950, and eyeing the potential revenue from animated advertising that public broadcast television offered from 1953, Okawa Hiroshi founded Toei Douga with brash goal of being the ‘Disney of the East’.

Toei head Hiroshi Okawa founded Toei Douga to pursue an animation industry akin to Disney

Don’t mistake this as an intent to just copy Disney’s style or content, but as an aspiration to achieve what Disney had achieved but at home. Okawa wanted to regularly output animated films that could match Disney’s professional quality and to have the same sense of industry, that scale of manpower that could push out impressive feature films like clockwork. He shocked even the veteran animators with his proclamation that the company would eventually ‘output 2 feature length animation films and other smaller works a year’. Although not always remembered as a warm or charismatic individual, Okawa’s steadfast optimism and resolve can’t be denied. By all accounts, he was at the time more hopeful about the future of animation in Japan than the animators themselves.

The audacity of creating Japan’s very first colour animated feature film with almost no existing industry or expertise in making anything of this scale cannot be understated. Before Toei Douga was created for this task, the largest existing Japanese animation production studio was Nihon Douga-sha (Nichidou for short), which had only 20 members and were working out of a makeshift office on a high school’s grounds. These guys had done some independent animation before and that made them the closest thing Japan had to veteran animators.

Nichidou became Toei Douga in 1956, which brought across its most senior animators and the true grandfathers of anime, such as Yasuji Mori and Akira Daikubara. With a sizeable investment, these animators suddenly found themselves housed in a brand new office building with air conditioning, with new desks and supported by new staff. In 1957 this new company produced the black-and-white short film Kitty’s Graffiti and then began ramping up its efforts to tackle Hakujaden.

Obviously, the scale of this film demanded many more hands and Toei scouted any aspiring animators from colleges of fine arts as well as general public recruiting that saw a deluge of entrants from many walks of life. Still in a post-war lull, employment was hard to come by, and this represented a good opportunity to go in with little or no qualification and become trained up. In this wave of recruiting came Yasuo Otsuka (another deeply influential figure in the anime sphere), Daikishiro Kusube and many others.

The origins of anime itself can truly be traced back to this humongous, conscious injection of effort and, presumably, corporate cash to build up an industry that could leave a legacy almost from scratch.

Toei Douga’s original office, built just for the studio

The road was certainly rocky, with the early company struggling to recoup costs and marred by labor disputes, but to his credit Okawa reached his goal for the studio’s output within 6 years. In some ways, Okawa’s efforts were a success beyond his imagination – Toei Douga, now Toei Animation after being reborn, is still a major animation player in Japan but, more importantly, the creators he gave the tools back then started their own dynasties that ended up being the workforce of today.

The Animators – Yasuji Mori and Akira Daikubara & Underlings

Hakujaden’s only two credited key animators were the two more experienced members of the absorbed Nichidou – Yasuji Mori and Akira Daikubara. While it’s not strictly true that they were the only staff who did key drawings, they certainly did the bulk of them and it cannot be overstated just how much of a driving force these two guys were. To fully appreciate it, you first need to understand that a key animator back then had a very different role. In these early days there was no animation director, certainly no chief animation director, and no storyboarder. For Hakujaden, the key animators were standing at the very top of the food-chain in terms of the animation production.

In truth, they had another very important role – that of a teacher. Replicating the Disney apprentice program, Toei focused on training up animators through it’s work. It was half-jokingly coined as ‘Toei University’ at the time, and this focus played a big part in Hakujaden. Mori and Daikubara were each given a team who would handle their in-betweens and learn from their corrections and mentoring. In all, 30 animators put pencil to paper for this film.

For their following movies they put in place a more structured and hierarchical ‘seconding system’, but initially it was very much a hands-on teacher/student kinds of arrangement. In early Toei, the key animators were the founding leaders and mentors of an animator generation, and not just responsible for the drawings in a scene.

Almost every animator in the years after this film will have worked under them in the ‘Toei University’. Being so crucial to the film, these guys’ very distinct personalities shine through in a very obvious way, and really shape the impressionable generation brewing below them.

Yasuji Mori (Left) and Akira Daikubara (Right) were the two key animators on Hakujdaden)

The film was split between the two based upon their animation philosophies and predilections, with Mori receiving the gentle and spritely characters, particularly the animals, and Daikubara being given the more masculine humans and the action scenes requiring rough action or natural phenomena. But the distinction between the two treads deeper than just handing different kinds of cuts.

For Panda & Magic Serpent, Toei Douga leveraged a kind of rotoscoping, which was common in Disney’s animation. Many of the sequences involving people were actually filmed in a studio acted out in full by genuine actors. Stills from this footage were then used by the animators for their drawings. This added significant effort and expense to the fill as even more difficult parts like the stormy seas were recreated with actors in the film studio. Nevertheless, they continued to use this model for at least the next couple of movies.

This approach mainly applied to Daikubara’s parts involving the human characters, with Mori needing to resort to more genuinely conceived animation for his fanciful animal sequences. Hence, Daikubara’s bits often presented the awkward surrealness that rotoscoped animation usually entails, while the early tenets of animation that underpinned Disney’s work are far more clear in Mori’s work.

Their personalities were allowed to guide the way they worked and this manifests clearly in movie. Mori’s nature was clean and precise, and he demanded rigid quality from his animators. Daikubara, on the the other hand, was much freer and more liberal with the drawings he accepted. Daikubara’s less uniform tendencies meant that he, in turn, entrusted certain sequences to in-betweeners based on their own strengths.

He’d ask me to draw something

I’d draw it and he’d laugh and laugh

He’d say ‘This is good. Weird, but good’

And he’d go ahead and use it.

Yasuo Otsuka on Daikubara’s animation direction style

The most famous of these in-betweeners is Yasuo Otsuka. Otsuka, at the top of the douga credits, was charged especially with sequences involving natural forces, being integral to the stormy sea cuts including drawing the giant catfish. Ever able to draw from nature and his real surroundings, Otsuka got a real catfish to study its movements – perhaps the first steps towards realism in anime. He would later become well-known for another giant fish sequence in Horus Prince of the Sun. Indeed, Otsuka went on to become a revered pillar of Japanese animation, creating a legacy in Samurai Giants and Lupin III, among other things. Far from a Daikubara disciple, he also worked extensively with Mori and was greatly inspired by him.

Yasuo Otsuka 

It’s obvious that Otsuka was a star among the new recruits, handling some of the most memorable moments and even staking a claim to some legitimate key animation for the fish sequence (2 cuts).

Yasuo Otsuka’s key animation for the catfish sequence – note the lack of peg holes on the genga – Toei didn’t start using these until they adopted widescreen filming for their next movie.

Another name who appears in this film is Daikichiro Kusube, who was a second under Mori. Despite being under the more perfectionist of the two, Kusube audaciously pushed for Mori to let him bypass the seconding system and key animate some of his own cuts (uncredited of course). Continuing this rapid upward trend, Kusube would only be at Toei for a few more years before moving on to found his own studio, A Production. Kusube was known for attracting the more eccentric staff at Toei, and many of those who learned under him soon went on to leave their own mark on the industry (such as Kimura Keichi on Tiger Mask).

This work style is very apparent in their animation; Mori’s cuts are polished and all cleanly articulate his vision, while Daikubara’s are much rougher and varied. Daikubara’s animation occasionally feels messy, but other times its roughness is exhilarating – likely depending on which in-betweeners he was working with.

Mori is far better known than Daikubara was, and he weaves a certain magic into his animals that steals the show even in this first Toei venture. Daikubara’s impact can’t be ignored though – his free nature and tendency to push the boundaries in both realism and comically exaggerated drawings (coined as mangateki kocho style) seems to have spurred a creative energy in his understudies that would snowball into the kaleidoscopic industry we have today. If you want to learn more about him, check out Jonathan Clements’ obituary.

In 1958 Disney was the undisputed gospel of animation, and all of these guys were zealous in their pursuit of the company’s knowledge and techniques, importing and translating books by their animators (such as Animation: learn to draw animated cartoons by Preston Blair). Yasuo Otsuka would even hand-copy books he borrowed from the library, translating the text and re-sketching all the illustrations. This isn’t too surprising given Otsuka’s innate predilection for sketching with utmost precision since he was a child infatuated with steam trains.

Yasuo Otsuka hand-copied Animation by Preston Blair

It’s clear that they adopted many of these ideas in their work, and this early work seems to display it more, almost as though they were still in the imitating phase of learning it. There are a number of cuts in the film that almost seem designed to put these fundamental concepts to practice, and although you have to admire their passion for their work, it occasionally feels a little too on-the-nose Disney.

Some cuts in the film feel too textbook, such as the use of anticipation in the above cut.

Different characters act differently, partly by the nature of dividing them and their respective cuts to different key animators and, in turn, to different in-betweeners. But also by a kind of innate personality; Yasuji Mori’s work best demonstrates this – all his characters have individual demeanor and gait, and it’s clearly deliberate. Most obviously, the protagonist has less movements, being gentle and reserved, while the young Xu-Xian is playful, stepping from side to side, twirling and just generally making a lot of unnecessary movements. More nuanced are the differences between the pandas, Panda and Mimi, who share Mori’s animal spirit but have their unique tempo and pace.

At the time, the understanding was that animation at the cinema was all about spectacle – nuance in storytelling had to cede ground to big grandstand sequences of astonishing animation. This meant that Mori and Daikubara each handled sequences that would push their approaches to the limit. The result is a film that feels disjointed, clearly swinging between the style of the two. In a way, it’s like a clash of two churches of animation – the clean and precise versus the loose and free. Otsuka has described one of the fight scenes in this film (which Mori keyed and he ‘in-betweened’), a scuffle between a large, thuggish pig and the cute panda, as building on the distinctive styles of the two lead animators.

Daikubara’s bold and impact-focused style was suited to these large, lumbering characters with strong but inelegant movements, while the panda’s soft and refined bearing is almost a personification of Mori.

‘Mori’s animation was like watching Mori himself’

Yasuo Otsuka

The hammer is a significant feature in Toei’s earliest days, especially for Otsuka. A similar cut of a boy ramming in a stake with hammer swings was actually the entrance test devised by Mori which Otsuka took to get into Toei animation. It seems to have resonated with him as he continues to use it as an exercise in his present post of teaching animation at Telecom. In its purest form it’s a great foundation exercise in using key frames to portray balance, human movement and gravity.

Perhaps a sign that the film was really a grand training exercise, a similar hammer swinging cut was used as the Toei entrance exam. Mori (in trademark hat -left) and Daikubara (to his right) are caricatured in this image.

Needless to say, the philosophical and stylistic split between these two leading animators still reverberates among the animation force of today. The pulling of forces between freedom and control over animation, and the lineage of their respective flag-bearers are best traced back to this film. The practice of assigning cuts to animators based on their penchants and predilections has carried through to today and is a defining feature of Japanese animation

Early production values

It’s interesting that the job of the animator hasn’t changed all that much in the 60 odd years since Hakujaden. Sure, we have different roles and they have new tools like tablets at their disposal – but at the end of the day they’re still drawing a series of key frames and in-betweens. It’s what happens to those drawings next that has been most revolutionised by technology, particularly in the last couple of decades.

Prior to around 2000 each drawing had to be replicated onto transparent cel sheets, painstaking hand-painted, and then mounted in as a layer in a machine called the animation stand. The stand allowed for the layers to be composited, lit and filmed frame by frame. Read more about the animation stand in my article on Photography & Composition.

Toei Douga’s animation stand used to film Hakujaden

You can probably guess – it was a hell of a lot more effort than scanning cels? to be painted and composited in animation software! When you consider this, the actual role of the animator was comparatively minor in terms of labor – there were many more hands involved in painting and filming. It’s why Hakujaden was such a feat – getting the labor force and technology wouldn’t have been cheap or easy!

Toei Douga’s original tracing/colouring department

While the animation department was almost entirely staffed by males, the tracing/painting department of Toei was largely comprised of women, and lower paid. It was thought that women had a better eye for colour, while men were better inclined to the draftsmanship needed for animation. This perception was unfortunately used to keep women from moving up to better paying roles within animation, and would be a factor for some in the ongoing labor dispute at Toei. Despite these issues, Toei’s original painting department would become renowned, with few matching its gamut of colours since.

Hakujaden’s colours are rich and smooth with a cinematic warmth that compliments this kind of animation. There are a few colouring mishaps throughout though, and not subtle ones either.

Colouring mistake – the the red and blue fishes swap colours for one frame

It’s worth noting that linework is not at all emphasized, and the palette is dominated by soft yet vibrant colours. The linework is carefully coloured along with the painted colour of the area (i.e. matching skin tone or frabric colour). This is largely due to the fact that the tracing/painting teams were the same department back then and the whole drawing needed to be completely repainted by them anyway. Future advancements within the next decade such as Xerography/machine-tracing meant that the linework could be photgraphed onto cel and the painters would just need to paint it in. I’m not sure if Toei used this on their films (they certainly did on their TV work), but either it coincided with a prevailing style shift to black lines (which, interestingly, is now started to change again).

Toei’s original tracing/paint department coloured lines carefully to good effect

The fine art department would also give any production today a run for it’s money – good proof that better technology doesn’t make things artistically better.

Toei Douga’s background art department

Interestingly, the background art is the clearest departure from the Disney style in this early venture. It forgoes the soft fairytail appeal for a more abstract and harsher style. Although often overlooked, background artwork has always been an element of anime with a distinctly Japanese spin on it, and has underpinned many of the medium’s most iconic works.

Hakujaden’s background art

The photography and compositing work is perfunctory at best. The layers are relatively stable without much noticeable wobble or big chunks of dirt/hair on the cels, which is big tick, and frankly a lot better than many photography departments in anime were doing decades later. However, it’s kept very simple and shies from capitalising on the artistic potential that compositing can offer 2D animation (see my post on the subject if you want to know what I mean). 

The shots are lacking in perspective – the camera is almost always flat on the character. It may be partly because of the stage-play film-making ethos of the time but is probably mostly to make the animation easier to draw and, especially, film. The camera also loathes to ‘move’ – while there are some pans, there film is largely a series of static shots. When these pans do appear, they’re a conservative, one-dimensional affair. Us anime fans are spoiled nowadays, with digital compositing encouraging the camera into all kinds of free-spirited acrobatics. While the animation back in ’58 still has a certain timeless essence that holds up, the conservative photography is hard to miss.

On the other hand, a number of cuts have do a certain visual depth, achieved with nifty compositing with layers of background art that goes beyond mere foreground/background. Characters often weave in and out of parts of the backdrop, behind corners of buildings, around poles, etc, stopping the film from feeling too flat.

Creating visual depth using background art layers

They also do weave in some rudimentary live-action special effects which I’ll give them points for.

 Special effects created with inter-spliced live-action footage of light patterns

Trouble with Toei

But (at least according to Jonathan Clements), despite their dedication, the animators were disenchanted with the film, including Yasuji Mori himself. If I had to guess, I’d say this lack of love for the work was due to the industrious and rigid Toei of the time which always sounded like more of a corporate quagmire that bled creators dry rather than inspired them. There’s no coincidence that those who thrived in this environment and went on to form Ghibli, Miyazaki and Takahata, had a notoriously demanding work ethic. It’s not just a generational thing, Toei as an institution forged hard auteurs and shed the free-willed artist types.

Although Okada can be credited with forming Toei, he was far from an inspiring leader.

“He was a pompous king,” wrote Mori in his memoirs, “and rarely spoke to us commoners. I did meet with him once when we’d finished work on Hakujaden. Me and [Akira] Daikuhara, who did the key art, were invited to his office, and he just said ‘thank you for your work’ in this high-pitched voice, like when a tape is played on fast-forward. And in the autumn of the year that Toei Animation was founded, there was a sports day for all the Toei employees and their families, and the animator team won first prize in the fancy dress. I went to collect the prize money, and he said to me ‘that was really funny’ in a way that showed he really didn’t think it was funny at all.”

https://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/tag/hiroshi-okawa/

I mean, you can sample his high-pitched whine for yourself here in the “trailer” for Hakujaden.

At the onset, there was this sense of conflict between the pay gap between the animators and art staff and the paper-pushing staff transferred in from the parent rail company or other groups under its umbrella. Flaws in the seconding system would eventually become clear that saw the hard work of many aspiring animators rewarded equally alongside the lazy and incompetent. These issues would eventually boil over, but Hakujaden was produced against this backdrop of simmering disenfranchisement.

But this sure as hell didn’t stop the more prominent animators from throwing themselves at the task of bringing their cuts to life. However, it seemed like the animators didn’t connect with the film in the same way they would later down the road.

Conclusion

It’s fair to say that this movie isn’t only worth mention as a statistical milestone, but it is the real genus of the anime industry today, both in terms of its approach to production and the organic, always evolving chain of personal influences and philosophies. Although the film was a success, it by no means turned Toei Douga into a profitable company (the huge cost of animation production was something that meant even Disney could scarcely recoup costs at the time). Nor was it critically claimed or regarded for its storytelling (although Hayao Miyazaki earnestly states that he was infatuated with the girl character, Bai Niang). Rather, it was the mere fact that it had been completed that made it so impressive.

Through the vision of Okawa, the talents of Japan’s only seasoned animators, Mori and Daikubara, and the thankless hard work of countless other staff, Japan had created a feature length colour animation work. This astounding realisation encouraged a whole generation of animators-to-be, proving that the medium had a future in the country. Maybe a lot of people assumed that the anime industry just sort of crept into being, but the fact is that we owe it to this enormous, conscious undertaking. Okawa was no passionate creator, but without his conviction anime in Japan might still be limited to small groups doing independent short films.

Sources/Further Reading

Ben over at Anipages has written extensively on Toei’s films and its animators. His articles are essential reading

John Clement’s superb book on the history of anime – Anime: A History, and articles over at his blog.

The insightful musings in Thomas Lamarre’s book The Anime Machine

The Yasuo Otsuka Documentary – Yasuo Otsuka’s Joy in Motion

(Japanese) Nerima Animation Site post on Toei Douga

The more I dig into the history of anime the more I’m coming to understand the impact that one man had in turning it into what it is today. Sure, Hiroshi Okawa bankrolled the start of the industry in founding Toei Douga, and of course Yasuji Mori and Akira Daikubara were deeply influential as the leaders of anime’s first generation. But perhaps their biggest achievement combined was recruiting and fostering this man.

I know words like genius and prodigy are thrown around a lot in the anime blog-sphere these days, but I can say this with good old-fashioned, hyperbole-free sincerity: Yasuo Otsuka is a bonafide animation genius.

From early childhood, he itched to draw and when his pencil hit paper he could create the most remarkable sketches of everything he fancied. As can be forgiven of any young boy, machines were an especially inspiring subject. As a teenager he spent all his time doing intricate sketches of military vehicles at a nearby occupation base, which he would go on to publish in many books/doujinshi in future. In the documentary Joy In Motion, Otsuka shows off many of these sketches, and it’s clear that this kid had talent. His sketches show not just a diabolical eye for detail but also a natural flair for capturing that detail in an artistic way.

Through his young adult life in a short-lived career as a drug-enforcement agency assistant and then a 2 year stint in hospital, he never stopped drawing. His sketchbooks are tomes filled with endless drawings of everything from landscapes to political comics.

Only after seeing an add for animation recruitment for the studio that would work on Hakujaden in the newspaper did Otsuka seriously consider work in animation (no surprise there given that there was practically no animation industry before then). After taking the entrance exam of animating a short cut, Mori and Daikubara immediately saw potential in the would-be genga-man. Nurtured by these two great grandfathers of anime, Otsuka tore his way up the ranks at Toei Douga.

Although he was only credited as an in-betweener in Hakujaden, he actually did key animation and I’m making no understatement in saying that his contributions to the film were among its most impressive moments. From there, he was the only newer recruit to skyrocket to position of legit key animator for the next film. By the time the third film came out, he was outshining the work of not just all his peers but his mentors as well. Otsuka was breaking ground with every film year-to-year, and already building up a strong following within his own generation.

In these formative years, the thing that Otsuka most clearly brought into frame was realism.

What do we even mean by realism in animation? For Mitsuo Iso, it’s about capturing the finest, most evocative particulars of human body language or the way real animals move and then distilling them down into potent animation that can stir the heart. In Shinya Ohira’s original quest for realism he embodied his work with sheer density of frames and layers to the point where it no longer even feels like animation at all. Yasuo Otsuka, the progenitor of realism in anime, used his innate eye for detail and sketching talents to try to acutely reconstruct what he observed in nature in every one of his drawings and in how these drawings flowed.

While Mori and Daikubara were bringing animation to life, Otsuka started bringing life to animation. Suddenly it wasn’t all about stretch-and-squash and cartoonish designs, he was dragging things like anatomy and accuracy into the conversation.

This truly began when he became a key animator in Magic Boy (essentially the 2nd anime movie ever made). The film is a great example of how Toei let its animators play to their strengths and drive the production of the whole film, perhaps even to the point of indulgence. While Mori honed the essence of his rounded animal characters, Otsuka explored using animation to capture the real world in the earliest form of realism in animation.

In this scene of a monstrous catfish, Otsuka built on his work with a very similar cut, also of a giant catfish, from the previous film. For these cuts he obtained a real catfish and studied his movements to inform his animation. More so than in Hakujaden, the fish in this film seems to swirl and lunge with a truly organic will of its own. On top of that, the drawings of the monster are far more elaborate than the rest of the animal or even human designs of the film; with its spotted pattern, claws and that plentiful row of teeth Otsuka’s fish has a terrifying, visceral presence.

Otsuka largely handled the climactic fight of the film. Keeping in mind that the key animators storyboarded their own cuts in this early Toei era, the fight sequence showed Otsuka was really trying to make the battle exciting in every way he knew how. But the most memorable bit is where he poured an exact sense of realism into a cut of a mage’s skeleton fleeing the hero. Instead of abstracting the skeleton as is normal for animation, each individual bone is clearly articulated and drawn to be strictly correct. This, combined with the weightless magical floating lent the whole thing an uncanny feeling that actually caused audiences to laugh in the theater instead of being gripped by the thrilling action.

Despite being remarkable for its detail, the cut missed the mark and is a good lesson in how realism doesn’t necessarily translate well to animation in a literal way.

In the following film, Alakazam the Great (Saiyuki), Otsuka was once again a key animator, and was just as much a star of the film, relishing in its more challenging sequences.

He handled the volcano eruption. While much has been said of Otsuka injecting realism into his water effects, this is a particularly exhilarating example of effects animation, capturing both the sheer power and majestic awe of a volcanic eruption. The distance shot is really effective. The molten lava traverses down the mountainside with a sense of viscosity, and the way it feels its way through and around invisible cavities and protrusions feels very real.

Once again he animates the one-on-one showdown at the peak of the film, this time a duel between the protagonist and a gnarly bull. This is the first great example of the kind of animator Otsuka was rapidly becoming, because it combines a studied sense of realism with a rough and dynamic approach to animation. The bull moves just as you’d imagine a real bull would, carrying itself with true weight and charging with frightening force and speed. But you wouldn’t call it an accurate depiction of a bull, would you? Perhaps learning from his skeleton, here Otsuka elicits realism in his characters without focusing on replicating real life or sacrificing the potential of animation.

In the next movie, the Littlest Warrior, Otsuka tackled another effects-animation show-piece. This time, a giant whirlpool appears in the ocean, pulling a rickety boat full of men into its aquatic maelstrom. Here again, Otsuka heeds realism but bends it to the will of the scene. The physics involved, the way the water splashes and swirls, or how the boat is splintered and sucked into the vortex, feel authentic. But at the same time, the water is splashy and globular in a cartoony way, and the ocean is drawn as if it is a smooth surface.

Otsuka makes it realistic enough to suspend disbelief but sacrifices the bleeding edge of realism to throw everything at the animation, accurate or not, to ramp up the intensity. The ferocity and inescapable power of the water is suffocating.

His early career culminates in the battle with the dragon at he end of the Prince and the 8-headed dragon (Wanpaku Ōji no Orochi Taiji). For this movie, Toei wanted to revitalise their style by entrusting it moreso to the new generation, breaking down the pillars of Mori and Daikubara’s style. The film was a game changer in a number of ways, introducing the animation director role in anime for the first time (Yasuji Mori, obviously) and using simplified, stylised designs more than ever to stretch the limits of full animation. It’s perhaps the first apex of the anime industry, a stunning monument to cinematic Toei at its prime. TV anime started this very same year with Atom, which diluted its core focused and led to some staff upheavals (many jumping ship to Tezuka’s Mushi Pro).

And who was behind the epic animation climax of the film? Otsuka of course! The training wheels were now well and truly left in the dust as he and his assistant, Sadao Tsukioko created a truly epoch-making sequence.

In order to really appreciate these older anime I’ve been watching them in order from the Hakujaden onwards and I can safely say that this astounding finale overturns all expectations. I had real trouble picking highlights from the extended battle, but here’s a couple of snippets below – I strongly recommend getting a hold of the full thing though.

From the menacing lurking of the serpentine dragon heads when they first appear, through the frantic dashing and charging of the flying horse as the confrontation begins, which conveyed speed with full animation like nowhere else,  to the graceful and powerful struggle after Susano takes the fight to them, there’s just so much to awe at in this sequence. With the eerily real and snake-like movements of the dragon heads, the intense speed, and the attention to gravity and and momentum, and so much more, Otsuka’s animation mesmerises with natural realism.

But at the same time, it fully embraces the magic of movement in ways that transcend the physical world. The curling, and stretching of the flying horse as its legs wildly propel it through the air and the fully bodied vigor of the hero’s lunging and dodging are good examples, but it’s ingrained in every cut. It feels like it was Wanpaku that made it click for Otsuka – how to bring realism into animation.

“Ultimately animation is about convincing the audience. I try to create perspective, immediacy. A sort of virtual reality.

Genuine realism doesn’t suit animation. Realism doesn’t have to be real. What you want is constructed realism.”

It also contains one of the earliest instances of background animation in anime and shows of his flair for effects animation.

Daikubara’s influences are still present, but these early Toei films are really about Otsuka’s explosive realism and Mori’s animation going toe-to-toe. While Mori imbues his drawings with life using precise fundamental animation techniques, Otsuka throws his mind and body at every cut to make it breathe life in a real sense. Both are valid and almost opposite approaches. It’s Otsuka’s prodigious versatility that made this possible. Even at this early stage he was mastering effect animation, anatomical movements of humans and animals and even mechanical drawings as seen later in Lupin. While it wasn’t always as polished or successful as Mori’s conventional approach, when it did hit, it hit it out of the park.

In a rare case of the stars aligning, Otsuka’s unreal gift for animation is matched by his ability to teach and mentor. Word has it, he is able to articulate the most sophisticated principles of animation in a way that’s grounded, easily digestible and engaging.

Notable animator and sakuga personality Shin Itagaki entered telecom and often fondly recalls his teaching in his publications.

That’s why he ended up settling into a teaching role at Telecom, but more importantly it’s why so many of his peers at Toei were influenced and pushed forward by him.  To name a few: Daikichiro Kusube,who headed A Pro, and his ‘team’, Yoichi Kotabe and Keiichiro Kimura who would go on to impress with Tiger Mask. But most importantly, he deeply influenced and inspired both Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, who were his peers at Toei having entered around the same time. These three esteemed figures would go on to form a strong bond of both mutual respect and friendship, which really clicked after the seminal Hols prince of the sun. In Hols, Otsuka’s animation matures from this early more experimental realism into the style that he is best remembered for.

This ascension would only continue as he left his mark on limited animation with Samurai Giants, Future Boy Conan, Moomin, and ultimately became the driving force behind Lupin III. Along with Miyazaki, Otsuka relished the opportunity to create lifelike depictions of guns, cars and other mechanical designs in Lupin, returning to his formative teenage obsession with machines. Of course, Lupin also became a launching point for charismatic character animation that underpins the whole sakuga movement. But this is all a story for another day.

Even in these early works, the trend is clear. Although Otsuka’s early career is marked by a stricter, more mimicking reality in each frame, as his career progressed, he got better and better at translating his observations of the natural world into movement that evoked the real world while also entertained with the free spirit of animation. It’s this style that Otsuka is best known for, and it’s been deeply influential right through the lineage of anime up until today.

The take-home message is that after witnessing his career development first hand in his animation, I can say that Otsuka isn’t just an important footnote in anime history but a remarkable man filled with both passion and talent for animation in a way that few have since.

One anime of late that I can really get behind is Dororo. What could have been a perfunctory remake of an old classic to cash in on people’s nostalgia turned out to be a winner in its own right. It deftly arranges the notes of the original into a modern composition while also running with its own vision. It hooked me from episode one, with the chemistry between the brooding Hyakkimaru and exuberant Dororo, the supernatural twist on a a war-torn feudal Japan setting and the underlying tragedy of Hyakkimaru’s story. It’s the complete package. But perhaps where it shines brightest is when the arms come off and swords start swinging: the action!

I recently watched episode 23 which was one of the most satisfying action episodes of TV anime I’ve seen in a fair while. It really struck me then that there’s something unique to Dororo’s action scenes – they’re exciting in a way that some much more lavishly produced stuff can’t seem to pull off. Then I actually went back and looked into the times when I got these wow-factor vibes from the series and it turns out it they’re pretty much all the handiwork of one particular animator: Keiichi Ishida (石田慶一).

That’s the name of the key animator behind most of the key fight scenes, such as (but not limited to!)

The battle on the bridge

Hyakkimaru vs soldiers

Hyakkimaru vs Tahomaru and company

Hyakkimaru vs Tahomaru in the castle

(Presumed by me, a fair assumption as he’s on the top of the genga list and it fits his mold)

Videos sourced from the amazing service Sakugabooru

A history

I was surprised that I’d never heard of him but a quick google got me up to speed. He’s been in the industry as a key animator since the mid 00’s where he rapidly came to attention as a standout animator on basketball series Eyeshield 21, even ending doing OPs and key sequences later in the series. From there he became a pretty prolific action and effect animator working extensively on Naruto and many JC Staff series. He ended up shooting more hoops for another basketball affair, Kuroko no Basket, but the next big thing on his resume was the series action animation director for GARO vanishing line – a series I admit to knowing absolutely nothing about.

It is interesting though that he went from a series AD back to just a key animation role here. The optimistic way of reading that is that his heart is more in animating than overseeing and climbing the slippery corporate ladder (by all accounts animation directing can be a punishing experience for some). In any case, I’m glad that he’s still on the frontlines of animation because I think he’s only truly hit his stride with his work here.

His animation overall could be described as being low in frame count and with relatively jerky movements. There’s a hell of a lot of implicit movement between frames that inbetween work can’t bring out which can sometimes feel rough.  There’s no doubt he’s leaning toward Kanada on the spectrum in that sense. His animation also flirts with gravity a little bit, his poses either floating longer than they should or slamming with extreme force depending on what his drawings call for.

On the upside, from the very beginning he demonstrated an ability to handle detailed anatomy in his drawings, capturing muscle definitions on the characters during basketball scenes. He also seems to have developed a good handle on animating shots with spinning or moving cameras over the years as well.

In Dororo

I can’t say whether it’s because he was afforded the freedom and responsibility he needed or simply because this kind of action is his calling, but all of his past efforts seem to have culminated in Dororo’s outstanding battle scenes.

His fights are frenetic, intricate and thrilling. While not every frame is beautified, he stays on model without sloppy blurs or contortions. Those things have their place of course, but sticking to anatomically correct human figures works well in Dororo to help the action feel more real and dangerous. His frames are still jerky, but it feels like deliberate punctuation, resulting in action that feels rough but can still accentuate the emotion in each movement. His implicit activity between frames is used to good effect in the fast and frenzied Dororo action, i.e. multiple sword slashes are suggested by the slash effect without the character posing that would normally need to accompany it – creating a sense of speed.

Perhaps one flaw that remains is the liberal use of gravity. Hyakkimaru often feels too weightless as he lingers in the air for just enough time to squeeze in a few fancy flips or extra attacks.

The camera often joins the fray, spinning and panning to keep up with the skirmish, adding a level of dynamism.

But best of all, the choreography in his sequences is extremely good. It has all the things you might expect from a good fight – it’s fast, physical and quick-witted with a lot of inventive flourishes. Things like Hyakkimaru leaning over and falling head first through a hole in the bridge, bending right over backwards into a roll to dodge an enemy swipe, or getting his sword stuck in the roof when he goes to bring it down all add an unpredictable edge. Action scenes are boring when they just go through the motions of trading blows, it’s the rapid-fire twists and turns that make it truly exciting.

Living choreography

Like pretty much all anime, the choreography is embellished at the cost of gravity and realism. But while his characters in battle don’t lunge and lean with a strictly real force and momentum, there’s an exciting strain of sentient realism that pulses through each motion.

The action is fast and furious but also lucid; the animation doesn’t just carry physical momentum in each movement but expresses the mental flow of battle between two people. He draws each frame not just as a result of the character’s last action but seems to know that in the heat of battle every beat is also a critical decision that the warriors are making on the fly. They’re always on the teetering edge of acting and reacting to the constantly changing situation. As a result, his action sequences feel charged and come alive in unique way.

In other words, the characters don’t just feel like puppets being manipulated into a precisely planned sequence of poses, but they are really driving it. It’s this sentience that seems to let him wring more emotion and tension out of fight sequences than many others.

That’s what makes me think this Keichi Ishida has a lot of talent for this avenue, and I really hope he is offered more chances to hone his skills.