This series continues to surprise. Although I learned about it prior to watching the episode, the surprise this time around was to learn that Michio Mihara was back in the driver's seat with another solo episode. That's something I really wasn't expecting, even though Mihara did the same thing in episode 12 of Kemonozume. I didn't think Yuasa was going to be going in quite the same direction as his previous show in terms of delegating tasks in such way as to allow for wide variety of visual and directing styles between episodes, but the last two episodes have made me re-think my appraisal of the show's direction and character.

In an age of tight schedules and thinly stretched talent, the open displays of personality, devotion to craft and concentration of effort on display in this episode and in Mihara's previous solo episodes are certainly a refreshing aberration. Mihara is a unique animator who clearly has his own vision of what makes animation interesting. His work has an endearing earnestness about it, with these challenges he seems to pose himself time and again to keep on developing. The look and feel of his work is distinct from any other industry animator out there, with its rough-edged lines, grotesque caricature and weighty movement that brings out the physical tics that make a character unique. I think he sets a good example for other animators in terms of the way he thinks out of the box of typical stratified production roles and typical industry ideas and styles.

I've noticed an endemic ignorance about foreign animation among many animators and fans in Japan from interviews I've read here and there, with many people quite unaware of many foreign classics, but Mihara gives the appearance through his work of remaining open to ideas and approaches to art and animation from spheres far and wide. I find often that it's animators who absorb unusual influences who come up with the most interesting new ideas. Although Mihara hasn't done much other than animating prior to now, he's got a budding personal voice that seems to be struggling to emerge from the surface of his animation, having even gone so far as to produce a couple of quirky shorts on the side.

His recent shorts seem similar in spirit to what he's done in this episode, like two faces of the same coin. There seems to be a clear continuum of development from that early first attempt at a solo episode in Paranoia Agent to his first successful attempt in Kemonozume to those shorts and now to this solo-in-extremis episode of Kaiba. I'm reminded of old Toei animator Sadao Tsukioka, who traveled much the same path some forty years ago, drawing entire episodes of Wolf Boy Ken by himself only to get hooked on it and strike out on his own to draw everything himself as an indie animator.

Much of Kemonozume had an indie animation feel to it. Mihara has achieved an similar hybrid/conundrum in terms of the production style here, having essentially made an animated film entirely on his own within a studio-produced series - an industry indie. He's upped the ante from his last solo effort, Kemonozume #12, in which he drew all of the key animation and most of the inbetweens. This time he did everything himself. He wrote, storyboarded, directed and drew all of the key animation and inbetweens - a total of 5170 animation drawings - by himself, over the span of 9 months. Mihara himself has jokingly wondered if it might get him into the Guinness Book of World Records. It's certainly an industry first as far as I know, and brings new meaning to the idea of the solo episode.

The feat itself makes the episode interesting, but you don't need to make concessions based on backstage knowledge to appreciate the episode. The results are solid and the episode stands on its own quite well. Mihara's innate talent for expressing character through facial or body tics is well showcased through this episode's simple characters, who act out their personalities in fun, nuanced movement. Not only does he draw it all himself - it doesn't sit still for a moment, and all of the motion is consistently full of his characteristic swagger and bounce, drawn with what almost seems like instinct in a few spare drawings. He doesn't waste the opportunity by chickening out, but faces it full bore and fills the episode with animation. The drawings themselves have that unmistakable Mihara look, although it's more subtle than his work on Kemonozume, so it doesn't risk wrecking the continuity of the characters. I find that's more important this time around. I don't know what procedure they've adopted in terms of finishing and cleanup, but the texture of Mihara's lines remains visible in the final product as it did in Kemonozume.

Beneath the surface of the drawings, the story continues in the vein of the previous episode, with another simple but moving story that gets across some universal truths about love, loss and memory. We move to a small backwater planet, where the protagonist stumbles across a diminutive grandmother living alone with her two grandsons in the middle of nowhere. I appreciated the episode for its exploration of issues related to growing old, notably the way denial becomes our defense mechanism in the face of the unbearable experience of losing your lifelong partner. It's a universal issue to which most of us will be able to relate to some degree. Episode 9 of Kemonozume was similarly an episode that painted the picture of an elderly couple, each with their burden of the debilities of old age. I appreciate that Yuasa continues to explore such unglamorous issues throughout his work.

The plot mechanism of being able to literally crawl into other peoples' memories makes for novel ways of presenting the material each episode, and Mihara does that well here. I'm pretty sure this is his first time storyboarding/directing an entire episode (he did bits of that ETC episode in Paranoia Agent), but I think he's done a pretty good job for a first effort. There's some interesting presentation during the inner psyche scene where the old lady explores the memories of her past. Yuasa himself started out working exclusively as an animator for a few years before Mitsuru Hongo suggested he give storyboarding a try. That escalated to writing and designing, and the rest is history. You've got to start somewhere. I wonder if this means we'll be seeing more storyboarding from Mihara in the days to come.

Viewing this episode in terms of the numbers - one man, 5170 drawings, 9 months - helped remind me of the vast amount of labor that is represented by each minute of animation that we consume and discard so casually. It renews my respect for anybody who, working in as challenging and financially unrewarding a line of work as animation, is willing to not just churn out the work but to go the extra mile of pushing the limits of their skills to pursue new animated possibilities they have yet to explore. That inevitably translates into long hours of tedious labor that most of us (certainly myself) would probably not be willing to invest into anything. Maybe I'm overdoing it, but there's no getting around the fact that, in animation, we don't see the sweat and tears that had to go into the final product to stir our emotions, which is why I find it important to recognize the people behind the work. The people who have that special devotion like Mihara are the ones who create the special work.

Overall, Kaiba is turning out differently than I had imagined. After viewing the first two episodes, I was given to the impression that they were going to be sticking to a core team of craftsmen staff for the rest of the show rather than going the way of Kemonozume with a different small team handling each episode much the way they wanted. I thought they were going to be trying to maintain something of the same tone and quality of the first two episodes. But in fact, the production style seems to be veering closer to the Kemonozume model, as several upcoming episodes similarly seem to be one-person affairs in some form or another.

Episodes 3 and 4 were excellently made in their own way, but at the same time they seem quite different from the first two episodes. I liked the way in the first two episodes the various threads and main movers of the story were effortlessly juggled into the fabric of the narrative, hinting at things to come (you'll notice things already if you rewatch episode one now), while simultaneously providing many new and interesting visual and conceptual ideas around every corner, and fleshing out the workings of the world in which Kaiba found himself. The series was kicked into high gear by communicating many things on many levels right from the start. Yuasa is a great director because he has the rare ability to do this. I guess I felt like those threads were abruptly dropped afterwards, with this exclusive focus on guest characters. Nonetheless, each episode is filled with a tremendous amount of interesting stuff going on at every level, from directing to story to animation, so I think it's silly to complain, but that's what my initial expectation was. As I've said before, expectations are there to be betrayed. I'm looking forward to seeing where the story continues to go from here.

This episode surprised me a little bit at first, but won me over in the end. This is an exceptionally well crafted episode that stands up to repeated viewing thanks to the tight directing of exactly the person I spoke of in my previous post - Akitoshi Yokoyama, who is this time credited as co-writer (w/Yuasa), storyboarder and director of the episode. Character designer Nobutake Ito returns as the animation director. Hence, we have another tag-team from that duo who have created a string of the best episodes in recent memory, including Champloo 21 to Denno Coil 3.

This episode is clearly Yokoyama's baby, and watching the episode you can sense the amount of work he must have put into getting the balance of each shot and scene just right to achieve the overall dramatic effect he was striving for. A tremendous amount of information is covered and conveyed in the episode without any surfeit of dialogue, and without the episode feeling overburdened. It seemed to me that Yokoyama was here doing something similar to what Yuasa had done in Mind Game in the frequent flashbacks that litter the film and fill out the background stories of each of the characters. Yokoyama has clearly thought up an extensive background story for the characters of this episode, and he conveys that story elliptically through a series of flashbacks that nevertheless leave room for the imagination, requiring you to do a little work to figure out how things fit together. I watched the episode twice, and I found the episode more moving on the second viewing, when I felt like I was beginning to understand the characters. I remember experiencing something similar with Mind Game, as with repeated viewings the stories of the characters begin to gel in your mind.

On my first viewing I felt that the episode was a little too sharply episodic, and lacked something of the sense of the wonder of the first episode. At the same time, with this episode I finally felt like I understood the basic structure of the series: a shishkabob. Each episode a piece of meat further along the stick, a new body for the protagonist, a new background story further illuminating the nature of the curious world of Kaiba. I felt that the second episode rounded that episodic nature in a way that seemed more successful in the big picture by keeping the forward momentum strong, and by deliberately keeping the focus a little hazy, keeping you off-balance as to where the gravitational center of things stood.

That said, the quality of the episode is unimpeachable and Yokoyama makes it work. This episode sensitively explores the deeply human themes that underpin this series - the nature of the self, of what it is that makes us us - our bodies, or our memories? And it does so through a very simple, accessible mini-drama about a poor family. If I find myself so attracted to Yuasa's work, it's not just because of his incredible talent as an imaginative animator, designer and director - it's that whatever he is doing, and however different it might look from what came before, you know that he is exploring serious issues that matter to all of us humans. And he does it in a way that always resonates deeply with me, making me think about life and not take it for granted. Yuasa never puts his heart on his sleeve, and that's why I respect him. It's also precisely what makes his work is so convincing.

The subtlety with which Yokoyama interweaves the layers of meaning throughout the episode is quite impressive, as many a fleeting shot offers much more meaning than might be immediately apparent. The last shot, for example, is quite a cinematic stroke, using the vehicle of the series - the modularity of memory within the empty receptacle of the body - to create a painfully ironic visual double-meaning, with what looks like the girl, who is in fact Kaiba, seeming to cry for the tragic fate of her mother, when it's actually Kaiba crying for both. The various characters each cry at a moment in the episode, and each time it carries a subtly different but important weight of meaning. Innocuous moments in this series pack an immense wallop when the implied banality of their cruelty is considered - the ease with which a person's existence is release into the ether and forever lost. And then there's the bitingly ironic visual simile of the girl's bubbles, symbols of innocence. This is intelligent, densely layered work.

On the animator front, we saw a few interesting faces involved - first and foremost Soichiro Matsuda, one of my favorite new faces in recent years, a great new animator to whom Yuasa has come back often after seeing the work he did on the barroom battle in Kemonozume ep 1. He did a lot of good work on Kenji Nakamura's Mononoke. Also present were young Gainax rising star Akira Amemiya and good old Takaaki Wada, whom I haven't seen in a while. (he's been active - I just haven't been watching the right things) The backgrounds throughout the series have been really fantastic, a number of which I would even want to put a frame around and put on my wall they're so gorgeous. (failing that, one is now my desktop) I didn't think it would be possible to achieve the look of the backgrounds of Cat Soup in a larger-scale format such as this, but they've done a remarkable job.

Just some notes about the latest in the seemingly now permanent stream of Naruto movies. The fourth film was directed by Hajime Kamegaki, and comes across as more lightweight and slapdash than the dramatically more solid-feeling second film by Tensai Okamura, not that this necessarily matters in the context. The drawings felt a little more uneven, too, with less effort put into smoothing things over than the earlier films. As usual, they clearly put less effort into the drawings in the first half hour, and released all their energy in the final half.

I didn't recognize as many animators this time around, though Shinji Hashimoto was there again, and his shots were as usual easily identified. I wonder how he came to be a regular in the movies. I was surprised to see old Topcraft animator Tsuguyuki Kubo here as an animation director. He remains very active after 40-some years. Ex-Topcraft animator Tadakatsu Yoshida was there too. Masahiro Sato and Hidetsugu Ito from Stranger were here as animators and animation directors. There were definitely spots here and there that had a unique touch to the timing or drawing, but I couldn't really identify much. It felt like rather than big patches by one person there would be these little scattered shots by lots of people. For example, a random lone shot of Rock Lee running out of the smoke towards the camera and hitting three guys was quite nice. The extended action scene that occupied the central part of the film felt like the highlight, although a lot of different people seem to have had a hand in it, and I didn't recognize any of the styles at work. It feels like a lot of the new, young faces from the TV series may have gotten to handle the actions scenes in this film. I also wonder what the significance is of the way they divide the key animation credits into six or seven large chunks.

My main catch from this film was Hiroshi Masuda, who was the FX animation director. The fire effects in the film were throughout wonderfully rendered and immediately announce him as a great new FX specialist alongside Takashi Hashimoto, Hideki Kakita, Shuichi Kaneko and the like. The explosions struck me as having the same style as Hashimoto's explosions in Baron Omatsuri. He also worked as FX animation director on Shin-Ei's latest Doraemon film that was released just a while back, so I look forward to seeing that. It's interesting to see how new approaches to allocating the work of handling the drawings continue to be devised in Japan to improve the overall quality of films. This sort of character/FX allocation of work in the western style didn't exist until a few years back, with the notable exception/anomaly of Sanrio Films' Sirius and Florence, where Mikiharu Akabori was the FX animation director to character AD Shigeru Yamamoto.

Okay, so it looks like I'll be blogging Kaiba. Few things I watch these days inspire me with the desire to say anything. It's refreshing to be filled with words for once by the great work being done here.

This episode did just what I was hoping: It maintained the quality of drawing of the first episode and sustained the momentum of the story and the very unique dramatic tone established by the first episode. I have this habit of checking the credits before I watch an episode, after doing which in this case I was pretty optimistic going in that such would be the case. The episode is directed/co-written (w/Yuasa) by the eminently reliable Akitoshi Yokoyama, who handled episode 5 of Kemonozume and episodes 3 and 11 of Denno Coil, each of which are among the most solid episodes of their respective series. He's also an animator, having helped animate Kenji Nakamura's episode 10 of Kemonozume, among other things. He's one of the most reliable figures I know at the moment. Whatever he touches, it works big time. Thanks to him, this episode covered a wide range of interesting happenings while maintaining great forward drive and dramatic tension from scene to scene. On top of that, we have Ryotaro Makihara and Takayuki Hamada as animators again, along with, guess who, Koichi Arai, the litmus test animator I mentioned in the last post. Thanks to these great animators, this episode, like the first, is filled with wonderfully movemented acting by the characters. So far, so great.

The drawing side of things is sustained by a very reliable figure: Akira Honma. I was afraid the quality might dip very quickly once Nobutake Ito left the podium as animation director, considering how unusual these characters are. Ito remains as supervisor here, but Akira Honma does a great job of adapting to these very unique designs. I didn't sense any discrepancy. Although apparently a relatively young face, he's been an invaluable in-house resource throughout all of the most interesting Madhouse shows of the last few years - Kemonozume and Denno Coil - showing the malleability of a great animator craftsman. If we could maintain this same level of quality through to the very end, by continuing to go with the sort of talented craftsmen animators and directors we see here, then I think this series would attain a pretty high level of perfection. I doubt it's possible to avoid some unevenness considering the constraints of TV production, but the team they have assembled so far is very reassuring.

If I'm hoping that the quality of the animation and directing are maintained, it's because I'm getting a very good feeling from the story so far, which works on any number of different levels, and I wouldn't want anything to distract from that. While on the surface the show explores the landscape of a fascinating alien world full of unexpected shapes, colors and relationships, making every moment of the show a delightful process of discovery full of new stimuli for the audience, it simultaneously, subtly gets across a number of poignant messages about the human predicament, and that's what's making me very enthusiastic about it - it's got a real sense of depth. The show has a deceptively soft and cute look to the characters and colors that is betrayed by jarringly adult and powerful moments that keep you off-balance and give the show its unique tone and dramatic strength.

I was an oversensitive and depression-prone kid, and one of the things I remember pondering morosely in my moments of angst-induced existential dread was all the people in the world who had come before me - the thought that I had been preceded by billions upon billions of people, all of whom were now dead, memory of their existence completely eradicated. I doubt it's a thought that crosses most people's minds, out of the need to stay sane, but it's a fact of our existence. The scene where we realize the meaning of the yellow clouds reminded me of all that. It's a powerful moment where many of the developing themes in the series seem to converge. And it does all this without being either heavy-handed or alienating, wordy or pretentious. It's all done seamlessly via the unfolding drama, which is the stuff of great storytelling. Without even having to think about it, the story invokes elemental issues deeply rooted in our existence, quite unobtrusively, which in my mind confirms that Yuasa continues to grow and improve as a storyteller. The one thing that bothered me, for that reason, was that they had to wordily explain the concept before the opening in this episode. I thought that was unnecessary. The storytelling here is doing an amazing job of bringing this situation, these characters alive, gradually letting us in on how it all fits together, without having to explain anything. But it certainly is a very peculiar situation that would throw new viewers for a loop if they just tuned in, so I can sort of understand. The story has been developing brilliantly so far, without revealing too much too quickly and without it feeling like they're annoyingly holding back on you, with lots of really cool and weird characters, each with a clearly defined personality. I hope it maintains this pace.

Last time I noted a palpable Shin-Ei feeling to the first episode via the animators. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I noticed in this episode that one of the voice actors is Wasabi Mizuta, no less - the voice-actor who recently replaced Nobuyo Oyama as Doraemon. In yet another connection, this new character named Butter is obviously an homage to Bakabon Oyaji from the old A Pro show Tensai Bakabon. I'm loving all of these connections.

I had a chance to watch Masahiro Ando's Sword of the Stranger. Overall I would say it was pretty much what I was expecting, although I was hoping it would hold up a little better as a film and not just as a great action film, which I already knew it would. The premise of the story, once it was finally revealed near the end, was laughable, if not insulting, and considerably took away from any potential dramatic impact. I thought it was sad that this is the best they could come up with, because Japanese culture owes a good deal to Chinese culture, and I see interesting potential in a film that examines a clash of the two cultures, and how they had diverged by that point in history. It's a shame, because everything technically seemed to be spot on. The directing was tight, the characters were interesting (though I was not taken by the designs), the script was quite good in the little details of dialogue and in the way the story moves from scene to scene, and of course the animation was full of exciting action set pieces that gave several talented Bones regulars the chance to strut their stuff. But we seem to have hit an invisible wall attempting to go anything beyond that.

That said, we come away with several very nice action pieces, so who's complaining. Most are from Bones regulars, with a few exceptions from outsiders. It comes as no surprise that the best bit comes from Yutaka Nakamura, the studio's 'kanban' animator, who consistently manages to one-up his previous work, which is saying a lot. He remains one of the most consistently amazing animators out there, a real animator superstar. Takashi Tomioka is another of the best Bones animators, and I've been following his work for a while now, having seen several great examples of his work over the last few years. His main contribution here would be the fight with the whip guy. He also did a good deal at the end around the point where the stranger finally unsheathes his sword. I love the feeling of richness and weight that I always get from his work, with its slow and powerful movements with lots of follow-through. This film probably provides a denser dose of his work than any previous production, so it's a great intro to his work.

There is, in fact, no single unifying style to even the great Bones animators. What makes Japanese animators unique applies even to animators who work at the same studio. Tomioka is as different as can be from Nakamura in the approach to timing, form and acting. The starkest contrast of all, though, is surely with Hidetsugu Ito and Tomioka. Hidetsugu Ito did the opening fight, which moves quite a lot, but in a very different way, much more jumpy, without a strong feeling of weight, but with lots of drawings thrown in to create this constantly moving, chaotic, spontaneous feeling. The drawings are a lot less calculated and refined. My main discovery in this film was an animator named Masahiro Sato. He's apparently been quite prolific over the last decade since doing some early work alongside Yutaka Nakamura on Sunrise's Lodoss Wars, which was made shortly before Bones was founded by Sunrise expats. Here he does the fight on the bridge and the shots of the fighting between the main Chinese baddie and the main Japanese baddie at the climax. His work is closer to Tomioka than Ito, perhaps, in the way we get more of a clean follow-through to the fighting and a feeling of weight in each little movement that makes the fighting more convincing.

One of my favorite animators, and one who turns up in just about every major new production, no matter the studio (he's almost like a litmus test), is Koichi Arai, who here does a bit of fighting - the bit with the arrows where the younger samurai gets knocked off his horse. Another one of my favorite animators, Shuichi Kaneko, is here handling the fire effects - first the temple at the very beginning, and then the flaming arrows during the climax. Alongside Takashi Hashimoto and Hideki Kakita (and Mitsuo Iso and Hisashi Ezura on the digital side), Kaneko is one of the small handful of great FX animators active today. I recall first becoming a fan from his mecha work on an episode of Eureka Seven, as well as his work as mecha AD on the FMA movie. He is a master who can handle everything from mecha to natural phenomena. It's not just that his FX are realistic - there's this unexplainable great feeling there in the timing that sets him apart.

Finally, we see animator Hiroyuki Nishimura doing a nice bit - the fight on the stairwell near the end. I know Nishimura primarily from the great action pieces he drew for the early-to-mid-period Shin-chan films. Nishimura had originally started out as an Ajia-Do animator, but soon went freelance and formed a 'pseudo-studio' called Megaten with Shin-chan director Mitsuru Hongo and Shin-chan animator Yoshihiko Takakura (husband of Hayashi Shizuka). Megaten, like Studio Hercules or Studio Torapezoid, is a studio only in the sense that its members are a bunch of friends who are working together in the same place on their own projects. Nishimura's involvement on the Shin-chan films can presumably be traced to his being part of Megaten. Hongo and Nishimura worked together big-time on last year's Deltora Quest, just before Nishimura left Megaten. Interestingly, Mitsuru Hongo came back to Shin-Ei to direct the latest Shin-chan film that just came out not long ago, and Yuasa was involved as set designer again, so it would be surprising if Nishimura were not involved as an animator. The film represents a reunion of the great staff of the early period, when the Shin-chan films were at their most vibrant, and comes at a time when the movie series seemed to be in terminal decline under a succession of short-lived directors. It strikes me as a great move to get him back, and for once I'm looking forward to the new Shin-chan film.

Very quickly the second ep of Bones' Soul Eater featured work by that animator I'd been wondering about, Kazumi Inadome. I don't know what she did, but there was a nice sense of timing in some of the action, so it would make sense to me if she did that part. The third ep wasn't too exciting on the animation front, but the preview of the next ep looked nice.

I've just watched the first episode of Masaaki Yuasa's new series, and I'm still coming off from the blissful high of a new dose of Yuasa's unstoppable, mad genius. I had little doubt that I would be in for something quite unexpected, perfectly warped, strangely beautiful, and very imaginative, and this first episode doesn't disappoint on any of those counts. It renews my faith in animation, and in anime in particular, at a time when I was finding myself growing impatient with the form. I have yet to see the Dreaming Machine short that Yuasa did for Genius Party, which is the intermediate creative step that Yuasa took between between this series and his first one, Kemonozume, so I don't quite know to what extent that short could be read to be leading to this series. All I know is that this series goes in a very different direction from Kemonozume. I can't think of many creators who would have it in them to be able to swing between stylistic extremes both graphic and narrative to the extent that Yuasa has done here, but I think it's a healthy thing to do so, preventing creative stagnation. Ever since Hamaji's Resurrection, Yuasa has shown that he is just as deeply interested in reality as in the depths of imagination, and from Kemonozume to Kaiba we can see the pendulum swinging from the relatively realistic back towards pure imagination.

The first impression that comes to mind is: the bewilderment of the newborn. Staring wide-eyed trying to figure things out in a strange new world. We are thrust into this situation we know nothing about in much the same way as the protagonist. This first episode does a perfect job of throwing you into a world, a visual style, a narrative, an entire concept that feels replete with interesting detail and captures you from the get-go. Like any well-conceived fantasy, every little element seems interconnected, but by a logical underpinning that isn't immediately obvious, getting you to wonder about the meaning of this or that - that strangely placed hole, the amorphous environs, those weird flying contraptions, the odd physics that seem to govern this world. It tosses you directly into the melee without coming across as forced or alienating, something that is quite hard to do, and that many anime try and fail to do, but Yuasa consistently manages to pull off. I think this is something that Yuasa hasn't accomplished, really, prior to now, this sort of total sensory engagement where each of the elements of the screen is divorced of common associations and reset to a meaning that only exists within the context of this universe, because prior to now he would be dealing with a more realistic look or situation that didn't allow his imagination completely free rein, or did so only in spurts. Here we're back to the feeling of something like Noiseman or Slime Adventures or Cat Soup, which I've always considered to be items of particularly high Yuasa proof. Here we are finally seeing a world constructed from the ground up of the imaginings of Yuasa, both in terms of the visuals and in terms of the very unique storytelling that has always lurked buried in those drawings that Yuasa is finally getting the chance to fully explore. The very fabric of the world has this way of drawing and a way with forms and shapes and spaces that I recognize immediately as the ether of his imagination from having viewed many of his concept sketches over the years. I felt like I was swimming in Yuasa's imagination, especially when the CG was used to add this feeling of depth to the strange world we find ourselves in.

I think this is a successful episode because it doesn't just leave you wondering what's going on, the entire visual/narrative element works together to achieve that effect. What is this strange world about? What is going on? What are these funky looking characters? The sheer oddness of it all leaves a delightful aftertaste. The whole look of the show is, as usual with Yuasa, very appealing while being a major change from the look of his previous effort. Gone is the sketchiness, grittiness, the bold use of colors - here the characters are simple, very cleanly drawn, the colors muted, the world a strange alien organic maze. There's something delightful about the simple, elegant oddity of the shards that are presented, and the way they almost but not quite seem to send little electrical impulses to each other, to connect and make sense. Yuasa, who wrote/storyboarded/directed this episode, has again created a perfect leader into a new world the likes of which we have never seen before in animation. I can speak of Yuasa the director, Yuasa the animator, Yuasa the conceptual artist - each of whom are great artists in their own right. I knew the latter two artists, but with every new project Yuasa undertakes I am endlessly surprised and delighted to see how much stronger Yuasa the director becomes, how much of a sense of assurance there is in the way he sets up and juggles the various elements of the fairly sophisticated and mind-bending situations he conceives, doing a flawless job of leading the viewer at each instant in the proper direction, without over- or under-feeding information, but keeping this opaque and mysterious question-mark of fascination perpetually hovering.

One of the things that jumps out is the look of the characters, which are all deftly realized here by character designer/animation director Nobutake Ito. Yes, this is the same guy who came up with the characters of Kemonozume! Now that is range, and that is talent. The characters here are quite fascinating, going in a direction that's very new for anime - vaguely retro, but not the nostalgic wanking of certain deliberately retro-styled films. These are truly original designs that skilfully play on a retro feeling by using the look of those old designs and a springboard for a pared-down approach to forms inspired by the same aesthetic. They honor that aesthetic by bringing it to new places, rather than just riding it to the ground. I caught whiffs of everything from Tezuka to Ishinomori to Fujiko Fujio at various times. The mad variety of the shapes of the various characters is a sheer delight. It's amazing how much of a breath of fresh air these designs are.

Nobutake Ito strikes me as having a very sharp and analytical mind. He has a very calculated and knowing way of manipulating the semantic elements that constitute a drawn character, expertly borrowing this way of a drawing a nose, this way of drawing an eyebrow, and grafting and mutating the various elements in clever new ways to create a huge battery of these disarmingly simple designs. It's a highly refined and studied kind of simplicity. Each little detail of the designs seems to play a key role in the story or in the significance of what is presented on-screen, so that the visuals are all tied together, from the strangely meta-looking characters to the amorphous not-quite-there backgrounds. There is an odd and calculated strategy of mixing this strange sense of nostalgia and simple character designs with something profoundly psychological going on underneath that hasn't yet been revealed. This gives the show a very unique atmosphere poised somewhere between a fever dream and an acid trip.

The music is a low-key, neutral electronic musical wash of sound alternately melodic and atmospheric that is quite effective and feels very unusual for an anime. I'm really quite fond of this music. It's rare that a soundtrack feels like it has a new approach to sound in anime, but I get that feeling here, as if the action we're witnessing unfolds within this big organic being and the sound we're hearing is the ambient sound of its nervous system, heart and other vitals rather than a CD that goes to the next track for each successive scene. It feels like the music was orchestrated based on the visuals, though I doubt that is the case. It's more a testament to the complexity of emotion conveyed by this music. The music is by Kiyoshi Yoshida. It certainly feels like he has been explained the concept of the series by Yuasa, and has successfully translated it into sound, the same way Seiichi Yamamoto did the conceptual phrase communicated to him by Yuasa for Mind Game: "the borderline between life and death". The understated, dreamy ambient melody of the music works quite brilliantly to heighten the effect of the strangely disembodied situation.

On the staff front, we find a number of Shin-Ei animators working on the first episode, such as my favorite new face at Shin-Ei, Ryotaro Makihara, and Doraemon veteran Tetsuro Karai, which makes perfect sense. This series has a very Shin-Ei feeling to it, with its simple designs that hark back to the shows Yuasa worked on in his early years for the studio, so he obviously thought of them for this new show, and there is some very nice movement in this first episode. We even have Yuichiro Sueyoshi helping out on the opening. The ending, meanwhile, is handled by the amazingly versatile Masahiko Kubo (Mind Game car chase, Tekkonkinkreet Yakuza smackdown/Minotaur sequence). Takayuki Hamada from Tekkonkinkreet leads the animators and also handles prop design. I was wondering where Yasunori Miyazawa would turn up this season, but for some reason I wasn't expecting it to be here. He couldn't have landed better, as this is precisely the sort of material that I think would fully exploit Miyazawa's very particular genius. He's credited as having helped with the conceptual design on this episode, which is perfect. Miyazawa is to me is a rare animator who can come up with peculiar forms that are not only visually pleasing and highly original but that come alive in an irresistible, magical way when animated. So I think he's a great match with Yuasa, and I look forward to seeing what else he'll be doing here, to say nothing of who else will turn up. Madhouse's shows are nice because there are always pleasantly unexpected faces turning up.

Just a few comments on the new season after having seen a few episode 1s. By far the most impressive so far has been Bones' Soul Eater (no relation to Soul Taker), directed by the always reliable Takuya Igarashi. Directing was great and solid throughout, but more than anything, with first Sword of the Stranger and now this show, Bones show they really understand action animation. This episode 1 was packed with more stellar animation than I've seen in an episode in a while, from tip to toe - an amazing one-man opening by Yasuhiro Irie, yet another one-man ending by Norimitsu Suzuki, and between the two, two nice fight sequences, one by Nakamura Yutaka, and one I presume to have been by Norimitsu Suzuki, who dominates the proceedings with this double-whammy of action scene + ending. The sublimely rendered explosion in the ending, in particular, sent the fx nerd in me into nerdgasms. I'll be following the show, if just to see how far they can maintain this quality, but also because it's obvious that they're focusing squarely on something that they are proving to be better at than any other studio at the moment - action. I presume we'll be seeing action from Irie, and I noted a woman animator named Kazumi Inadome credited as the main animator, so perhaps we'll be seeing action from her, or at least a good amount of regular animation. Once again I'm left to wonder about the nature of the "main animator" role that is a staple of Bones' shows. Few other studios use the role, so it's something unique to Bones, and it clearly is a major part of their MO that speaks to how they approach and conceive their shows. I like the way there's a sort of 'guiding spirit' animator for each of their shows. It shows an appreciation of and respect for the role of the animator.

Other than that, I was happy to note three new shows directed by women, which is more than I can recall seeing in any season before. Takamitsu Kondo had the simple characters of the kids' show Pipopa going through some nice kinetic action. Ichiro Itano was back with Blassreiter, a new series about CGI motorcycles/robots that was more watchable than I'd anticipated. Gonzo's Aegis was a wan and late take on D&D parody, but was nonetheless watchable, and had a nice section of craziness by Itsuki Imazaki. I don't like his work that much because he seems nothing more than a Yoshinori Kanada epigone without bringing anything new to the mix, but he's sure enthusiastic about it. And hard to believe as it may be, Shoji Kawamori is back with yet another re-hashing of Macross. And it was watchable, with considerable effort put into the first episode technically. It seems to closely follow the pattern of the original show. Not part of the new season, but the last episode of one of last season's shows, Dragonaut, had a nice bit by Toei animator Tatsuzo Nishita, and this episode (and show) was a strong effort overall from Torapezoid's Manabu Ono. I'd like to see him team up with Susumu Yamaguchi again someday for something. The new xxxHolic series by Tsutomu Mizushima didn't do anything new for me, though here's hoping for Yasunori Miyazawa. Finally, for the last of what I'll bother to mention, JC Staff's Nabari no Ou left a mildly nice impression for the vigor and looseness of drawing of some of the action (Ken Kato?). Felt like young staff giving the action a nice go. Most of the rest of the credits this season are dominated by names I've never heard of, so I feel really at sea.

I've been totally out of it lately in terms of animation, but I'll be awakening from my slumber quite soon, as Masaaki Yuasa's latest TV series at Madhouse, Kaiba, is going to be starting two weeks from today, airing on WOWOW. Hopefully I'll get to see it. If I do, maybe I'll be driven to blog the show. I've been watching very little anime lately, and basically nothing new, just old stuff. Thank god there are producers in Japan like Masao Maruyama giving talent the opportunity to create something remotely interesting for once, otherwise my anime consumption would be pretty much zilch. Denno Coil was the last new anime I can recall waching through to the end. I even gave up on Ghost Hound out of sheer exhaustion. What a wasted opportunity that was.

I was thinking the realistic, sketchy style of Kemonozume might have scared some people away, so this show seems like it might attract viewers who might have been turned away from that aspect. The characters are very cute, and much closer to Yuasa's usual style, with their simple shapes made with just a few lines. I get a distinct vibe of early Osamu Tezuka in the design on the first page of the site, so I wonder if Yuasa was inspired by 50s manga aesthetic here. He obviously has some kind of a retro thing going. Nobutake Ito is credited as character designer, though, so I'm curious to know how the characters were thrown together, if Yuasa laid the basic groundwork and Ito cleaned them up into workable character sheets, or if it's more Ito's work. Either way, it's great to see these two working together again, and this time going in such a different direction. I remember Ito did a short for Kimagure Robot that was more cartoony like this, and he recently did that Junk Town short, so I know he's got it in him already for this style.

One of the old things I've been watching is Nippon Animation's 1986 show Spaceship Sagittarius, which features weird looking simply designed creatures travelling to another planet and having lots of odd encounters with 'alien cultures'. For someone as sick of seeing anime characters as me, the designs are refreshing. It's an interesting show not because of the animation necessarily (though we do see some interesting faces occasionally), but more because of the script, which is pretty smart. The whole alien thing is nothing more than a vehicle for geopolitical metaphor, with each episode acting as a fairly obvious parallel for some issue on planet earth like the exploitative practices of oil or mining companies working in Africa or Latin America - just transposed to aliens on an alien planet. I suppose it would be impossible to have done such a thing with characters in the real world (and I think this show was probably intended to some extent for overseas broadcasting), so I see this as being a way of getting around that. The strokes are broad and it pulls its punches too much sometimes, since this is Nippon Animation we're talking about, but it's quite watchable, which is more than can be said for a lot of the other things NA was making at the time.

You can see what I presume to be the pilot for the series on Youtube. I don't know about the history of this project other than that Andrea Romoli is credited as the creator, making this a co-production of some kind. But I'm not sure to what extent. The show itself seems 100% Japanese produced, but the pilot seems to be a little more European-inflected, reminding me alternately of La Planete Sauvage and Yugoslavian animation. But Nippon Animation is credited with production even on the pilot. It was made in 1982, and the series dates 4 years later. I can't find any info on Andrea Romoli on the web, so I can't figure out in what way he could have been involved, or how this show came about, although at the very least he seems to have been responsible for the look of the characters. It's an unusual show, so I'm curious to know about its inception.

The greatest filmmakers can create a transcendent experience in the viewer. Few filmmakers can do that for me, but Tadanari Okamoto is one of them. I think he's one of Japan's best artists of the last few decades, and he is by far my favorite independent Japanese animator. Every element of art commingles in his work to a level of perfection that I find in very few animated films anywhere - not just technical ingenuity that makes each of his films different from one another and perpetually fascinating in terms of the technique or form, but even moreso the deep love of humanity, generosity of spirit and gentle humor that shines through in each of his simple and lovely films. I think his films are a treasure. I don't revisit his films often, but that's only because I don't want to ruin the pleasure of doing so by treading too hard on the soft and delicate ground of his universe. Whenever I do come back to one of his films, it renews my faith in animation.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, Okamoto is currently not represented on DVD anywhere in the world, not even in Japan. Many years ago a good 2-LD set of his work was released by Pioneer, including a broad selection of his shorts and full versions of several of his best longer efforts, but this has not been re-released. Testament to the size of his oeuvre is the fact that even a set of this size was only able to cover a chunk of his body of work, and several of his other longer efforts (films of almost 20 minutes in length) were conspicuously absent - meaning even viewers who had the luck to find the LD set did not have a complete picture of this major independent animator. This set forms the basis of my knowledge of Okamoto's films, so I've been longing for an expanded version of the set to be released.

Many of Okamoto's films won the coveted Noburo Ofuji award over the years (recent laureates being Mind Game and Koji Yamamura's Franz Kafka's Country Doctor), and those films were in fact released on a DVD box set that came out several years ago, covering all of the winners of the prize since its inception. So a few films were available, in a way. But the Ofuji box set itself was prohibitively expensive, so the films remained outside of the reach of most consumers. This is doubly a shame because two of the films included on the set were not included on the LD set, and had not been released on any consumer format prior to then. I held out hope that they would eventually be released as part of a newly expanded DVD re-edition of the old set, but such has not happened so far.

In the meantime, lacking any reasonable form of representation on DVD, Okamoto's name continues to be pushed further into oblivion with each passing year. I therefore do not feel in the slightest bit bad for pointing out that someone took the initiative of ripping the films from that DVD set and uploading them to Stage6. I recently discovered this fact upon scrounging around on the site for obscurities after hearing that it was going to be shutting its doors on Thursday. The four films on the site are among Okamoto's best films, and I don't think they have been viewable by audiences over here in any form prior to now, so I recommend anyone who is interested in independent animation to check them out while you have the chance, although unfortunately they are not subbed. It's the best we've got for now.

Revisiting a film by Okamoto is always a treat for me, so needless to say, finally being able to see one of his major efforts that I have never seen but have wanted to see for ages, and that turns out to be one of his best films, is sheer delight. I was lucky enough to have that experience tonight upon watching Niji ni Mukatte / Towards the Rainbow (1977), which immediately struck me as being one of his most perfect films in every way, right up there alongside Praise Be to Small Ills (1973) and The Magic Ballad (1982). What a sad thing for a film with this sort of emotional power to have remained buried for so long. But the same applies to all of Okamoto's films. These are films that have not aged at all, and that should be seen more than ever now, when this sort of honest and heartfelt filmmaking seems to have gone by the wayside. These are films that speak to people in a way few indie shorts do. Okamoto's voice was unique even during his day, and his voice remains unique today. I think it's also remarkable that he managed to produce so many relatively long films during the short span of about a decade and a half that he was active. His body of work appears to span over 5 hours.

Like the earlier film Praise Be to Small Ills, Towards the Rainbow benefits from a terrific soundtrack by folk rocker Kohei Oikawa. His voice flows like silk over the images, a lilting poetic echo of the narration by the great voice of Kyoko Kishida, while that unforgettable melody raises the experience of watching the film to another plane altogether. Yet another great example of Okamoto's unflagging devotion to creating a soundtrack that is an inseparable part of the whole yet also incredibly beautiful and moving on its own. The puppets are lovely and elegant with their simple forms, very clearly showing Okamoto's spiritual Czech heritage. The lighting is impeccably handled to create delicate, moody images of the interiors where the young girl is weaving. The images of the river are magnificently rich and lush thanks to Okamoto's wonted combination of various techniques. The ethereal mist is achieved by layering traditional animation for the water and crepe paper for the mist over 3D sets. The film uses the framework of a simple love story of two young people to evoke any number of powerful and timeless themes. Foremost, it is a universal story about how humanity, driven by love, can come together to overcome the obstacles that divide us. At the same time, it is also a fascinating culturally specific slice of historical technical ingenuity. Every element from the technique to the storytelling to the theme is effortlessly intertwined into a multilayered whole to create a deceptively simple film of transcendent beauty. This is Okamoto at his best.

I recently had a chance to see a few episodes of the old Toei TV series Tiger Mask. It was very interesting viewing in many ways. Besides being quite entertaining in spite of its age, this show features some of the most dynamic and exciting animation I've seen in any TV show of that period - or this one, for that matter - making it of considerable historical interest from an animation standpoint.

In spite of the show's relatively low profile over here, Tiger Mask is in fact at the root of a number of currents in anime, having been a training ground for a number of major animators and an influence on many others. It's something of a key show in anime history, surprisingly. This period in the latter half of the 1960s produced a handful of classic sports anime that were hugely popular among TV viewers, as well as influential on the rest of the industry, such as Kyojin no Hoshi and Ashita no Joe, and Tiger Mask ranks right alongside them as one of the most important sports anime of the period - the defining wrestling anime to the defining baseball/boxing anime of the former two shows. Nonetheless it, like most of these other sports anime classics, remains very little known over here in the west. These shows have admittedly aged a bit after some 40 years, and probably appear at first sight quite lame and cheesy to prospective viewers today. But in the best cases they hold up surprisingly well in many respects, far more than other shows of the period, thanks to good directing/drama and surprisingly strong animation, so they merit rediscovery.

Prior to watching a few episodes of Tiger Mask just recently, I was already familiar with the classic opening, the dynamic and sketchy style of which gave a clear indication just how unique this show was in terms of the animation, and got me curious to see more. Basically, it just moves far more than many shows from that period. Drawing after drawing passes by as the wrestlers run around, jump from the cords, grapple with one another, lunge at one another. Sports is all about athletes and physical motion, but anime by definition seems to impose limits on how much a character can move, so prior to seeing this, the whole idea of 'sports anime' struck me as something of an oxymoron. But the Tiger Mask opening seemed like the exception to that rule. It was one of the few anime I'd seen that put the considerable effort required into the animation to recreate that most basic thrill in sports - seeing the athlete vigorously moving around doing his thing. Besides that, there was the sheer rawness of the animation, which I personally found very appealing as a fan of the latter-day proponents of rough-styled animation like Shinya Ohira and Shinji Hashimoto. This was sketchy, spontaneous stuff full of flying lines and quickly drawn poses, certainly like nothing else I'd seen from this period.

I'd heard good things about Tiger Mask the show itself, but I probably would never have bothered to seek it out beyond the opening had some tapes not been bestowed upon me, so I'm grateful for having been given the opportunity to finally experience the show. I'm quite fond of several of Toei's earliest TV series like Ken the Wolf Boy and Hustle Punch, which I originally explored as missing links between Toei's feature period and TV period, and wound up finding to be quite excellent on their own merits, but for some reason I've never bothered exploring the TV work Toei did over the next few years.

Tiger Mask comes along right at that period in the late 1960s when we start to see a major surge in the number of subcontracting studios, many of which were being formed by people who had just quit either Mushi Pro or Toei. Usually those new subcontracting studios would go on to do subcontracting for the same big studios the founder had just left. (Tokyo Movie was another big contractor of the day) Such is precisely the case with the main figure behind Tiger Mask: Keiichiro Kimura. As I mentioned in the post on A Production, Keiichiro Kimura had trained at Toei Doga under Daikichiro Kusube. He did his first animation work as an inbetweener on the two 1963 films (Sinbad and Little Prince), before shifting course and moving to work on the TV shows, which he did from there on out. His first big job was working under Kusube on Fujimaru in 1964 alongside Yoichi Kotabe. Afterwards, he was abruptly bumped up to working as character designer/animation director, in which capacity he worked for two more years at Toei, first on Rainbow Sentai Robin and then on the first Cyborg 009 film. After then working on a number of other shows, Kimura was finally appointed character designer of Tiger Mask, which wound up being his last job at Toei. He quit mid-way to form his own studio, Neo Media, although he continued working on the show from his new studio.

Keiichiro Kimura is a one-of-a-kind character. No geeky nerd as a youth, Kimura was a burly tower of power enrolled in all of the sports clubs, who cowed not only his classmates, but also his teachers with his fearsome, never-smiling facade and his hit-first-ask-later attitude. After graduating from high school, family friends suspected he had become a yakuza. But he just loved to paint. Having spent much of his time during high school behind the easel painting, by the end of his studies he had honed his skills enough that he was able to win a competition hosted by the Mainichi newspaper, even getting his name in the paper. After graduating, this helped motivate him to try his hand at getting into an art school. However, he was unable to pass the entrance exams. It was then that he ran across an ad in the newspaper from Toei Doga looking for animators, and he decided to apply. He contacted Daikichiro Kusube, who had grown up in the same town and graduated from the same high school a few years ahead of Kimura, and the rest is history.

Daikichiro Kusube was known at the studio as the guy under whom all of the misfits assembled, and it was under him that Keiichiro Kimura learned the ropes. Yasuo Otsuka would occasionally drop by Kimura's desk to give him tips, answer questions, show him how to do things, and otherwise be tremendously generous with his knowledge, for which Kimura was very grateful. Whereas Kusube was Kimura's teacher, Otsuka was probably his greatest influence, stylistically speaking. It can be assumed that Otsuka's influence is at least partly one of the elements leading to the style we find in Tiger Mask.

Besides this, Keiichiro Kimura mentions that the one explicit influence behind the style he adopted for Tiger Mask was the work of Bob Peak, an illustrator who created a number of famous Hollywood posters and sports illustrations in the 1960s. Peak smeared the paint across the canvas expressively, heightening the feeling of exertion in the athletes he painted. Kimura works with only pencil in his work, so it's hard to see any direct influence. It's more of a spiritual hint that Kimura seems to have taken from Peak's work, in terms of the sort of freedoms he could allow himself with the drawings and timing in order to achieve a more dynamic and exciting piece of animation.

Kimura had always had an aggressively go-getter attitude when it came to his animation. Perhaps influenced by the teaching of Otsuka, as an inbetweener, he had always pushed himself to draw as many inbetweens as he could, driven by the conviction that skill came as a result of hard hours of practice, and if you wanted to become a great animator, the more you could draw, the faster you'd get there. Toei Doga had recently switched to a piecemeal system of payment, where animators were paid by the sheet rather than by the hour, which was certainly another motivating factor behind the very speed-oriented style of drawing that Kimura had acquired by the time he began working on Tiger Mask. Combine stylistic inclination with a speedy drawing hand acquired through years of work, and the result is the hard-edged and freewheeling approach to action that makes Tiger Mask so memorable.

Kimura came up with a variety of tricks and inventions to pump up the excitement on the animation of the wrestling matches, which were, after all, the centerpiece of the show. He told his animators, "Imagine the ring is as big as a football field." What he meant by this is, exaggerate the length of the actions. Allow your character to run for ten meters before taking a flying leap and soaring through the air for five seconds before he lands on the other side. The action in Tiger Mask is full of breathtaking, space- and gravity-defying aerial acrobatics that are tremendously fun to watch, even while they gleefully stretch plausibility.

Rather than planning out a wrestler's move in a particular shot in detail prior to sitting down to animate it, he sat right down and came up with the moves on the spur of the moment. You can see very clearly in the opening how this approach to his task shows up in the animation on the screen. Rather than a fluid, predictable motion, we have a series of choppy and jumpy but spontaneous and very expressive poses fluidly flowing in one unprecedentedly long arc for a single shot, incorporating extravagantly long camera moves that reportedly resulted in the background painters having to create some of the longest backgrounds ever painted for a TV show in Japan. He varied the frame rate dynamically, something he learned from Otsuka, going from spare threes to twos or even ones at unexpected moments.

But most of all, those aggressive lines! It seems like he nearly cuts through the paper, he presses down so hard with his pencil to create these incredibly powerful and jagged lines that criss-cross the characters and give them an immediacy beyond any other show of the period. Every little jagged notch is kept alive in the final product thanks to the Xerox method that was used back then. Inbetweeners reportedly had a challenge adapting to his demands. The result of Kimura's long years spent learning how to draw large quantities of inbetweens as good and quickly as possible can be seen in Tiger Mask, which seems to be the culmination of a young animator's long incubation period. Kimura would even extend his action sequences by adding shots not in the storyboard, which halfway into the show wound up leading to disputes with the directors that eventually led to him quitting Toei. He was determined to create the most exciting animation he could. He just had his own brash way of going about it.

Kimura handled episodes in alternation with a handful of other animation directors, and their work is interesting in that it shows a number of different interpretations of the style presented by Kimura. A number of these figures went on to become famous for their work elsewhere, making this show also interesting as a showcase of the early work of a few other greats. These include Oh Production founders Kazuo Komatsubara and Koichi Murata, and soon-to-be Topcraft animators Tsuguyuki Kubo and Yoshinori Kanemori. Another soon-to-be Topcraft animator, Tadakatsu Yoshida, can be seen among the animators on Kubo's episode. Each of these animators went on to develop his own unique graphic touch that seems to have taken in a little something of what Kimura was doing here.

Of the few episodes I've been able to sample, I was particularly taken by Kubo's work here, as I was not familiar with his pre-Topcraft style. Hidekazu Ohara has mentioned that Kubo's painterly drawing skill was one of the things that convinced him to join Topcraft, and that skill was clearly in evidence here. Kubo shows a brilliant eye for drawing faces with distinctly and pleasantly rendered features that sets itself apart from the look of the rest of the animation directors, almost with a more western look to it. You can see one of his drawings above - he did the third drawing, of the guy with the smashed-in face. Kimura's own drawings can be seen in the top two drawings, as well as the opening. Each animation director exhibits a distinct touch of line, which only magnifies the pleasure of watching the show, giving it a variety of styles that huddle together comfortably under the overarching umbrella of Kimura's rough 'n dirty approach.

The show is rather watchable besides, in a sort of comic book-melodramatic way, with its lovably convoluted and heart-tugging story about an unfortunate wrestler blackmailed by a mysterious international school of assassins into wrestling one opponent after another in order to pay off his debts to the school, which taught him everything he knows. All the while, he's forced to wear a tiger mask in the ring to protect his identity so that the orphans at the orphanage - for whom he also happens to be fighting to earn money, having been an orphan there himself in his youth - will not discover his identity. The recurring theme of how powerlessness drives the characters to seek the power to overcome seems very much of its time for Japan, which was presumably well on its way to recovery by 1970. The show has a decidedly 'showa' atmosphere about it that is very warm and inviting, with its reassuringly humanistic tone and themes, which is a huge contrast with the bulk of anime made today. The fights get quite bloody and violent, almost certainly more than any other show by that point, so it is easy to see how the show might have shocked audiences in its day.

The animation directors who worked on the show would go on to do more work for Toei and other studios, retaining something of the rough touch of line of Tiger Mask, in the process establishing a kind of a tradition for this kind of roughly drawn TV animation in Japan. Tiger Mask has been cited as an influence by any number of animators, and latter-day echoes of the style pioneered by Kimura here continue to found heard in various places, ranging from Shinji Hashimoto's work to Kemonozume.

After Tiger Mask ended, Kimura continued doing subcontract work for other studios from his new studio, Neo Media, where he had several other animators working under him. He and Yasuhiro Yamaguchi were the first at the studio, working on Lupin together in 1971, with Yoshiyuki Momose and Masayuki Uchiyama coming in right afterwards and working on Dokonjo Gaeru. In the latter half of the 1970s, two other animators joined the studio who would go on to make a name for themselves in the 1980s and beyond: Yuji Moriyama and Hiroyuki Kitakubo. For a small subcontractor, Keiichiro Kimura's Neo Media put out an impressive number of great animators.