Redline.

If you’ve been follow Twitter for the past week or so, you might have noticed that a film called Redline has been getting quite a bit of buzz. 7 years in production, its director Takeshi Koike working day and night for years drawing frame after frame—if you’ve heard about the movie, then you’ve heard about its production history. It got released over in Japan and it sold just a little over 4000 copies across its various DVD and Blu-ray releases. Disappointing stat to see from a movie that had so much heart and soul poured into it, but it’s not unexpected given the tastes of otaku over in Japan. Then again, this movie was clearly aimed at Western audiences to begin with, so hopefully it will gain a cult following over here.

That said, I couldn’t wait for the US release and I decided to buy Japanese collector’s edition Blu-ray (with subs on the movie and the extras) and I don’t regret it at all. In fact, I’m still trying to recover from the thrilling experience. The movie is the most intensive visual experience I’ve had since Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game. But while its amazing visuals have touted left and right, the humor and personality that help carry the film is pretty underrated. Yoshiki Sakurai and Yoji Enokido were brought on to tighten Katsuhito Ishii’s script so as make the story flow and for it not to be bogged down in too many explicit details story wise. The visuals and body language of the characters make up for the final, more streamlined version and they create an interesting world with lots of depth. The design work in the sets, the machines, the characters themselves, and the music are overflowing with tons of personality, It makes the movie not drag its feet when it’s not going all out on the race track and make the entire movie a joy to watch. Ishii was the one who wanted an overload of information on screen and Koike was the man for the job. Honestly, the movie is nothing short of stunning.

There were 100,000 drawings made for this film and there were a core of 15 animators working on it, with other key animators being brought in to fill in holes here and there. Shinya Ohira is one of the latter animators whose work stood out the most. This was the first work we’ve seen from Ohira since his work on Genius Party and it’s breathtaking. *SPOILERS**SPOILERS* Katsuya Yamada corrected one cut, cleaned up another, and Hokuto Sakiyama probably cleaned up the rest of Ohira's work since all his work was 1st Key Animation (in other words, rough key animation). His scene starts the climax of the film (the awakening of the bioweapon). It’s great to finally see Ohira at work again, but I wonder when we might see him next, if ever. Sushio animated Machine Head and the Super Boins' introduction, Hiroyuki Imaishi did Johhny Boy and Lynchman’s intro, and Yoshiaki Kawajiri did about 20 to 30 cuts of Colonel Bolton in the third act of the movie. Kanako Maru did the intro of the MCs of the Redline race and Takeshi Koike handles the end of the climax film with JP heading towards the finish line and the very last scene. Sushio, Maru, and Koike did other stuff, but I’ve yet to decipher all the info on the Sakuga@Wiki entry (taken from the key animation book).

All in all, and I don’t say this often, you owe it to yourself to at least experience this movie once.

EDIT: To see the comments, go on the main page and click on "X comments" for this entry.

EDIT 2: Sushio also did Machine Head's intro. Yutaka Minowa did the cuts where Bosbos is putting on her earrings and the racers getting into their rides before the Redline race starts.

FMA Movie Staff Revealed.

The FMA movie premiered over in Japan and the staff list has already found its way online. Thanks to liborek3 on Twitter, I posted the staff list over on ANN. As expected, it's a high quality production. There's a couple of animation directors from the new Evangelion movies involved (Shunji Suzuki and Atsushi Okuda), along with a few flash animators that were surely part of this production thanks to Shingo Natsume's involvement (Kenichi Kutsuna, Shingo Yamashita, etc. ). Natsume directed the memorable 6th episode of The Tatami Galaxy and he serves as the unit director here to help execute director Kazuya Murata's storyboard. Some of the other animators include Satoru Utsunomiya (his first work in 2 years), Hidetsugu Ito, Fumiaki Kouta (who animated this a few years back) and Hiroyuki Aoyama to name a few.

Curiously, Kiyotaka Oshiyama is serving as animation director, but he/she is credited with the task in katakana while the other four animation directors are credited in kanji. It's not clear specifically what is supposed to be the difference between the two, but given the placement of the credits it appears that Oshiyama oversaw the 4 animators under Kenichi Konishi's direction with him being the chief animation director. BONES also recently came up with the task "Motion Design" to credit Hironori Tanaka (who also worked on this movie) on the first opening to Star Driver and it's still not clear exactly that entailed either. Hopefully BONES's new approaches to production will be cleared up in the future.

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Star of Milos Full Trailer

Movie comes out in Japan on July 7, 2011. It'll be in theaters over in the US next spring. Animation looks totally sick. Presumably that's Yoshimichi Kameda's work at 1:19. It's getting the usual reactions that it lacks details and shading, and I suspect that pretty soon people will be saying that even the animation quality from the 1st TV series looked better. All of this is nonsense. Yes, they cut down on the shading. Yes, they don't add in as much detail as they would if they just used one frame for a panning shot that takes forever to end. But is everybody so blind to the sheer vigor that's being put into the movement of these characters? The staff has been allowed to go wild and it's clear they're taking advantage of Kenichi Konishi's designs to bring a new spin to the FMA world.

It's clear it'll be worth watching for the animation alone, as the plot doesn't necessarily looks all that interesting. The plot seems to be a side-story and it's getting some backlash on that front alone. But I never heard anybody complain about the novels that were no different in that regard. Hopefully people can look past their predispositions to the norm when it comes to animation and actually appreciate this kind of ambition in the setting of FMA. It's not like the animators are going to stop working like this if they don't.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence MAD.

I helped out a bit on this video, so I'm posting it here.


Yay, sakuga. This movie is tedious to watch, but I've actually warmed up to after watching it a few times. Though, it still is a masturbation session for Oshii and his pet topics (philosophy and...his pet). But the animation is absolutely amazing.
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On another note, some upcoming episodes for Naruto Shippuden that have potential are episode 211 with Seiko Asai as the animation director and 213 with Tokuyuki Matsutake in that role. Presumably, Matsutake is there pinch-hitting for his pal Hirofumi Suzuki. That's about all I got for right now. I might comment on ep. 204 and Masayuki Kouda's 209 later on.

Kemonozume.

It sure has been a while since I've posted Mostly because I haven’t had the sudden urge to post anything and because I can’t find the time to do so on a consistent basis. Anyways, thank to Doftljus for telling me to update this blog.

On a more important note, you should definitely contribute to any one of the charities that helping out on relief efforts over in Japan. There are a ton of efforts going on right now, so you definitely aren’t out of options if you want to help: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2011-03-11/relief-funds-for-march-11-earthquake/tsunami-in-japan

Lately I’ve been trying to get things out of my backlog. One of them was Kemonozume, the first TV series that Masaaki Yuasa directed. This was aired in 2006, two years after the theatrical debut of his magnum opus, Mind Game. Without going too deep into spoilers, the show is about the story of a demon hunter swordsman, Toshihiko, falling in love with a demon (called “Flesh Eaters”) woman, Yuka. Stuff happens, etc.


Script-wise, the show starts off with plenty of intriguing drama involving the organization (the Kifuuken) Toshihiko is involved with and where the relationship between the two main characters is going given their standing in society. However, towards the end Yuasa introduces a main villain into the story that pushes these two elements aside and the question revolving the relationship was never resolved to my satisfaction. The first half of the last episode involves the main characters trying to stop a huge ball from crashing into Tokyo, so that only confirmed my view on the second half—that Yuasa did not know where to take the story that he started out with. Don’t get me wrong, though. For the most part, the villain is great to watch and the scriptwriting in the show was more than competent. But the contents of episodes 2 or 6 were more along the lines of where I was expecting the series to go.


On the visual side, Yuasa seems to try to challenge himself with everything he does by doing something completely different every time and you can see this trend continue with Kemonozume. As you can read from the Anipages link I posted before, this does present problems in terms of actually getting animators on board due to the level of skill required. This was probably an issue with Kaiba as well, where the key animators list for every episode was very small in comparison to your typical anime production. On the other hand, this leads to a great amount of work being done by skilled animators.


Every episode starts off with an avant-title section and they had quite a few notable animators work on these sections. Satoru Utsunomiya did episode 3’s, Hiroyuki Aoyama #5, Kouichi Arai #8, Nobutoshi Ogura #9, Eunyoung Choi #10, Hiroshi Shimizu #11. Kobayashi and Mihara did the avant-titles for their respective solo efforts.

Osamu Kobayashi’s was episode 7. You got what you’d expect out of Kobayashi, with his close-ups and the square mouths combined with that stuttering kind of timing. Embarrassingly, I’ve never seen a series directed by Kobayashi. I did see one episode of Beck way back when, but that’s about it. I’d like to rectify that. Kobayashi’s episodic work always sticks out no matter what, even on a show as eccentric and out of the norm as Kemonozume. So I’d like to see how Kobayashi’s vision would translate over a series of episodes instead of just one focused, singular work.


There was also an episode by Kenji Nakamura (#10), which packed in a ton of material rather effortlessly. I haven’t seen anything from him before, so I’m looking forward to his upcoming C anime series and the Bakaneko arc of Ayakashi which I ordered a little while ago.

My favorite episode was Michio Mihara’s solo key animation effort in episode 12. He also did a similar episode in Kaiba, where he drew every frame of animation for episode 4. In Kaiba, you could see Mihara giving the character’s more weight in terms of how they moved than what you would normally see in an anime. Here, the main attraction was the insane amount of detail he placed on characters’ faces or when outlining their bodies in combination with constant, vigorous acting throughout the entire episode. Even amongst series that supposedly have a “great budget”, you rarely see animation that feels so alive. By itself, the scene where Kazuma is running up the stairs to face the villain speaks for the raw energy that Mihara spread across the entire episode. Hiroyuki Yoshino's performance is also commendable.

I was surprised to Kenichi Kutsuna work on this show, since I had forgotten that he was involved. He did the silly action part with a chair that defies gravity in episode 8. Yasunori Miyazawa is here too and his parts are easily identifiable. On episode 8, he did a few cuts of the Kifuuken swordsmen fighting the Flesh Eaters (notice the panning back and forth) and on episode 13 he did the really sketchy line work when the main villain transforms.

On another note, I’m looking forward to Shippuden 204. Hiroyuki Yamashita is both the animation director and the storyboarder for the episode. Judging from the preview, it looks like it will look better than his last.


Episode 194 of Shippuden was another episode where it was definitely worth watching. It was the second effort from the Gorou Sessha/Masayuki Kouda duo. It was spent of a filler episode that harkened back to the juvenile potty humor days of Naruto, but it looked great doing it. There is a chase scene in the first half that is impossible to miss that shows that Gorou Sessha was the guy responsible for a similar looking part in 135 (the Itachi vs. Sasuke part). This also shows that he was responsible for the part at the end of 26 where Sakura winds up and throws the ball (or whatever it was) Sasori. His style is marked by that crazy blur and those bad-looking hands, but it still looks great in motion.

More Yamashita and Panties.

Another post, another episode of Naruto Shippuden with Hiroyuki Yamashita as an animation director. I don’t want to make this blog dedicated solely to him, but there are only a few things that are making me fired up enough to post on here nowadays. Anyways, there were 8 episodes in-between Yamashita’s episodes as an animation director. Last time he was only directing half of one episode, whereas here he was in charge of the whole thing. The lip sync, timing and drawings that were so clear in Yamashita’s half of 178 wasn’t as prevalent here. You could see a bit of the flat fingers and everybody is thinner than usual, but everything that makes Yamashita so interesting to watch seemed to be lacking all around. It was much more reserved. I imagine Yamashita as an animator himself must have been responsible for the start of the fight here since that’s what stood out the most, but it still didn’t wow me like the ep. 178. Here are some of shots from 178

(^Presumably Yamashita work)

and from 186

(^Yamashita again?)

I’m guessing that the production schedule and the overall learning curve in becoming a animation director lead the difference in quality here. He’ll have plenty of chances to get more familiar with the the process of actually correcting and supervising everybody’s shots for a weekly TV schedule in the future, so I don't think this is a big deal.

On another note, Tsuneo Ninomiya was the first animator on the key animators list for this episode. He’s been involved in the industry since the mid 60s, but as far as I can tell his biggest contribution is being the character designer for MD Geist. Clearly the connection to Koichi Ohata's masterpiece had something to do with how this episode turned out.

I'm still watching Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and I still think it's the best show that's come out this year. Great action aside, episode 11 (or 6) had some beautiful work done by Yasunori Miyazawa. I'm guessing he did the brief shot of the little ghost getting killed and transforming, but there's no doubt he was responsible for the multitude of flames that were present at the end of the episode. Tomorrow's episode will have Ryo-timo as the animation director and next week will have Nobutake Ito teamed up with Masayuki. Good times ahead!

Recent Viewings (November 2010).

As typical of this time of year, I’ve been crunching anime into my hectic and unorganized school schedule, but I have managed to enjoy a few things here and there.

---Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt- So with this we again have Imaishi directing as his unrestrained self. As much as I like Gurren Lagann, if you compare it to Dead Leaves, you can see that he’s holding back. Not in terms of the quality of the animation, but in terms of being absolutely crass and, frankly, immature. Lagann was clearly aimed at younger audience, so he couldn’t have the same kind of sex and poop jokes that he placed in Dead Leaves. The closest he ever came to that level was the uncut version of episode 6 directed by Shin Itagaki.

But that isn’t the case here. If you couldn’t tell from the trailer, then this show will make it clear as to what it’s about fairly soon. Right from they get go, you have a joke about “morning wood”, the huge sound effects that go across the screen (something that Imaishi also used in Dead Leaves) and the kind of visual set-up and organization that makes Imaishi’s work such a joy to watch. For the people that can get pass the ill-advised notion of anime should look like, the biggest complaint I’ve seen aimed at this show is that it’s the same joke over again. After watching 10 episodes (or 5 if you must), I can’t say that at all. While the characters have stayed consistent since the first episode, the way the “Geek Fleet” has handled and placed them in a number of various situations still remain interesting. From the fat monster to the booger monster, while they tend to involve some nasty or crass subject, the way they look at the boundary of what’s the norm for anime and go right past it is commendable.

The soldiers episode is one of the highlights in the early going of “Pansuto”, with the war sections all animated by Hirokazu Kojima and the script by Shigeto Koyama. Taking a firmly tongue-in-cheek approach to this hilariously dramatic struggle totally caught me off-guard. But the biggest thing so far in terms of blindsiding the viewer is without a doubt Osamu Kobayashi’s episode 10/5b. In large part by changing the art style to give off a more realistic tone, Kobayashi and Takashi Mukouda managed to inject convincing social commentary in this escapist show. Kobayashi’s previous endeavor on an Imaishi show (Gurren Lagann episode 4) generally left the viewers in an uproar, but I believe that the people who would have complained about the art and animation taking such a drastic turn already left show at episode 1. Imaishi clearly doesn’t care about the negative feedback the production got from that episode since he knows what he got. Bringing Kobayashi back to his next show and allowing him to go ahead with this scenario is the kind of bold accommodation of strongly distinct and individual styles that make Imaishi one of the few directors whose work I always look forward to. Needless to say, I’m looking forward whatever comes next (apparently people like Kazuya Tsurumaki, Masayuki, and Ryo-timo are working on future episodes)

---Naruto Shippuden (up to ep. 181)-Well, things are looking up for this show even with its current break into filler. Episode 178 featured Hiroyuki Yamashita, whom I’ve talked about before, making his debut as an animation director. He only worked on the second half, but what a half it was! It starts out animation by Yamashita himself and the rest of the episode, while not completely matching Yamashita idiosyncrasies since there’s only so much one man can do, did manage to retain a good deal of his sense of timing and visual flair. It’s been noted by others that Yamashita has been influenced by Hirofumi Suzuki due to the lip-synch on display on the episode and it’s hard to argue against that. Working on Shippuden has allowed him to be among some very talented people like Norio Matsumoto (who probably got him to work on Keiichi Hara’s Colorful), Suzuki, et all so it’s only natural to take in some of that experience.

Yamashita also directed the delightful new ED (#15), featuring Shingo Yamashita, Kenichi Kutsuna, Tatsuya Koyangai, Shingo Tamaki, Yoshimichi Kameda, 甲田秀人 (couldn't get a reading) and Yamashita himself as animators. Hiroyuki did the Naruto vs. Neji part which is easily identifiable and Kameda did the Rock Lee vs. Naruto part. The new OP is a slow piece with no action, but it still is another solid delivery from the Toshiyuki Tsuru/ Hirofumi Suzuki duo. Tokuyuki Matsutake leads the animator list (presumably he did the part where Naruto is blasted out of the water and he’s spinning around).

These new OP/ED debuted on ep. 180 and this episode also marked the debut of Gorou Sessha as an episode director on the series and Masayuki Kouda’s as an animation director (another Pierrot animator). Sessha (rumored to be the pen name of ex-Kyoto Animation animator, Seiji Watanabe) has been one of the bright spots in this series, being the animation director for eps. 26 and 143 (among others), and the chief animation director for episode 135. While Atsushi Wakabayashi was absent from Shippuden until his return in ep. 167, Sessha and episode director Atsushi Nigorikawa were trying to fill the considerable void that Wakabayashi left behind. Their best effort by far is episode 143, which features some great swordplay courtesy of Hiroyuki Yamashita right after the opening credits and the pacing and framing throughout exhibits the kind of ambition that you would find in Wakabayashi’s episodes, though I would not exactly equate the two. Not that it fails, on the contrary, but Wakabayashi is simply on another level.

Episode 26 marks the duo first real effort to break through and give the audience a high quality episode. You can clearly see their grandiose intent, but it ultimately falls short. It’s not bad for their first effort, however. Episode 135 is a retelling of the Uchiha massacre which contains some more striking imagery and a very nice fight between Itachi and Sasuke—I still don’t know who’s responsible for it.

Going back to ep. 180, this one features some neat smoke effects, particularly towards the end. I believe it was the work of Gen’ichirou Abe, the Shaft animator they got to work on this episode, who was responsible for this. I’ve never seen anything like it in the series. There are also some nice smoke effects when Sasuke kicks Naruto in the face that, as others have noted, feels very much in line with Kishimoto’s smoke effects. As a side note, Shigeki Kawai was the animation director for the first half half of ep. 181. Nothing great in comparison to his previous effort, but it’s safe to say that ep. 180 must have taken quite a bit of that budget from 181.

Looking forward, Chiyuki Tanaka was set to be the episode director and animation director for episode 184, but she ended up as only the animation director instead. Hiroyuki Yamashita is set to be the animation director for ep. 186 and maybe this time he’ll be the only AD on board this time. Perhaps he’ll be a workhorse like One Piece’s Naoki Tate after all. I wonder if the being an AD gets easier as you go on or do you just get worn down after having to correct so many subpar drawings.

---Street Fighter Alpha Generations- I went and rewatched Ikuo Kuwana’s directorial debut after reading Ben Ettinger’s post about it. If you thought that this movie was boring when you first saw it, I highly recommend giving it another shot. I thought so too at first, but after revisiting it I came away with a different impression. The biggest problem this movie faces, aside from being spearheaded by a novice director, is the “Street Fighter” tag that comes with a load of expectations. You automatically expect every notable character from the game to show up ala Gisaborou Sugii’s Street Fighter movie and for it to be overblown like the video game.

This movie would have been more at home in the 80s, where you saw these kinds of one-shot OAVS that were largely self-contained. The overall tone is very low-key and Kuwana lets the storyboarding and animation tell the story, much as you would expect from an animator who’s been given the task of directing. At the start of the movie, you’re not given a clear definition of where the current story is taking place in terms of the timelime; but it’s still able to move forward and backward without being too confusing and manages to be effective by avoiding the typical pitfalls of that “flashback sequences” fall in.

The line work on the old men’s faces on this one really bring out some expressive features, though there are notable shots throughout the movie where you can tell they had to sacrifice in order to pay attention to others. I could only tell Hiroyuki Imashi’s part on this one and they stands out, per usual—it’s the fight with the old man and Ryu and his part ends when the old man starts laughing after launching Ryu through the wall. The part after that looks a bit too smooth for Imaishi.

And that’s that. I typed a bit too much so I’ll leave stop right here.