Sakuga

you wippersnappers' who grew up with Naruta and Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z don't know how lucky you have it. All I had growing up is Thundarr the Barbarian. Once I saw Akira, once I saw Vampire Hunter D. So my youthful years I wasn't able to waste on absorbing endless anime. So I'm late to the party knowing about Sakuga and stuff. (but here's a page of compilation of sakuga artists) Anyway, watching these had me thinking about Glen Keane's exodus, and wanting to find a way to put his own stuff up on the screen, no inbetweener's no clean up artists. Nice to see a different branch of animation evolution. Interesting how 1 animator will be in charge of a whole scene, fx, characters, everything. Also had me thinking about economy storytelling. Interesting how they talk about how the motion tells the story.
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part 3

part 4

part 5

part 6

part 7

part 8

part 9


Frame Modulation (Yatsua Otsuka) some scenes are smoother, some scenes are more choppy, save time and money by taking the expression of full animation and make it work in limited animation with frame modulationn.
A big focus on movement and motion and fx
talk about the evolution of super dynamic shots that really draw you in to the action because the camera and subject are getting totally warped. Not looking for the illusion of life in the motion, we're looking for a different utilization of japan's limited animation to create a really clear aesthetic. Snappy pose to pose, camera very active participant in the action.
Mitsuo Iso in typical animation an animator lays out his key poses first then fills in the gaps later with inbetweens the problem with doing it this way is the motion is always trying to arrive somewhere, with arms and legs just landing from pose to pose. With really meticulous inbetweening you can try and smooth it out and make these smooth motion arcs, so you can't tell where the key poses are. But most of the time you can see where the key poses are, it's very obvious. When you have movement like this, it's more in the disney school than anything else. It feels like the characters are being puppeted rather than moving in their own energy.
there's an animation legend out there who threw out this whole way of doing things and said I'm going to draw every frame myself and not pass my keys to an inbetweener, and this way I can have total control and my characters can have total freedom of not having to arive from pose to pose, or to do these buttery smooth motion arcs. This man animated some of the most legendary Battle scenes in modern anime
when you watch this series this scene really sticks out because suddenly these mecha are imbued with weight and momentum. The weightlessness and jitteryness that's common to anime is pretty much gone, and every blow carries the force of a thousand tons .
Iso calls his style full limited because he's trying to convey sophisticated motion while animationg on the 2's and 3's, so the animation is both jerky but very rich and full of movement, with many parts oscillating and moving with their own energy
with Ryo Timo it almost looks like dirty pencil lines all over the place
Some of you may have seen anime with very good stories, but lackluster storytelling.
Some of you may have seen anime with silly stories, but brought to life with very good storytelling.
The director of The Girl who Leapt Through time He understands how to use the power of animation to convey a pivotal scene. The running scene conveys the sudden determination of a character who had been pretty aimless until this point, and not through expositino, but by an animator slogging it out on the frames.
You can credit the director for knowing how to use his animation team, but it's really the animators doing the real thinking of "How do I express with motion? How do I draw a series of pictures to make the audience feel what my characters feel? How do I make the audience feel what my characters feel? How do I make the audience understand what my characters are going through?" That's the nitty gritty of storytellilng where animator's are front and center.
When it's directed by nobody, when it's animated by nobody, the all important question about how best to tell this story goes unanswered. (a fast deadline and farmed out to korea)
It's one thing to say on paper "stuff happens and charaacters feel sad" but it takes the power of artists to make it real.
also a fun 4 parter about the animation pipeline in Japan