I'm so behind on Kaiba it's not even funny. The series finished broadcasting weeks ago, but I didn't have time to write my thoughts about this episode, which I actually watched for the first time over a month back, so I got stuck and couldn't watch the rest. With only four more to go after this one, I'm going to slowly make my way through to the end, savoring each episode.

I just watched this episode several times, which is what it took to finally get to the point where I felt I knew what had happened. The script is actually brilliant, this time written solo by Yuasa. The details of every line are fantastic in the Japanese, full of that great ellipsis of details that Yuasa is so good at. Through the script here he carefully presents particular pieces of the puzzle one by one, here and there, slowly bringing the big picture to light, creating a great feeling of building tension, and masterfully weaving the various players into the converging unfolding narrative. This episode creates a great feeling of excitement and anticipation, as you sense that things are going to start really moving. Things almost go too fast to be able to follow what's happening, but it makes for a richer experience the way he does it. Watching this episode I actually thought this was perhaps the first TV anime I'd seen that achieved something of the feeling of epic scale of Future Boy Conan, as different as the two shows are in the details.

Choi Eunyoung of episode 5 backs Yuasa's brilliant script up perfectly as storyboarder, director and animation director, confirming the smart and sophisticated sensibility we discovered in the wildness of episode 5, which is here focused to the task of revving the engine on the story heading into the final lap. It's as if we've gear-shifted from the middle transitional portion where we explored side-stories that fleshed out the world of Kaiba, into the meat of the overarching story.

This was Popo's episode, and the early parts at the meeting where we're first given budding insight into Popo's past and consequent conflicted position in the group were very well handled by the directing, with the tripartite mental image of Dada merging with the image of a youthful Popo - a touch subtle enough to not give anything away blatantly, but clearly enough to deepen the meaning and impact of the scene upon repeated viewings. The color sensibility of this episode was also as exceptional as episode 5, with a different color palette seeming to accent the tone of each major scene, ranging from the blue of the opening where the atmosphere is heavy to the yellow of the ending where the mood is ascendant and prospects are opening up for the characters.

Choi's drawings litter the episode in a patchwork fashion that works wonderfully to give the episode visual richness, interspersed as they are with great work from all the regulars including that maniac Michio Mihara, who apparently hadn't done enough doing a whole episode himself, and here provides numerous bits in various places. Rather than big chunks being done by one person, the style here is more scattered. The great scene at the dinner table with Jakuchu and Neiro seemed maybe like the work of Ryotaro Makihara, though I'm not sure. Also the scene of the two near the end of the underground museum scene (the rest being Choi). Just a guess tho. Masahiko Kubo was there too, though I don't have a good enough sense of his style to say what he did. He's too versatile. (as if that were an insult) Maybe the memory sections - the pre-op & wrestling memory? I remember a bit of rich, fluid animation of Vanilla running at the end of episode 2 reminding me of some running in here. It's funny that Choi's listed as animation director, because it doesn't look like she corrects anything. Her shots jump out, and they're fantastic as usual. Who needs to when the animators are this good?

The names of the characters are interesting. I just figured out that Jakuchu is named after a wonderful Japanese painter of the 18th century. I wasn't aware of him at all, but upon looking at some paintings, I was stunned by their masterful formal stylization. I didn't think anyone had done this kind of painting back then. His paintings of birds in particular are magnificent, a sophisticated blend of realism with meticulous stylization. I can see why Yuasa would admire his work, if that's what it is. A nod of respect to a great sempai.

Studio 4C's Tweeny Witches was one of the most enjoyable and memorable series I've seen in the last few years. It was filled to the brim with imaginative ideas the likes of which have never been really tried in this kind of material in Japan before, even though material involving witches and magic is pretty common. This is the first time it felt like this kind of material was done justice.

Besides that, the production of the series was really interesting, with each episode often being handled by a single individual, so that from episode to episode you could clearly identify each animation director or director's style, which in turn gave the show a great richness and variety that was equally if not more appealing to me than the imagination on display in the story, paraphernalia and designs. Most important of all, this series was the series on which Yasuhiro Aoki came out as a great director. I don't know whether it was technically his debut as an episode director or not, but without a doubt this is the show on which his powers first became clearly evident. And through his work on this show, he clearly developed tremendously as a director, so that this series was a key step in his development leading directly to the work we've seen from him afterwards - first directing the great Kung Fu Love, and most recently directing In Darkness Dwells, both of which show him continuing the same process of incremental development I recall being so impressed by as I watched each new episode of Tweeny Witches from him.

I'd long wished I could see more of the show, as nothing else was quite like it. In a curious development, it came to light last year that the studio had produced a 6-episode offshoot right after the end of the TV show, but that it was never broadcast or released in any form until just recently, presumably related to rights issues. Imagine my delight to discover that Aoki had done one of the episodes. He storyboard and directed the third episode. I was cautious going in, not sure how much time or budget they might have had to produce it, but was amazed at the quality. This episode is perhaps the best stand-alone episode he did for the show, partly because it's a one-off, like all of the OVA episodes, but also because there's a clear sense of development. So it turns out there'd been one more push by him with this show. He'd done one last volley, pushing his skills to the next level. It was great to be able to re-discover this episode to see that.

Again, each episode has a different set of staff, and each group brings a different flavor to their work, but Aoki's work towers above the rest in terms of entertainment value, humor, visual good sense, and thrill of animation. The other episodes are well enough drawn, but lifeless, and the directing has no character or edge to it. It feels like they're just riding along on dramatic rails, and everything is quite predictable and conventional feeling. Only Aoki seems to have the instinct of a good director, willing to try to push beyond that and experiment with tactics for maintaining audience interest of his own devising, such as displacing the timing or the framing a bit or using unusual and fun compositions to show the action unfolding from an intriguing perspective. The drawings and animation also speak at all moments, creating great compositions throughout. And most of all, the characters feel alive in his hands. The situation is a conventional one that has been done countless times in the past, but it feels completely convincing in his hands, and he gives its message an emotional resonance you wouldn't expect. The show itself definitely got across a subversive message about how societies are all based on different levels of power and subjugation, thanks to writer Shinji Obara, and similarly, without any sort of overbearing emphasis, this episode weaves a similar message into the fabric of the story, adding a level of thematic depth that makes the emotions of the characters in response to the events that much more convincing.

Unlike in the TV series, the animation direction was not done by Aoki but by an individual named Hideki Nagamachi, whom I've never heard of. I only realized this fact afterwards upon seeing the credits, but while watching it was unmistakable that the drawings looked very different from the usual Aoki drawings. The style was very sketchy, almost reminding of Yuasa in terms of the oddly angular lines used, for example the way the fingers are drawn as these blocky rectangles. Yet the characters clearly are those of Aoki. In the TV series you could clearly identify each animation director by comparing their different ways of drawing the eyes and other facial features of each of the characters, and Aoki's stood out as being among the more realistically rendered and meticulously drawn, contrasting, for example, with the more cartoony drawings of Yumi Chiba. In this new episode, it's as if Nagamachi is drawing the characters based on Aoki's designs, but in his own sketchy style. Either that, or Aoki corrected the drawings. I'm not too sure. I'd be very curious to know more about how this episode was produced.

Either way, the animation is stupendous - very nuanced and rich, yet very spontaneous and tactile. It's easily the richest and most satisfying of the episodes he did, which is saying a lot, and it complements the directing perfectly. The characters' expressions are varied and complex, expressing a great range of emotions. It's a very simple story, of course, self-contained, without the drama and weight he brought to his episodes of the TV series, but it has a great range in terms of tone that does an even better job of giving him room to try different things as a director - hilarious in the first half, and with slowly building power in the second half that has a surprising potential for depth and emotional resonance. It acts as a kind of summary of his work on the show.

Another great discovery of these new episodes was a solo episode done entirely by Shogo Furuya, who had already handled a number of episodes in the TV series in his own distinctive style. Here he storyboarded, directed, and singlehandedly animated the fourth episode. His more realistic style isn't as pronounced in this episode, but the work is very heavily worked, with the same approach to solid layouts and strong drawings, and a slow, measured pace, that was seen in his work on the TV episodes. It easily stands alongside Michio Mihara's solos as one of the most impressive solos of recent years. I have to wonder how much time he took to do it. He didn't do quite as much as Mihara, so it doesn't seem like it would have taken him quite as long - a few months perhaps.

It's great seeing solo animator episodes also directed by the animator, because it's an opportunity to see a fully-formed approach to telling a story through visuals. It's not the animator just handling his animation in a compartmentalized fashion. He has to figure out how to present every single solitary element, from the pacing of the scenes to the layout to the specific nuances of every second of animation. It's a tremendous amount of work, so it makes sense to split up those tasks, but in talented hands, in the hands of someone who has a vision unified enough to make it worth the work, the results can be quite impressive. Shogo is incredibly talented, although the directing doesn't jump out at you the way Aoki's does. It's much more low-key, but he's clearly a workhorse who can create a film from the floor up. There's almost a whiff of Satoshi Kon in his very meticulous approach to the elements of the screen and slow pace. I knew who did the main tasks of the TV series, but I'd never seen the animation credits for each episode, so it's entirely possible that one of Furuya's episodes was a solo episode without me knowing it.

The rest of the episodes were well produced, as is to be expected of this studio, and each featured interesting ideas that had been developed specifically for each episode, but the directing was never able to go beyond the level of the ordinary. Faces involved were basically all familiar from the TV show. (see the TV series staff list I made) Producer Eiko Tanaka and co-founder Katabuchi Sunao even wrote some of the episodes. The last episode was handled by Toru Yoshida of Osaka animation studio Anime R, who was also involved in the TV series. They are known for handling Sunrise material, which is probably why the episode features a giant robot, of all things. You can see a bunch of Anime R animators in the credits, including Taiki Harada and Fumiaki Kouta, the latter of whom I just mentioned as being in Crossfire. As talented as I'm sure Yoshida is, his drawings struck me as far too conventional anime character for this particular show. It was particularly dismaying to see stock expressive symbols appear for the first time in the series, as one thing that had made the characters of the show appealing was that they did not rely on any such crutch to express emotions.

I'm behind on everything these days, but I finally had the chance to watch this omnibus last night. It was what I was expecting, nothing more, nothing less. It was interesting seeing what would result from crossing an English script with several different Japanese production teams. It's as if there are two different approaches to storytelling struggling to co-exist in each short, which certainly makes for an interesting sort of tension. At a more basic level, there is only so much you can do with this sort of material, and you have to push certain buttons or there is no point in even doing it, so the material is all quite self-limiting, and to me is of no interest save to see what the directors bring to it. A film can be great no matter the material. It just depends on the directing. The films in this omnibus serve as good contrasts to illustrate this point, some succeeding within their short alloted time span, others not. Personally, totally irrespective of the material or whether the film works as a whole, this omnibus is welcome to me simply for having provided two great up-and-coming anime directors the opportunity to show off their skills in a project that will actually be seen by a wide audience over here - Yasuhiro Aoki and Shojiro Nishimi.

Nishimi came at the head of the film with Have I Got a Story For You, which was tremendously well produced, as expected, as well as having by far the most unorthodox look of the film in view of the material. The look of the characters, with their pointy heads and loosely drawn freely criss-crossing lines, goes against the typical flatly stylized, shadowy look that seems to be be the branded image for this franchise, the goth machismo of which has never done anything for me anyway, so I found Nishimi's inventions appealing. The action was all excellently done, the movement all full of the nuance of Tekkon Kinkreet. Shinji Kimura was the animation director, to boot, so the short felt quite similar. Yasuhiro Aoki made his first appearance in this short as an animator, second only to Jamie Vickers. He also helped out with the animation on Toshiyuki Kubooka's film later in addition to doing his own film, so he put in quite the effort here. Masahiko Kubo was another animator in Nishimi's film, so these guys must have been the ones behind a good portion of the action. Interestingly, this short actually represent a return to old territory for Nishimi, as he and Aoyama and Tomonaga et al at Telecom handled many of the best episodes of the old Batman TV series back in the 90s. The story was quite light and insubstantial, but this is a good example of good animation and quality production carrying a film.

Nishimi's film got me to thinking about style, and why style is homogenous in the west and in Japan. Nishimi is a great example of a guy who has come up with his own style that feels fully conceived and is a sheer delight to look at. He is a tremendous animator with solid training who breathes amazing life into his characters, yet his designs are entirely his own and full of edgy inventiveness that beats just about anything else out there. I wish more animators would do what he's done rather than just buy into the dominant style of the industry. So much of what I see in the west seems over-focused on creating hyper-clean, retro-looking, over-stylized designs, whereas it's the reverse in Japan, with too few people bothering to think deeply about novelty of design. Nishimi strikes me as achieving a good balance in terms of this, which he did by coming up with his own peculiar style of drawing. It's the roughness of his drawings that's so appealing to me. They feel alive and never the same. It's not that they're sloppy. It's that he's come up with an interesting way of drawing the characters with these peculiar angles and shapes that he knows will allow him to move the characters however he wants without having to worry about getting every detail of the design right. The designs looking fantastic in motion, a great hybrid of realistic core and eminently line-drawn style.

One of Nishimi's main influences is obviously his old friend Masaaki Yuasa, but like Yuichiro Sueyoshi, Nishimi is no mere imitator. With some twenty years under his belt in the industry, he's developed his own very personal style that is quite different from where Yuasa's own style has evolved over the years. His is more realistically influenced, focused on bringing characters to life, whereas Yuasa remains, as ever, focused on bewildering, freewheeling designs and movement. Like branches of the same tree, Yuasa, Sueyoshi and Nishimi, not to mention Shinya Ohira and Shinji Hashimoto, all share a certain spiritual affinity while having budded into their own personal styles. This school of animators represent perhaps one of the richest veins of creativity in Japanese animation today.

Futoshi Higashide's Crossfire had moments when it felt like it was sort of working, but never gelled, and wound up feeling like a mess. Not helping were the weak drawings of animation director Shinobu Tagashira. This is exactly the feeling I've gotten from much of Higashide's work over the years, of never quite being able to focus his talent in the right direction. Yasunori Miyazawa did some animation in the short that's easy to spot. There was some decent action afterwards that ironically stood out as being better drawn than the rest of the short, which I thought might have been drawn by Anime R animator Fumiaki Kouta, though I don't know his work enough to be sure. Now that's bad, when a scene drawn by one animator stands out as being better drawn than the drawings of the animation director, particularly in a short such as this where you would expect the quality to be higher throughout. Litmus animator Koichi Arai was there with "conceptual character design". I'd love to see what his designs were before they were maligned in this short.

Morioka Hiroshi's Field Test was mostly notable to me for having been animated by a single person - Toshiharu Murata. I'd never heard of him before, and in fact the animation is nothing to jump up and down about, as it only moves here and there and consists mostly of static close-ups of characters, but as a lover of solo episodes it was a nice surprise. Solos turn up in the most unexpected places. I'm very curious to know whether the credits are accurate and the director was the animation director as opposed to Murata himself, as that would change the whole dynamic of Murata's effort. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that the anime character up there on the screen was supposed to be Bruce Wayne.

No surprise to me, Yasuhiro Aoki's In Darkness Dwells blew me away. It was by far the most solid short in the film, the only one that stood on its own as a perfectly crafted creation with a feeling of dramatic weight that managed to overcome the limitations of the material. I was expecting no less of Aoki, but the quality he turned in here surprised even me. I knew Aoki was a great director, but his short here has the power of a feature crammed into a mere 10 minutes, which got me to dreaming about what the results would be if he focused that cinematic brilliance onto an actual feature-length film one day. What's most impressive is that, beyond being a great director, Aoki's drawings are awesome. He and Nishimi were the only directors here who were their own animation directors, and they clearly stand in a league of their own in terms of technical skill and talent. Like Nishimi, Aoki started out as an animator, and he musters all his talent as a drawer and a creator of great movement in everything he directs, so that whatever he does is a seamless whole where every bit of the image serves his bidding as director, communicating something at every moment through the animation or the image. It's in the little details that directing comes alive, and Aoki has a brilliant eye for detail in everything he does. It's not about packing in detail so much as emphasizing the right detail, which is something Aoki is great at. The action scene in Aoki's short was easily the most exciting in the film in terms of the choreography and creating a thrilling flow of dramatic tension, confirming Aoki's place as one of the best action animators in Japan. But Aoki isn't just an action animator. This short to me only confirms that he has the potential to go much further.

Toshiyuki Kubooka's Working Through Pain was interesting for the animation to me. Without Naoyuki Onda's meticulous drawings guiding the eye at every moment with some slight nuance, I don't think the film would have worked at all. It's not that I'm a fan; I don't even particularly like his drawings. But Onda is one of the more meticulous and maniacal animation directors out there, and when he does a project, he clearly takes control of every shot and fills it with his own nuance. I respect his skill, and admire that he can draw animals properly, which is something few animators seem to have the ability to do in Japan. The fight scene was nicely animated, but I have no idea who might have done it. I found the last short, Deadshot, interesting mostly for having been animated entirely by two Korean animators, with only three inbetweeners, showing how different the training is over there. With only five people they're able to make a film that moves so smoothly. That said, the animation isn't particularly interesting or nice to look at, nor was the story or directing particularly compelling. Boy would I have loved to see this one done by Kang Won Young instead.

I was a little confused by the credits. They seem kind of messed up. For the first film, for example, it says Shinji Kimura did the storyboard, the layout, the character design, animation supervising, and, oh yeah... art director too! Is that humanly possible? Isn't that not even what he does? Surely it's Nishimi who did all those things apart from the art directing? There are several other spots that don't make sense like this, and disturbingly, it's for credits of major importance. For Aoki's film, Inoda Kaoru is listed as the character designer and the art director. Now that is an odd combination I have never seen before, except maybe for Shinji Kimura's piece for Genius Party. I would have thought that Aoki did the designs, since he was the animation director of his own piece. For Kubooka's piece, again, Shuichi Hirata is credited as animation supervisor and art director, and the director is credited as animation director. I'm not sure what the specific meaning of these credits is, but surely it was character designer Naoyuki Onda who was the animation director, and not the art director or director? For the same film Tatsuyuki Tanaka is credited as as storyboard supervisor and conceptual designer. I can see conceptual designer, but why would he be storyboarding Kubooka's film? In Morioka's film, it strikes me as odd that Morioka would be the animation director, and Toshiharu Murata would be storyboarder and character designer. Surely Morioka did storyboard, and Murata did animation directing? If I am wrong on all counts (which I hope), then this film adopted a strange production style the likes of which I've never seen before. If I'm right, then it strikes me as being egregiously disrespectful of the supposedly "revered animation filmmakers" that they couldn't even be bothered to list their credits right.

One of my favorite shows back in the mid-90s when I'd borrow VHS tapes of the latest anime shows from a neighborhood Japanese grocery store in Houston was Bonobono. Not only was the show very funny, it was totally unlike other anime in terms of its humor an the look of its characters, and that immediately attracted me. I just discovered a DVD of the Bonobono movie from 1993, which I had not seen. It was great re-discovering Bonobono after all these years through the very first anime adaptation that I'd never had the chance to see. It was a nostalgic experience, but it's also a uniquely interesting show.

The manga by Mikio Igarashi was first serialized in 1992, and the movie came out a year later, in 1993. The TV series was aired 1995-1996, which would be when I discovered it. Both the movie and the TV series were produced by Group Tac. The staff are different for each, but the movie features some more well-known staff - producer and audio director Atsumi Tashiro and character designer and animation director Michishiro Yamada. It was nice to discover that the film was directed by Yuuji Muto, whom I knew only from his work on Crayon Shin-chan over the last decade or so. Group Tac is one of Japan's more unique studios, so it would be worthwhile to dig into their back catalogue, as I'm sure they've done other memorable projects informed of the distinctive vein of inventiveness they brought to Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi. I don't know about now, but in the past they occupied a unique position in terms of the projects they did and how they executed them.

Muto also directed two of the Shin-chan movies not long ago, and I actually hadn't been too pleased with Muto's work on them because I'd grown accustomed to the Shin-chan movies being strong films rather than mere assemblages of gags thanks to Keiichi Hara and Mitsuru Hongo, whereas Muto's films were more scattershot and lacking in strong dramatic direction. But Muto is a perfect match with Bonobono. The film was actually written, directed and storyboarded by the manga artist Mikio Igarashi, with Muto being credited as the "animation kantoku", so it's a bit of an unusual situation. I'm guessing that Igarashi oversaw the whole production, while Muto must have been the equivalent of "enshutsu", supervising the final assembly of animation and visual elements. In any case, Group Tac is a great studio for their ability to create a film with a production style and look as unusual this one. They quickly spotted this great manga, and had the willingness to adopt a new approach to producing a movie from it that would allow what's great about the manga to be successfully transferred onto film. This is almost certainly one of the most successful instances of a manga-ka directing an anime film.

Muto has a very detail-oriented approach that comes through wonderfully here and is a perfect match with this material, with its eccentric, loopy sense of humor that relies tremendously on precise timing and slow-burn for effect. The first five minutes of the film are practically wordless, introducing each of the characters in turn by slowly enacted sequences that work entirely by visual means to introduce us to the behavior and quirks of each of the show's eccentric characters. Sound plays a great part at the very beginning as we're slowly zooming in from a bird's eye view of the forest down to ground level. The film is willing to create these calm, quiet moments where the camera is still and the ambient sounds are the elements that communicate. This aspect reminded me of Night on the Galactic Railroad, which makes sense, as the same audio director was behind both films - studio head Atsumi Tashiro. For twenty seconds or so we simply sit listening to the sounds of the forest with its assorted chirping insects and birdcalls and breeze through the trees, as the first character walks slowly down the path towards us. At the same time, the images of the forest are obviously hand-drawn in the style of Igarashi's manga as opposed to realistic, which creates a nice contrast and establishes the look of the film. It's one of the many great moments in the film.

That's something that characterizes the film and Muto's approach - very moment oriented, detail oriented, rather than dramatic and forward-driven. Rather than the film being about any sort of dramatic story, it's all about simply being there, with the characters, as they go about their daily life, thinking aloud about the first silly and amusing thing that comes to mind. It's all very effortless. It's very real in that sense, and that's a big part of why I found myself liking it so much back then and now. The film is steeped in the mood of a lazy summer day with friends. At times there's almost a deep comment about life that seems to be made in these quiet non-moments, but anything serious only just barely pokes its head above the surface for a moment. It's almost taoist in its mentality, with the way it flows along quietly making ludicrous but simultaneously deep and philosophical observations of things floating past.

The images are very close to the original manga, but the animation is nonetheless quite rich and finely crafted, and it has a look and feel that is specific to the show. I don't just mean in terms of the character designs, but in terms of the way characters meander about the screen in a very detailed way that sets it fundamentally apart from the typical anime approach to layout and staging. It's important for animation to come up with new approaches to the animation, but it's rare to see in anime, and this is a good example of how anime, in the best cases, can come up with original approaches to animation informed by the atmosphere and graphic sensibility of the manga on which it's based, rather than merely plugging the designs into a standard industry approach to layout and animation. Here everything works as a whole to create a world where the original approach to layout and movement of the characters is the very essence of the enjoyment of the film.

Animation director Michishiro Yamada is actually a member of Ajia-Do rather than Group Tac, unless I'm mistaken, so I'm not sure how he came to be working on this film, although they certainly made the right decision in choosing him. He's a veteran of the A Pro school, and a longtime Ajia-Do member, having debuted as an inbetweener on things like Panda Kopanda and drawn a lot of key animation on the classic A Pro shows like Dokonjo Gaeru and Hajime Ningen Gyators, and joined Ajia-Do when it was founded in 1978 by Tsutomu Shibayama and Osamu Kobayashi. During the Ajia-Do era he did a lot of work on various shows, notably Ajia-Do's big success Nintama Rantaro. He is one of the few animators who were active on the classic A Pro shows who by 1993 remained fully active as an animator, or animation director in this case. Those decades of experience obviously make him an expert in animating this kind of small, cartoony character, and he upholds that legacy here, doing a great job of bringing the personalities of these characters to life through animation.

The film achieves a great sense of overall unity also in part thanks to the great music by the guitar duo Gontiti, with its lulling, dreamy, loopy atmosphere so different from typical associations with anime. Testament to how different Group Tac's approach is, it seems the music was composed based on the images, rather than simply having the composer create tracks in advance that would be pasted over each scene as deemed appropriate by the director, as is usual in anime. The music ebbs and flows in sync with each little movement of the characters in certain scenes, creating a great sense of unity of visuals and sound. The film would be unthinkable without its music. The film achieves a rare sense of unity between the every element, which combined with its eccentrically meandering dramatic structure and pared-down yet rich visual sensibility makes it a truly refreshing watch.

More than anything, though, it's the how the story plays out that makes watching Bonobono so rich an experience. Rather than everything taking place on a predetermined line called the narrative, it's as if we're simply plunged into the forest that these creatures call home, observing them interact with the insects and other animals of the forest as they wander about, each with their odd habits and tics that come across as both human and animal, stopping for a moment to watch a lone ant wandering across the road in fascination. The characters are animals, and if there is a narrative it's the story of the natural world, but at the same time they have the natural curiosity of children about the little things in life. That's the element that really captured me - how good Igarashi is at extracting these little ideas, and molding them into delightful extended sequences that function great as visual gags and also have a grain of truth in them that you can relate to. Who hasn't at some time as a child shut one eye, then opened it and shut the other, then the other, then the other, and so on, back and forth, marveling at the odd way the scenery shifts back and forth when you do that. The way the characters go about having fun discovering the little things in life like this gives the series a naive but profound undercurrent that makes it a delight to watch, which nicely balances out the times when it gets quite crass in its humor.

It's been many years since I saw the TV series, so I can't recall how it may differ from the movie, but from what I can recall the shorter format seemed better suited to the episodic structure of the original, whereas the film kind of meanders randomly. The film achieves an odd sort of perfection in its singular way, with its rounded production, but the TV series is probably closer to the episodic silliness of the original comic. Coincidentally, the whole TV series came out in two DVD box sets last year, so I'm curious to re-discover this memorable oddity. The film is still as unique in its atmosphere and untainted by anime conventions as when I discovered the TV show back then, so it's stood up better than I expected. In an idiosyncratic voice that combines whimsy and depth, it offers a simple and soothing picturebook experience, which alone makes it stand out all the more in this age when it's hard to find studios willing to tackle material without pre-mapped appeal.

Actually, I just noticed that a number of episodes of the TV series are up on Youtube, and a quick look reveals that the style is indeed quite different. First of all the animation is much more spare, of course, revealing the great work done by Michishiro Yamada in the film. But more importantly, the series lacks the great feeling of "ma" as they say in Japanese, or timing, the way each shot and each sequence plays out slowly and deliberately, allowing things the time to unfold naturally and with the sort of disjointed whimsy that is so critical in making this material work. From a cursory glance, in the TV series things seem to pass by at the same uniform pace without any sense for timing, simply rushing from one gag to the next, which doesn't convey the right feeling for this material. So much comes through in the spaces between the gags in the film, without which the TV series seems a bit of a pale imitation. Even so, it was enough to get me hooked back then, and it's still amusing and fun in its own way, but it's a different beast from the movie.

Incidentally, Mikio Igarashi was also the creator of Ninpen Manmaru, which was adapted into a TV series by Shin-Ei, and for which Masaaki Yuasa animated the ending.

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A few extra comments. I hadn't completely finished watching the film when I wrote this, but now that I have, my impression is slightly different. Everything I said before is true, but in addition, it's a fantastic film that works great as a film and is underpinned by a surprisingly thoughtful and philosophical atmosphere that, in the end, transmits a subtle and indirect but moving and convincing message about life, and what it means to be alive. Igarashi uses very simple language to convey this message, but its simplicity reinforces the theme of the film, which I think can be summed up using one of the character's lines near the end: "We're simple." We're not as complicated as we make ourselves out to be. Life isn't as complicated as we make it. We're not born for a reason. Life is. That's all. Like the musk ox who provides the backbone of the story, appearing one day all of a sudden relentlessly plowing forward through the forest, animating the denizens of the forest into a flurry of trepidation and excitement - life is simple, with no reason, simply moving ahead, one day at a time. What we can do for one another is to create transient moments of pleasure. They won't last forever, but neither will life, nor pain, nor anything in this world. Eventually he passes by, they see him, the excitement dies down, and life goes on its way. Did anything change? Maybe, maybe not. Just as the film ends on a note of ambivalence and openness, there wasn't really a narrative thread, only life playing out around him. Igarashi has achieved a beautiful balance in this film through the unified simplicity of dialogue, directing and visuals, and the resulting film a genuine, moving, meaningful creation.

I've long been fascinated by a phenomenon that seems to be unique to Japanese animation - the solo animator episode, where a single person draws all of the key animation for an entire TV episode. There have been many over the decades, and it's rather common in the simply designed situation comedy style shows produced by A Pro/Shin-Ei (you can still see good solo work done on Shin-chan, for one), but it's rarer in typical productions these days. I've pointed out a number over the last few years, the latest being Michio Mihara's episode of Kaiba.

A new one has turned up in the series World Destruction. Kensuke Ishikawa drew all of the key animation for episode 3, although there were lots of seconds. (meaning he drew rough keys that people cleaned up) So it isn't quite a solo of the purity of, say, Mihara's episode of Kaiba, where he not only didn't have seconds, he even drew most of the inbetweens himself. I'm not too impressed with the work, but it's always an interesting thing to see, which is why I mention it here. Solo episodes are nice because they offer the rare chance to get a sense of what it is that defines animator style, in the broad sense. They also, of course, offer an intimate and extended look at a particular animator's style and skills, which is great if it's a great animator, but even if it's not, they help give a sense of what it is that sets animators apart from one another in general terms, i.e. how to go about identifying the different traits that distinguish animators from one another; what each animator brings to the table through his or her unique talent. That can be hard to do without prior knowledge of an animator's style in most episodes, which typically feature a dozen or more animators with different styles, not to mention varying degrees of correction by the animation director. Kensuke Ishikawa also storyboarded and processed the episode, so you can clearly see a distinct personality at work in terms of not just the animation but also the staging and so on.

Not all solo episodes are necessarily showcases for an animator, but rather merely the result of scheduling expediency. Veteran Toei animator Nobuyoshi Sasakado has the distinction of being probably the single most prolific creator of solo animator episodes, the quality of which are however consequently consistently nominal, at best, at least from the few episodes I've sampled. He obviously has speed on his side, which I gather must be an asset in TV production in Japan. His approach represents the diametric opposite of the approach of a Michio Mihara. It's about quantity over quality, a pragmatic way of helping speed along production for the company, whereas in the case of Mihara if anything even longer was spent producing the episode in order to achieve better quality that met the animator's standards. Another animator named Yoshitaka Yajima apparently did a lot of solo flying throughout the various Digimon series as part of the in-house rotation team, probably falling into the expediency category.

Here's a list of some good solo episodes from past and present.

Goku's Big Adventure #12 & #21 (1967) by Sadao Tsukioka
New Lupin III #14 (1977) by Kazuhide Tomonaga
Gold Lightan #41 (1981) by Takashi Nakamura
Hanaichi Monme OVA #2 (1989) by Hideki Hamasu
Hanaichi Monme OVA #5 (1989) by Koichi Arai
Eat Man #7 (1997) by Norio Matsumoto
Legend of the White Whale #21 (1997) by Hirotoshi Takaya
Dokkoida #5 (2003) by Futoshi Higashide
Samurai Seven #7 (2004) by Hisashi Mori (only part A)
Gankutsuoh #9 (2004) by Yasuhiro Seo
Honey & Clover #7 (2005) by Tetsuya Takeuchi
Tweeny Witches OVA #4 (2005) by Shogo Furuya
Aria the Natural #2 (2006) by Takaaki Wada
Kemonozume #12 (2006) by Michio Mihara
Kaiba #4 (+(2008) by Michio Mihara

The opening featured some nice work, as did the first episode, in which Yasunori Miyazawa did a very distinctive section. I also liked the fighting after Miyazawa's section, and wonder if it might not be the work of Shuichi Kaneko. The only shot in the op I was able to identify was that of the unmistakable Nobutoshi Ogura, near the end, but I surmise that Hideki Takahashi or Kyoji Asano probably did some of the other good bits.

I've been too busy to write about the new batch of shows that came out a few weeks back until now, but there were a number of nice surprises among the bunch. First and foremost was the new series by Osamu Kobayashi, a show with the windy title Mahoutsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora. Not knowing he was involved, I didn't expect anything, but I sensed something different as soon as the show started, with that unmistakable slow pace and odd combination of blocky characters in close-up layouts over photorealistic backgrounds. Actually, in this case they are literally photos, and that is a big part of what gives the show its character, and what made me so happy with the project. Kobayashi, as ever, is deeply involved, scripting each episode (probably), and his directing takes on a new, cooler, more earnestly emotional and less goofy style that really works well with the material. But the unique combination of great designs by Yusuke Yoshigake and photos presumably taken by Kobayashi himself make for quite an impact.

In looking back over 1001 Nights recently I was reminded that the Eiichi crew were among the first in the modern 'anime' era to combine such a variety of media in a commercial production. Yuasa updated that tradition with his unique incorporation of live-action and background photos in Mind Game and then Kemonozume, and Osamu Kobayashi is also creating his own unique mixed-media hybrid in his work. I think he'd already done something incipient in this direction in his previous show, Paradise Kiss, particularly that fantastic opening sequence in the first ep, where Osamu's loopy imaginary ghosts and goblins were pasted over shots of the nooks and crannies of Tokyo, but here what he's done is full-bore and quite striking at first sight. And quite effective. To me it's important that the visual element in animation, be it the character designs or the styling of the backgrounds or whatever, provide something that really captures you in some way with some new and interesting ideas, rather than just following a pattern, and the visual scheme in this series satisfyingly (to me) creates a visual atmosphere that immediately announces this series as unique, without even needing to get to know the characters or story.

The animation itself is also in a style that's unique to Kobayashi's projects, with very spare animation that's somehow still realistic in its timing and acting, like it was in Beck because he deliberately and studiously avoided using cliched anime expressive symbols to allow the characters to express themselves in a more realistic fashion, all without relying for this on realistic or particularly nuanced designs. I hope this series will be shorter so that Kobayashi can maintain a tight rein over the direction, as Beck lost me in the middle parts when things got watered down, but the first three episodes of Mahoutsukai have all been pretty tight. The animation aspect has been really satisfying. Young animator Kenichi Kutsuna, one of the most famous of the new generation of gif-animators-turned-pros that includes brethren Ryochimo and Shingo Yamashita (working over on Birdy) here is credited as "special animator". Kutsuna is not as flamboyant as the others, so I'm not too sure of his style, but this series promises be to be a good way of getting to know how far he's progressed since Satoru Utsunomiya hand-picked him back in the heady days of Noein. There was some nuanced low-key stuff going down at the beginning of the second episode, so maybe that's what he's doing these days.

Character designer Yoshigaki Yusuke himself and Osamu's close associate Motonobu Hori are also there in each episode. The opening was a delight with the way every shot has a totally different look to the drawings. Every animator is an animator with personality, and a very different personality at that. Obviously there was no correction. It looks like a fun opening to try to figure out shot by shot. If you want to give it a shot, the animators were, in this order (presumably by number of shots): Yusuke Yoshigaki, Osamu Kobayashi, Yasuomi Umetsu, Tokuyuki Matsutake, Motonobu Hori, and Kenichi Kutsuna. The ending was a surprise because it was animated by Osamu Kobayashi and none other than old Madhouse veteran animator Manabu Ohashi, that great animator of the Cloud section of Robot Carnival, the opening of Treasure Island, and countless other gems. He's an animator about whom I've wanted to write more for a long time, though there's so much to say I never got around to it. Overall, excellent stuff, Osamu! Keep it coming.

Of course, the photo up top isn't from Osamu's new show. It's from the latest One Piece movie, which was by far the most impressive to me in terms of the animation after Hosoda's Baron movie. My first viewing of the climactic battle quickened my pulse in a way I wasn't expecting of a One Piece movie. I was delighted that Hisashi Mori was there with a long sequence that is by far the easiest to identify in the film, but the other sequences had possibly even a greater impact on me. Particularly so Zoro's sword fight on the ships in the first quarter of the film. The only names other than Mori that I could figure were probably responsible for the action were Takaaki Yamashita and his protege Tatsuzo Nishita. My first guess was that Mori might have done it due to the magnificent FX, but Mori's scene later on is quite different, and I believe Nishita has drawn beautiful FX in his work on a number of occasions, such as Gaiking ep 21, and has this kind of very fluid (as opposed to Mori's much more limited style) animation like that seen here, if you look at his scene in Kemonozume ep 8 where the people are lobbing molotov cocktails at the buster suits. So I'm guessing Nishita may have done the boat scene and Yamashita maybe did the sequence immediately preceding Mori's where Sanji tries to shake off the afro hairball from his leg, as the latter was the only scene in the film where characters moved in a way that seemed remotely affected by gravity and balance, and Yamashita is great at bringing a bit of acting alive like this. Of course, that's only a guess. After a bit of searching I discovered that Hiroki Tanaka, that animator who's been drawing hyper crazy impossible-to-follow action in Toei's PreCure, was probably responsible for the very fast action in the climax that I was really wondering about. That had quite an impact. Another animator with whose work I'm not at all familiar, Yuuki Hayashi, may have done other nice bits of the action. Today's Toei is very different from the Toei of yesteryear, but it continues to foster very good animators who create animation that moves something wicked.

If I were in Japan, I know where I'd be on July 28: Yokohama. Koji Yamamura is going to be holding a chat with Isao Takahata titled "The Expressive Possibilities of Animation" on that day at the Yokohama EIZONE 2008 event. Sounds exceedingly titillating. Too bad I'll be in Quebec instead.

The satellite station Animax has held a yearly script contest for the last few years. The winning script gets to be produced by a professional animation studio. This year's script for a short film called Takane's Bike was produced by the up-and-coming studio A-1 Pictures, whose Birdy the Mighty just started airing. I was a little dismissive as I started watching Takane's Bike, but after a while I started feeling that at least the story was honest in its simplicity. It's a good old-fashioned, naive, earnest children's film of a kind that doesn't seem to get made often anymore.

More importantly, I could have sworn I'd seen the designs somewhere before. I finally figured out what they reminded me of - the old TV show Mama is a 4th Grader. I wasn't aware of her name, but both were designed by Sachiko Kamimura. Looking into it, I realized that she had also designed one of my favorite anime films from back in the day when I was first starting to watch anime around 1992 - Arslan Senki. That's where I remember these drawings from. It was like seeing an old friend again. She has a distinct and immediately identifiable style that I find very nice to look at, but for some reason she hasn't done much designing other than these two shows, which is why I'd sort of forgotten about her over the years since those shows. Kamimura seems to have started out as a disciple of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko in the 80s. Even in this latest film, a certain twinge of Yasuhiko influence rears its head in her drawings every once in a while. Apart from these two stints designing, she has mostly worked as an animator, animation director and illustrator. Notably, she animated the ending of the re-make of Jungle Taitei in her own identifiable cute but rich style. She was also an animator in many of the Doraemon films.

Sachiko Kamimura has a nice home page where she provides a generous sampling of rejected designs, storyboards, key animation and the like from various shows she worked on throughout her career. It was particularly instructive to discover, for example, that she had animated numerous of the hair-raisingly complicated mob scenes from the Yoshikazu Yasuhiko epic Arion (1986). Even apart from this, Arion featured quite a lot of extravagant animation in Yasuhiko's unique style, including a nice scene from Satoru Utsunomiya (the mid-air attack of the sickle monsters). Kamimura thus adds her name to my short running tab of mob animators, which so far includes only Hiroyuki Okiura and Michio Mihara. It would seem that her work caught the eye of Yasuhiko, as three years later, in 1989, when Yasuhiko came back with another big movie of his own creation, Venus Wars, this time he turned to Kamimura to handle the drawing side of things as the animation director, which in Yasuhiko's richly animated films must have been quite a task.

Before that, Yasuhiko had directed an OVA between his two big films entitled The Song of Wind and Trees (1987), on which Kamimura had worked as character designer and animation director. She provides some examples of her corrections (which in the analog age were drawn on yellow sheets) on her home page. This was another well made film from that era that left a favorable impression on me at the time, perhaps also because it was maybe my earliest exposure to shoujo manga (or at least its anime rendition). I suspect she had a major hand in the animation through her work, helping give it a certain richness and elegance of movement that I remember struck me as seeming different from other anime even back then. A look at the animator list reveals the presence of Ghibli regular Makiko Futaki, who is an expert at just the sort of rich animation I remember the film for. Kamimura, then, turns out to have been one of the main figures behind the Yasuhiko films of yore.

Arslan fared quite well when I had another look at it recently, thanks in large part to Kazuchika Kise's work as animation director, so this is another nostalgic oldie I'd like to have a chance to revisit one of these days to see how my impression may have changed over the years. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like it was more common back in those days to see big studio films like these headlined by these charismatic animation directors who sort of stepped in and took hold of the reins, putting in this massive effort to totally define the feeling of the animation of a film in a holistic sense, really taking the spotlight as the ones who created the feeling of the show through their effort, rather than just correcting the drawings in a rote way as seems more common today. I don't know what it is, but there's something different about the approach on display in films like these from the late 80s.

I don't know how he finds the time or the films, but every day Ian Lumsden posts a writeup and a link to an animated short by a different artist, most of which are usually new to me. They're not always to my taste, but I loved his latest link to a film by Canadian animator Malcolm Sutherland. All of Malcolm's films are viewable on his home page. Seeing the rest, I instantly fell in love with his work. Every film is in a different style and very assured, and his illustrations are quite original and beautiful too. It's great to know there are still animators here in Canada doing this sort of work. (Birdcalls inevitably brought to mind Norman McLaren.) I quite dig his taste in soundtracks, too, using favorites of mine like Boards of Canada and Lord Invader. (bring back the cat o'nine!) Apparently Malcolm was educated in astrophysics before being detoured into animation and illustration. He certainly struck me as having something very different driving him, so that sounds about right.

My DVD of Koji Yamamura's latest film, A Country Doctor, arrived a few weeks ago, and I finally watched it yesterday. Although it left me with more question marks dangling above my head than with any sense of catharsis or dramatic closure, I am convinced that this is his richest and most powerful film in countless ways. I also think it's one of the best Japanese indie animation films to come down the pipeline, ever. It's a great achievement, and it shows just how far Yamamura has come over the years.

I respect Yamamura because he's just about the only major indie animator in Japan who can boast so much variety of style from one film to the next. He's constantly trying out something new, exploring the endless possibilities of animation. A Country Doctor couldn't be more different from The Old Crocodile, which couldn't be more different from Mt Head, although in terms of intensity of work and length the latter is probably the closest comparison to A Country Doctor. They also both used similar-sounding traditional theater styles for their narration - kyogen in the case of A Country Doctor and rakugo in the case of Mt. Head. Adopting a new approach to the animation and soundtrack for each film is something he seems to have inherited from Tadanari Okamoto. Yamamura is perhaps the only Japanese indie animator who stands up to that comparison. He's making world class films, and keeps pushing himself to go to the next level. New faces on the scene like Tomoyasu Murata and Kunio Kato are striking out on the same journey now, but he's still in that lonely place at the top in the meantime. (Although Kato Kunio is ascending the ladder at a quick clip, what with his recent win at Annecy.)

The animation aspect has always been re-invented throughout Yamamura's work, but these last few years I feel like he's been creating animation that is ever more interesting as pure movement, culminating for me in his wonderful 4-minute film Fig, which blazes with animated power. He fills the film with imaginative transformations of a kind that only he can come up with. In Country Doctor now he goes even further in that direction. Here it's like he's swung back from the stasis of The Old Crocodile to an approach focused on creating vivid, dynamic movement. He's created a film where the animation takes on the sort of primacy and primordial power that I haven't seen in any animated films from Japan apart from maybe the films of Nobuhiro Aihara or the work of Shinya Ohira. The animation in this film truly speaks louder than words. The animation slowly sears a hole in your eye one moment, and then explodes from the screen in a frenzy of motion the next, mirroring the curious, deliberately malformed ebb and flow of Kafka's storytelling.

This film has some of the best shots of animation I've seen in years - shots that are so full of vitality and energy, and communicate the situation so powerfully, that watching them was literally hair-raising. Yamamura came up with a really original style of animating the characters in this film, bending them willfully all over the screen as an external manifestation of their inner turbulence in response to each situation. The story itself is quite an enigma, and two viewings have not helped to parse the unending succession of surreal scenes that constitute A Country Doctor. Both despite this and because of this, the film leaves a very rich aftertaste. The doctor is a fascinating character, morosely pensive and hypersensitive, a typical Kafka character I saw a lot of myself in, and it was a brilliant idea of Yamamura's to adopt this style of animation as a way of expressing this peculiar character's mental state, and of expressing the specific atmosphere of ironic claustrophobia of Franz Kafka's stories.

Kafka has been adapted successfully several times in animation, but Yamamura brings his own unique look and atmosphere to Kafka's stories. Yamamura does something that people probably usually neglect to do, maybe out a fear of disrespecting the aura of seriousness of the father of angst - he reveals to us Kafka the comedian. He puts the laughter back in Kafka. It's not a belly-laughing sort of humor. It's more that Yamamura brings out the bleak humor betweens the lines of Kafka's books. I think that was a great insight that helped to make this film successful. Yamamura's films usually have an atmosphere of dark whimsy, and in that sense this film remains quintessentially Yamamura. It's a case of a perfect match of temperament to material.

Although I haven't read the original to be able to comment on how Yamamura adapted the story to the audiovisual means of animation, the film is supremely visual. It creates simple, powerful images that resonate on a number of levels with the theme of the story and show that Yamamura put effort into creating a film endowed with a kind of literary richness. It's rich in terms of the actual richness of the screen, which is constantly layered with lots of effects and animation that make for beautifully dense living paintings, and it's rich in terms of the thematic poetry of the images. At one point, the doctor grows immense and reaches out to touch the brightly shining moon, only to plunge his head into the noose of its bowl and swing high in the night sky. The film offers a feast of creative imagery to chew on that enriches the narrative. The pacing of the film is quite unique, too, with the way for a minute it will flow along in slow motion only to suddenly jerk into fast-forward. Yamamura does a brilliant job of coming up with all of these myriad ways of mirroring the schizophrenic nature of the story and the character's mind, through the deformed and wildly jagged animation, through the deranged and zig-zagging structure, and even through the eerie soundtrack with its Ondes Martenot warbling behind eerie violin strains. The deliberately halting way the story flows is an aspect Yamamura mentioned in the talk. He says that it was this halting aspect of the narrative that attracted him to the original story, and that aspect of the film is definitely one of its most distinctive features.

The surreal images and explosive animation are Yamamura's contribution to the material - Yamamura jamming to Kafka's tune. Just because it's literature doesn't mean it has to be literal. Too often people confine themselves to churning out romantic historical postcards. I'm sure that could even have been done with this story. Without even having read the story, I can tell that this is obvioulsy a case of a great literary adaptation that does justice to the material by instead re-imagining the story in another medium, rather than just rotely re-gurgitating it. Night on the Galactic Railroad is one of the few other instances that come to mind as reaching this level. Sometimes a literary adaptation has to be almost an original creation to be great.

The film seems to take on the influence of any number of figures from Parn to Norstein, but Yamamura does what few people are able to do and makes the lessons of the masters his own, rather than just doing surface mimickry. The richness of the screen seemed to be something he might have learned from Norstein, but it's folded into Yamamura's aesthetic. There's a nice video of a dialogue between Yamamura and German literature critic Osamu Ikeuchi on the DVD that was very interesting for getting into the matter of the Kafka source material, although I was a little disappointed that they didn't have any other guests on there who could have asked Yamamura some questions about the animation, of which no mention was made. What an elephant in the room.

This episode marks a return of the tone and quality of the first three episodes, and what a welcome return it is. The intervening episodes have been fascinating vivid individualistic excursions into the wild worlds of Kaiba, but I have to confess to being delighted to be back in the ether of that earlier tone, with that touch of line and style of directing that got me hooked at the beginning. I don't think it will be a straight line in this style from here on out judging from what I've seen before, but I have to confess to being partial to what the team here has done with the material. Quite simply, this was a stunning episode that did everything I had wanted from the series - showing off fascinating design ideas in the characters and world through vivid, rich, colorful animation that danced around the screen, combined with brilliant directing tying together the various threads of the narrative into a tightly wound whole.

The team to thank is the venerable duo responsible for episode 3 - storyboarder, director and co-writer (w/Yuasa) Akitoshi Yokoyama and animation director Nobutake Ito. I'd been girding my loins for this episode, and it did not disappoint. Building up slowly, the second half of this episode gradually ratchets up the tension until exploding in one of the most hair-raising, moving, deftly constructed climaxes of the series. I am deeply impressed with how Yokoyama seems to add to his directing powers with each new episode I've seen from him over the last few years. Watching Yokoyama grow with each episode of Kaiba reminds me of watching Tweeny Witches eagerly looking forward to Yasuhiro Aoki's next episode to see how he would continue to extend his directing powers. I hope Yokoyama continues to build on what he's achieved as a director so far, as I think he shows tremendous potential. I know of few people working in anime today with a directing sensibility as finely tuned as his.

Yokoyama again interweaves flashbacks into the narrative, in the process revealing a lot about the relationships between the various characters. He hints at other elements of the back story, deftly treading the fine line between giving too much and too little away. I thought was the first time the various narrative threads had been effectively woven into the fabric of the narrative since episode 2. The presentation of the various flashbacks in the second half made for visuals of tremendous richness and variety, showing Yokoyama again putting a great deal of thought into how to present the material so as to make every moment full of surprises and thereby maintain strong forward momentum and visual interest. Not a shot passes that doesn't show the care of the director either in the form of interesting visuals or great animation. Testifying to his attention to detail, I notice a new significant hidden element almost every time I rewatch this episode.

The drawings of this episode were very strong thanks to the work of the animation director. The designs had the aloof, clean simplicity of the early episodes that Ito is so good at, and the world of this episode was particularly well rendered. It really felt like the characters inhabited this unusual world, rather than the characters simply having been placed over an drawing of an unusual planet. Care was given to creating a feeling of depth, which was clearly important for an underwater world, as the characters literally have to swim through their environment, rather than walk on a flat plane. This came through particularly well in the action sequence preceding the climax, which was easily the most riveting action sequence since the chase at the beginning of the first episode.

I'd venture to say this was the most powerful action sequence in the series because of the brilliant way the action was tied into the tragic progression of the story. Exciting animation + moving story = brilliant animated filmmaking. Even with the sound off watching this climax is quite something, with the rich animation of the ships flying around the screen, and the way what is happening is clearly communicated through the drawings. Beyond being great animated filmmaking, it's great visual storytelling. Through this series Yokoyama has revealed his gift for creating highly moving drama. I'm rarely moved by anime that is supposed to be moving, and find the majority of tear-jerker anime simply manipulative. Yokoyama's work is the rare exception that is powerfully moving, as intended. Yokoyama elegantly brings a sense of closure to the arc of the girl who was introduced in episode 3, which he handled, by capping her final moments with a reference to the pink rubber boots that played a big role in her previous life. His love comes through particularly clearly in the gorgeous visuals that cap the climax, which he obviously put a tremendous amount of work into in terms of the colors and processing. The climax of this episode is unmistakably one of the most striking scenes in the series, or of any anime I've seen in recent years for that matter.

This episode by this core duo was backed up by a bevy of good animators, headlined by Ryotaro Makihara, who is turning out to be one of the pillars of Kaiba's animation. I'm almost tempted to call him Kaiba's main animator due to the frequency of his appearances and the amount of work he has obviously put into his animation. I couldn't be happier to see him doing so much great work under Yuasa. I wonder if he wasn't responsible for a big part of the chase at the end, and by inference also the action scene at the beginning of episode 1. I'm not really sure, though. Other animators of note in this episode include Ikuo Kuwana, of SFA Generations fame, Akira Honma and Akira Amemiya. Chuji Nakajima is apparently known for his action scenes, although I don't know his work at all so I can't speculate what he might have done.

Even apart from the action scenes, this episode's drawings were a delight from start to finish. For some reason I got a vibe of Osamu Tanabe from a number of scenes, especially the scene at the airport. The funny drawings of the bystanders reminded me of his Doredore no Uta. The feeling of the ship as it jumped out of the water at the climax was particularly nice, with great momentum making it exciting to watch and being very organic, like a flying fish jumping out of the water flapping its body around. It almost seemed like an homage to the flying fish in the great scene animated by Yoichi Kotabe in Animal Treasure Island. The editing of the director and the combination of the animation with the CGI also went a long way to providing this scene with real immediacy.

There was some interesting acting where Vanilla goes all heart-eyed, reminding of a similar scene in episode 3, which are the only two places I can recall Vanilla doing that kind of very distinctive exaggerated cartoon acting. Perhaps they were done by the same person, as there is a lot of overlap between this episode and episode 3 - namely Akira Amemiya, Nagisa Nagashima, Shoko Nishigaki, Aiko Wakatsuki, Natsuko Shimizu and Miki Wasada. The latter four have actually been involved throughout the series, I just noticed. Natsuko Shimizu in particular has been in every single episode except for Mihara's episode 4. Ditto for Miki Wasada, minus one episode. These four women must be among the core key animators at Madhouse supporting the animation of Kaiba.