Anipages

One of the classics of the golden age of OVAs is Black Magic M-66 from 1987. It was one of my favorites back when I was getting into anime, with its violent, exciting action and hard-boiled, no-nonsense story. It was a superb high-quality one-off - exactly what I wanted to see in an anime OVA - although in the end it felt a little slight and undeveloped.

I just re-watched it for the first time in many years, and the quality was far better than I'd remembered, probably because I didn't have the ability to appreciate good animation back then. The animation has impressive tension and energy.

As a film it's a bit problematic. It seems like it would make a strong film in theory, and it maintains interest at every moment due to the cinematic pacing and high-quality animation, but something about it feels off overall. But in the end it's a nice OVA with some uniquely detailed directing and animation, and is well worth re-visiting.

The film was co-directed by the author of the original manga, Shirow Masamune, and Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Shirow Masamune drew the storyboard himself, so this is probably the highest-grade Shirow Masamune anime. Later films like Ghost in the Shell bear the heavy imprint of their director.

I'm not sure exactly how the work was divided between the two directors apart from this, but perhaps Kitakubo was something of a line director on the project, Shirow Masamune providing the skeleton and details and Kitakubo putting them together, i.e. handling the technical matters of anime production about which the manga creator would have been ignorant. From Blood: The Last Vampire to Rojin Z, Kitakubo is unsurpassed at making highly dense short entertainment packages, and this film is no exception.

This was Shirow Masamune's first time ever drawing a storyboard, so he used the recently published storyboard for Miyazaki's Nausicaa as a reference on how to draw the storyboard. This certainly accounts for the film's unique feeling. His storyboard is extremely detailed, like his manga (see some examples here), so very little in the final product was left up to chance. No person acquainted with anime production would have storyboarded the film in the way he did; they would certainly have taken an easier way out, according to what they understood by experience could be achieved within the given deadline. The film apparently wound up many months over schedule, presumably due to the demands of the storyboard, resulting in its release being delayed by almost a year. The Gundress debacle is testament to how much of a generous concession this was on the part of the production company. But Masamune Shirow's direct input was simultaneously the film's liability and its greatest asset, because he brought an outsider's approach untainted by conventional anime thinking to the task of presenting the story.

But what was bad for the production company is good for us, as in the end it's because they were able to lavish such detail on the animation that the film still holds up after all these years. This unusually long production period resulted in a tight film in which each shot is highly worked, there is no wasted moment, and the action and effects animation is truly impressive. At around 45 minutes, it has the pacing and atmosphere of a film, but the length of a slightly longer-than-usual direct-to-video release. In that respect it's reminiscent of Hiroyuki Kitakubo's later Blood: The Last Vampire.

The narrative is satisfying because it's driven by visual storytelling rather than wordy explanations. They do an impressive job of visually conveying a future (yet familiar) world of believable cybernetic military sci-fi trappings. The storytelling is lean, the script is pleasingly serious and no-nonsense, consisting mostly of authentic-sounding terse and cryptic military exchanges. The action scenes are long and meaty, with each physical action depicted in convincing detail. The coloring palette of the film is toned down in a way that helps make it feel more realistic.

That's not to say it's dead serious. The films balances seriousness with fan-service. The film opens (predictably for an AIC production) with a nude scene that is saved from being in poor taste only by the fact that it's quite funny and isn't played up for lurid fetishism. The shot where Sibelle picks the sheet from the bottom of the pile and the pile topples over but she doesn't even notice because she's so intent gives the scene a pleasingly tongue-in-cheek tone. Kitakubo's only previous directing credit was Cream Lemon: Pop Chaser, which despite being the pioneering adult anime was more funny and exciting than titillating. Kitakubo also gives the film an edge of cleverness through directing tricks, for example when he cuts from a photo of the professor in the newspaper to the headlights of a vehicle where his eyes were. Rintaro did a similar gag in Download.

Despite the effort put into the details, the cumulative effect of the film is underwhelming for some reason. It feels sluggish and lacking in tension. But the serious-minded story, detail-oriented directing and powerful action scenes more than make up for this, and in the end, it may not be a Great Film, but it's closer to being one than most OVAs. At the very least, it's a damn sight better than the boring Appleseed OVA that came out one year later. It's a satisfying and entertaining little action film.

The animation

The quality of the film is strangely uneven. The animation is very high quality, but the backgrounds are not very good overall, and flat-out bad in some shots. Even the animation, which is quite strong, feels somehow rough. It feels in essence like highly polished TV animation, rather than the movie-caliber animation of Akira from the next year, for example. Despite striving for cinematic feeling, the film's layouts are fairly standard, without the careful simulation of camera lens focal length that is one of the subtle but important ways Akira and other films achieve a feeling of reality. To be fair, there aren't many OVAs that top this one in terms of animation quality. And most importantly, the animation is very satisfying. The action is good, and the drawings feel good at every moment.

Hiroyuki Okiua, Toru Yoshida and the other animators of Osaka subcontractor Anime R are to thank for the quality of the animation. Hiroyuki Okiura oversaw the characters and Toru Yoshida oversaw the mecha. This was Okiura's first job as sakkan. He had just debuted a few years before, mostly drawing impressive mecha animation on a few Sunrise shows like SPT Layzner (1985-1986), and very quickly made a name for himself at a very young age. Astoundingly, he turned 20 during production of Black Magic M-66. Toru Yoshida, meanwhile, had debuted not long before Okiura, first coming to prominence on Armor Trooper Votoms (1983-1984), on which Okiura worked as an inbetweener. Okiura drew what is one of his first genga in the last episode, uncredited, while Yoshida was still being credited as an inbetweener early on in the series despite the fact that he was drawing genga, so they debuted very close together.

The character animation is strong throughout thanks to Okiura's laborious work as sakkan. Despite having been pegged a mecha animator in his first few years, Okiura didn't view himself as such. He just wanted to draw detailed animation like one of his idols Takashi Nakamura, and in anime at the time the mecha animation was one of the places where there were fewer restrictions on the number of drawings you were allowed to use. That's the reason many 'mover' type animators like Okiura - and Shinya Ohira - started out as mecha animators. This was Okiura's first step towards becoming a character animator. Even at this early stage, you can sense Okiura's uncommon skills. The character animation feels unusually rich, even in throwaway shots like the shot at the beginning where Sibelle is writing something down, although this is no doubt also in part thanks to Shirow Masamune's detailed storyboard and Kitakubo's detail-oriented style of directing.

The key animation credits are divided between Anime R, Atelier Giga and AIC/freelance animators. I wrote about Atelier Giga before in my post on Cool Cool Bye and Relic Armor Legaciam. It was an informal gathering of ex-Bebow animators. Although Atelier Giga did not survive long past 1987, many of its animators stayed on at AIC for years to come. The impressive names in the AIC/freelance grouping are Shinya Ohira and Satoru Utsunomiya. I suspect Utsunomiya handled the scene in the restaurant, though I'm not positive.

Anime R receives a prominent spot in the credits, and its animators were responsible for many of the best parts in the film. This is in essence an Anime R film in terms of the actual drawings, although the production company was AIC/Animate. The big battle that is the highlight of the first half of the film was animated by Hiroyuki Okiura, Toru Yoshida and Kazuaki Mouri of Anime R. Okiura handled the beginning in the forest up until the impressive turning shot where the robot hurls the vehicle (pic 3 at top), and the rest was animated by Yoshida and Mouri. Mouri in particular did the impressive shots where the robot wields the metal pipe in beautiful acrobatic action (pic 4). Okiura also drew the climactic scene on the rooftop (pic 1). Shinya Ohira helped Okiura out with this section by animating a few shots where the building crumbles (pic 2). This is the same year that Ohira worked on the effects extravaganza that is the Captain Power home shooter game, and Toru Yoshida was the other big figure behind the animation of Captain Power, so Toru Yoshida may have been an influence on Ohira's development into an effects animator. This scene in Black Magic M-66 is also presumably what led to Ohira animating the smoke and building crumbling in Akira. Amusingly enough, right after Akira, Ohira animated another crumbling building in an episode of Peter Pan sakkan'd by Okiura. Ohira was an animator in Okiura's sakkan debut, and he is an animator in Okiura's latest film.

Black Magic M-66 came out a year before Akira, and in fact it feels reminiscent of Akira in various subtle ways. It almost feels like a dry run for Akira. The basic elements are similar - gruff general and crazy scientist after a rogue experimental subject with superhuman powers on a killing spree - and the military elements are depicted (visually and by the script) very realistically and methodically, and even the gestures sometimes feel similar. It's presumably seeing Okiura's work on Black Magic M-66 that prompted Katsuhiro Otomo to invite Hiroyuki Okiura to work on Akira. After working under Nakamura on Akira, Okiura went on to provide great animation under Nakamura again in Peter Pan and Catnapped, not to mention becoming one of the key figures behind the two Ghost in the Shell films alongside fellow (ex-)Anime R animator Kazuchika Kise, who is also present as an animator here (though he was technically at Anime R sister studio Mu).

Incidentally, the impressively nuanced animation in the elevator just before the climax was animated by two animators who aren't credited. It was animated by Yoshiyuki Ichikawa 市川吉幸 based on roughs by Yuji Moriyama 森山ゆうじ. Both were members of Studio MIN, formed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo himself in 1982. MIN was one of the many artist collectives euphemistically known as a studio that were formed in the 1980s. MIN disbanded in 1991, immediately after production of Kitakubo's Rojin Z.

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Black Magic M-66 ブラックマジックM-66 (Animate Film/AIC, OVA, 1987, 47 mins)

Created by:	士郎正宗	Masamune Shirow
Director/Script/Storyboard:	士郎正宗	Masamune Shirow
Director/Structure/Character Design:	北久保弘之	Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Animation Director:	沖浦啓之	Hiroyuki Okiura
Mechanic Animation Director:	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
Art Director:	本田修	Osamu Honda
Music:	片柳譲陽	Yoshiharu Katayanagi

Key Animation:	アニメアール Anime R

	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida	黄瀬和哉	Kazuchika Kise
	浜川修二郎	Shujiro Hamakawa	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
	貴志夫美子	Fumiko Kishi	毛利和昭	Kazuaki Mouri
	柳沢まさひで	Masahide Yanagisawa	寺田浩之	Hiroyuki Terada
	逢坂浩司	Hiroshi Ousaka	沖浦啓之	Hiroyuki Okiura

アトリエ戯雅 Atelier Giga

	宇佐美皓一	Koichi Usami
	岩瀧智	Satoshi Iwataki
	ところともかず	Tomokazu Tokoro
	小曽根正美	Masami Kosone
	さとうけいいち	Keiichi Sato
	仲盛文	Morifumi Naka

	林宏樹 Hiroki Hayashi
	田中正弘 Masahiro Tanaka
	宇都宮智 Satoru Utsunimiya
	橋本浩一 Koichi Hashimoto
	清水義治 Yoshiharu Shimizu
	大平晋也 Shinya Ohira

Animation subcontracting studio Oh Production is perhaps best remembered for their classic Gauche the Cellist (1982), although they were a prolific subcontractor who provided some great animation to many shows over the years while receiving little recognition for it. They later produced another in-house show called Little Twins (1992), which I wrote about before. Between these two there was one other major Oh Pro production that I only just recently had the chance to discover.

First adapted in 1972 by Toei (opening), Oh Pro re-made Go Nagai's classic manga Devilman into two high-quality OVAs released in 1987 and 1990. (Another Devilman OVA was released many years later, but it was made by Studio Live, not Oh Pro, and is in a completely different style.)

The most interesting and surprising thing about these OVAs is that the animation was in large part done by Ghibli animators, so it has a distinctly Ghibli inflection. Oh Pro had lent its animators to Miyazaki for years, and it seems he paid back the favor in this OVA.

These are well made OVAs with very nice animation and lush visuals. Especially the first volume features some of the most impressive sequences of animation of any production in that era, OVA or movie. The visuals are clean and refined and the directing measured and controlled in a way I wouldn't have expected for this material. It feels different from your typical OVA, in both directing and animation. It feels more cinematic. I don't even like Go Nagai that much, but I enjoyed these OVAs because of the good production quality.

The basic premise of Devilman is that demons inhabited the world in prehistoric times, but they were vanquished by the angels. Fast-forward to modern Tokyo, where the demons are trying to find their way back into our world. (Since when Tokyo isn't busy being blown up in anime, it's being taken over by demons.) The protagonist is enlisted to fight the demons by an old friend whose father was a demon researcher. He does so by channeling an old demon called Amon and becoming Devilman.

Most of the first episode is devoted to the buildup, as the protagonist learns about this secret history of the world, in the end finally becoming Devilman and killing a room full of demons who possess the body of a club full of revelers. But sprinkled between these basically realistic sequences are two sequences that depict the prehistoric monster world. These sequences are my favorite part of these OVAs. The monster world was a place where dinosaurs and demons inhabited the same hellish plane of reality, playing out an endless sequence of bloody battles, each more bizarrely horrific than the next. The sequences are masterfully animated and packed full of ideas. Rather than your typical goblins and ghouls, the monsters are horrible yet somehow believable mish-mashes of animals and insects living, ancient and imaginary, and their battles play out like a grotesque nature channel program.

The rest of the OVA apart from these sequences is nice, too, although I came away wishing the entire OVA had looked like those two sequences. The visuals are sleek and clean, and the scenes are carefully directed. The only problem is that the story structure is somewhat odd, with a huge proportion of episode 1 being devoted to buildup, and the second episode completely abandoning any kind of theme or story and going with long, drawn-out monster battles.

The first episode is more satisfying than the second in part because the animation feels a little better, but also because of the material. The first episode has a dramatic arc that builds to a surprise ending. The protagonist starts as a regular boy, and with the arrival of his mysterious friend, the tension builds and builds until the climax, which explodes into an orgy of violence as the protagonist transforms into Devilman. By the second episode, the premise has been established, and all that remains is for Devilman to battle one opponent after another. Episode 2 is split evenly in half between two opponent battles, and other than this doesn't really feature any dramatic tension.

I wouldn't say that I think this is the most faithful adaptation of Go Nagai in style and spirit, though I'm not exactly an expert on his work. I would think something with a more rough and graphic touch would be needed to do him justice. But this OVA works in its own way, and Go Nagai was apparently supervising the project, so he obviously approved.

Even though the material here is inherently gory, the tasteful drawings and understated directing make it seem less gratuitously so than it might have been in the hands of a lesser director. Even at its most violent, this OVA remains somehow restrained and polite. It's an interesting contrast with the contemporary Go Nagai OVA adaptations of Violence Jack, which felt much more authentically exploitative.

These OVAs are impressive perhaps because they are strong as pieces of visual directing. The opening sequence of episode 1 is a good example. The first few minutes are entirely wordless, depicting the early struggle between the demons and the angels. This sequence is epic in tone and quite lovely. It reminds of the opening of Nausicaa. Even the music, by a young Kenji Kawai, sounds like it was influenced by Joe Hisaishi's score for Nausicaa. (By the time of episode 2 in 1990, his score had acquired that patented Kenji Kawai sound.) Episode 2, meanwhile, features a long battle in the air that is almost entirely wordless - pure visual directing.

I also like that the battles are actual physical battles, not just two Super Saiyans blasting each other with psychic beams. Usually this kind of monster battling in anime is boring because when someone is finally cornered, they just power up and make up some new, even stronger psychic power to blast away the opponent. At least here, there's no powering up or other cheap tricks: it's just straight physical battling, with the same set of powers they started out with.

Oh Pro's Devilman was the directing debut of Tsutomu Iida, who later changed his name to Umanosuke Iida. Devilman benefits from the attention to detail that helped make his later Space Miners (1994) such a delight. The pacing is quite slow, even sluggish, yet it holds your interest because every shot feels clean and deliberately presented. The pacing is slow because it's grounded in reality, and that gives it more impact when supernatural things occur in this otherwise realistically paced story. There are no shots that feel like throwaway shots between important scenes. What the film lacks in dynamism it makes up for in unflagging tension and assiduously pleasing drawings.

Attention to detail is one of the things that makes it feel cinematic. The protagonist's father's house is a stately and high-class estate with expensive furniture and paintings on the wall. In one shot, in the middle of all the opulence, a corner of the wall bears the scar of a shotgun blast, testament to the father's descent into madness. It's nice because it's totally understated. No mention is actually made of it. It's a higher level of storytelling than the usual OVA when they put little touches like this in the background as a subtle way of augmenting the narrative.

I appreciated the little innocuous details like the way each of the bikes was individuated in the following shot of an ordinary sidewalk in the city (in front of the suspiciously named Iida Bookstore). It's not flamboyant and passes by unnoticed while watching, but it helps make the film feel more authentic and believable. Everyday nuance like this is something you associate with the Ghibli films. This OVA has many examples of nice details like this.

The lighting is another aspect showing the unusual level of attention to detail that Iida brought to his work. There's one particular shot that impressed me for its stylish and creative presentation. While the protagonists are driving in a car, at one point they stop at a red light. The camera is positioned as if it was facing the driver of the car, just above the hood. The windshield of protagonists' car is bathed in the red light of the taillights of the truck in front of them, obscuring the driver. After a few seconds, the truck driver steps off the brake pedal, turning the taillights off, and the red cloak disappears and the protagonist becomes visible.

In a later shot, we see the facade of the protagonist's father's home shown at an oblique angle. After a few seconds, headlights appear behind the bushes in the distance. We can't see the car, only the mansion and the big tree in the courtyard, but we know the car is moving off screen because the shadows of the tree's branches run across the face of the mansion in a believably rendered play of black shapes. Only after the shapes stop moving does the camera slowly pan right towards the driveway, where the car has stopped in front of the gate. It's an innocuous and unimportant shot, but it's so satisfying and interesting to watch.

The staging of the shots also feels cinematic. Shots are positioned in such a way that the action moves through the shot in a creative and unexpected way, the way it does in Miyazaki's films. It's quite possible that Iida was in fact directly influenced by Miyazaki's style in this regard, because just after his involvement in the Oh Pro episodes of Lupin III Part 3 (1984-1985), he served as assistant director on Laputa (1986).

The Ghibli connection

The animation fully backs up Tsutomu Iida's cinematic directing, and it's no surprise why: the animators almost all just came from Laputa. It seems that having worked as the assistant director of Laputa gave Iida the leverage to be able to invite many of the animators who worked on Laputa to work on Devilman. That, and Oh Pro's long history of having worked with Takahata and Miyazaki, ever since the days of Heidi. Miyazaki's previous film, Nausicaa (1984), featured Oh Pro animators Tadashi Fukuda, Kitaro Kosaka and Toshitsugu Saida. Tsutomu Iida's very first job in animation was as an inbetweener on Nausicaa. Before that, Future Boy Conan (1978) featured Oh Pro animators Koichi Murata, Toshitsugu Saida, Joji Manabe, and Toshio Yamauchi.

The character designer/animation director of Devilman is Oh Pro co-founder Kazuo Komatsubara. Komatsubara himself had of course been animation director of Nausicaa, as well as having been the planner of Gauche, so there are many ties between Oh Pro and Ghibli. At a deeper level, Komatsubara had started out at Toei Doga in 1964, just one year after Miyazaki, although the two never wound up working together on the same projects there. After Komatsubara left Toei, he worked on the famous Go Nagai productions of the 1970s for Toei, most notably Devilman, which is presumably what led Go Nagai to choose Komatsubara and Oh Pro for this remake.

There is no other OVA that features an animator list like this: Katsuya Kondo, Shinji Otsuka, Makiko Futaki, Yoshinori Kanada, Toshio Kawaguchi, Masaaki Endo. And that's just the first episode. This is probably the reason why many of the drawings have a distinctly Miyazaki-esque feeling.

The second episode came several years later in 1990, and features many of the animators who worked on the intervening two Ghibli films, Totoro (1988) and Kiki (1989) - Yoshiharu Sato, Shinji Otsuka, Masaaki Endo, Toshio Kawaguchi, Yoshinori Kanada, Katsuya Kondo, Makiko Futaki, Hiroomi Yamakawa, Sachiko Sugino, Hiroshi Watanabe. Oh Pro animator Hiroshi Shimizu, who worked on episode 2, became a regular in Ghibli films starting the year after with Only Yesterday (1991). The second episode features a few other impressive outside names: Yasuomi Umetsu, Hiroyuki Okiura, Norimoto Tokura.

Apart from the animation, there are other Ghibli connections that help account for the Ghibli feeling. The color designer of the first episode is Michiyo Yasuda, who has been the color designer of every Miyazaki film since Nausicaa. I think this is one of the few non-Miyazaki films she's worked on. The art director of the first episode is Takamura Mukuo, a veteran art director from the early days of anime who was the art director of Gauche the Cellist. He was art director of many a classic anime, from Galaxy Express 999 to Harmageddon, to say nothing of the classic Takahata/Miyazaki TV series Heidi and 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother. Anido released a retrospective book of his art.

The animation

There's something about the drawings in this OVA that I really love. Just as every age has its distinguishing style of drawing that eventually disappears, the drawings in these OVAs have a certain quality that you don't find in anime anymore. Komatsubara's drawings are graceful and clean, the girls cute without going overboard with the cuteness like people do today. Even when the animation isn't particularly interesting, the drawings maintain your interest because they're consistently pleasing to the eye.

The most impressive scene in terms of the animation is the 4-minute segment in episode 1 after the protagonist puts on the monster mask, where he sees a vision of world of the demons, pictured above. This segment is a beautiful standalone piece of animation, obviously done by one person, depicting a slyly humorous sequence of monsters eating one another. One monster devours another, only to be devoured by another bigger monster, only for that one to be devoured by an even bigger monster, etc, etc, ad infinitum - the demon version of what happens in the natural world.

The designs in this segment are beautiful and well drawn. The animation isn't impressive in an obvious way, but it's incredibly nuanced and well executed. The only equivalent I've seen is animation in the Ghibli films, so it's obvious this segment was done by one of the Ghibli animators - I'm guessing either Katsuya Kondo, Shinji Otsuka or Makiko Futaki.

Episode 1 features plenty of other very nice segments. Yoshinori Kanada obviously animated the delectable disco scene at the end of the first episode, with its riotous rainbow colors and wild dancing by nubile bacchantes in leotards and panties. The drawings in this scene look like they came straight out of Birth. There are some nice Kanada-school effects where the protagonists are attacked by the car monster, perhaps by Kanada associate Osamu Nabeshima. The scattered shots of the monsters in the mansion early on are each quite well done.

Episode 2 is less impressive in terms of the animation, but is still quite solidly animated. The episode is capped by a tour-de-force 15-minute-long extended aerial combat sequence. It's consistently well drawn and creatively choreographed, although the only disappointment is that it is somewhat lacking in dynamism and is a little boring. What is impressive is how consistently well drawn the characters are from various angles as they grapple with one another mid-air. It's also nice how the sequence evolves naturally according to the surroundings, first in the city, flying around and bouncing off buildings, then zooming over a river past a bridge out to the forest on the outskirts of the city, then using the trees in the forest to attack the opponent either as projectiles or camouflage.

The animation highlight in episode 2 is the segment in the house where the protagonist saves the nude girl from the monster. This sequence was obviously drawn by Hiroyuki Okiura. It's easily identifiable by comparing it with the great segment he animated in episode 1 of The Hakkenden the same year, which is one of my favorite sequences ever. Okiura's animation changed a lot in later years, becoming much more impressively nuanced, but there's something about the raw power and excitement of his early work at this period that I find I miss. I prefer the more dynamic and expressive early Okiura at the tail end of his Anime R period, and this scene is a great example of his work from this period.

Tsutomu Iida

Sadly, Tsutomu Iida passed away two years ago from lung cancer. It cut short a career that I was always hoping would take off. After Devilman, he was involved in a number of projects, but none of them seemed to me to quite provide him with the opportunity to show just how great a director he was. Space Miners is perhaps the best showcase of his talent. I think he was one of the few people out there with the instincts of a director. He was detail-oriented, able to create fun and engaging stories and characters, good at world-building. I wanted to see him get the chance to do that in a feature context. He was directing the Towa no Quon (2011) movie series for Bones when death interrupted him, but I haven't seen these yet. Ironic that when he finally got to direct a movie, he should die in the middle of it.

It seems to me like he got side-tracked with fluff projects after Devilman. First there was the Chibi Go Nagai World OVAs. He directed 3 45-minute OVAs for this series. Apparently it all came about when Go Nagai saw his chibi drawings for the Devilman characters during production of Devilman and Go Nagai so loved them that he asked for an anime version to be produced. The anime is certainly entertaining and well made, with animation from Oh Pro animators, helmed again by character designer/animation director Kazuo Komatsubara. But it feels like nothing so much as a waste of his talent. He later did a similar side-show for the main event of Giant Robo in the Gin-Rei OVA.

Iida also directed one of the episodes of Oh Pro's Little Twins, which I mentioned above, as well as one of the short segments in a two-volume OVA series made by Oh Pro adapting traditional Japanese horror stories, in the more cartoony style of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi. His major projects of later years Gundam: The 08th MS Team (1996-1999), Hellsing (2001-2002), Tide-Line Blue (2005) and Towa no Quon (2011).

Finally, Iida directed a pilot for a movie called Spirit that obviously never got beyond the pilot stage. I haven't been able to find any information about this. Hopefully some day this can be released so we can see everything this talented director left us. Alongside Mahiro Maeda's R20 Galactic Airport, this is another pilot for a feature-length film that I wish would have gotten off the ground.

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Devilman: Birth (Oh Pro, 1987, OVA, 50min)

Director:	飯田つとむ Tsutomu Iida
Script:	永井豪 Go Nagai
	飯田つとむ Tsutomu Iida
Character Design:	小松原一男 Kazuo Komatsubara
Animation Director:	安藤正浩 Masahiro Ando
Art Director:	椋尾篁 Takamura Mukuo
Music:	川井憲次 Kenji Kawai
Color Design:	保田道世 Michiyo Yasuda

Key Animation:		安藤正浩 Masahiro Ando
		金田伊功 Yoshinori Kanada
		鍋島修 Osamu Nabeshima
		松原京子 Kyoko Matsubara
		森友典子 Noriko Moritomo
		矢吹勉 Tsutomu Yabuki
		川崎博嗣 Hirotsugu Kawasaki
		東京モモンガ Tokyo Momonga
		二木真希子 Makiko Futaki
		遠藤正明 Masaaki Endo
		近藤勝也 Katsuya Kondo
		河口俊夫 Toshio Kawaguchi
		大塚伸治 Shinji Otsuka
		小松原一男 Kazuo Komatsubara

Devilman: Demon Bird (Oh Pro, 1990, OVA, 57min)

Director:	飯田つとむ Tsutomu Iida
Character Design & A.D.:	小松原一男 Kazuo Komatsubara
Animation Director:	安藤正浩 Masahiro Ando
Art Director:	宮前光春 Mitsuharu Miyamae
	海老沢一男 Kazuo Ebisawa
Music:	川井憲次 Kenji Kawai

Key Animation:		清水洋 Hiroshi Shimizu
		遠藤正明 Masaaki Endo
		沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura
		佐藤雄三 Yuzo Sato
		梅津泰臣 Yasuomi Umetsu
		河口俊夫 Toshio Kawaguchi
		鍋島修 Osamu Nabeshima
		松原京子 Kyoko Matsubara
		金田伊功 Yoshinori Kanada
		近藤勝也 Katsuya Kondo
		杉野左秩子 Sachiko Sugino
		練木正宏 Masahiro Neriki
		諸橋伸司 Shinji Morohashi
		渡辺浩 Hiroshi Watanabe
		宮本英子 Eiko Miyamoto
		大竹紀子 Noriko Otake
		加藤茂 Shigeru Kato
		佐藤好春 Yoshiharu Sato
		黒沢守 Mamoru Kurosawa
		山川浩臣 Hiroomi Yamakawa
		戸倉紀元 Norimoto Tokura

The first Lupin III TV special from 1989 Bye Bye Lady Liberty had nice elongated designs harkening back to the more stylized designs of Mamo-era Yoshio Kabashima, who did way less work on the series than he should have.

Noboru Furuse was the designer. In looking into his filmography I didn't find much else as pleasingly designed as Bye Bye Lady Liberty, but I did discover a different facet of him that I wasn't aware of: racing anime maestro.

Turns out he was behind some of the nicest racing anime OVAs of the high OVA era between 1985-1990:

Bari Bari Densetsu (1986, 2x50min)
  Character Designer, Animation Director
Kaze wo Nuke! (1988, 40min)
  Director, Character Designer, Animation Director
Goddamn (1990, 2x30min)
  Director, Character Designer, Animation Director

His designs are easily identified by the sleek, elongated faces, which are a constant from project to project.

Each of these is about a different kind of racing: Motorcycle racing in Bari Bari Densetsu, motorcross in Kaze wo Nuke! and rallying in Goddamn. Apparently he couldn't get enough: he returned to racing in 1995 with Initial D, about street racing.

Each of them is surprisingly watchable. They put a lot of effort into the films in terms of the drawings of the vehicles and the directing.

Racing anime being merely a sub-genre of that most anime of genres, sports anime, it usually follows the template: beginner rider works his way up through the ranks, is challenged along the way by arrogant veteran with whom a bond of friendship is eventually formed before his inevitable and tragic death or maiming, and hero goes on to finally win the championship. The complexities of the race are boiled down to a samurai duel between rivals who can read each other's every move. A motorcross race becomes a space odyssey and Greek epic rolled into one.

There were many other motorcycle anime, like Pelican Road and Shonan Bakusozoku, but they weren't racing anime, and the biking in these was just a setting for the drama. Here, the racing is the protagonist, and we come away from the anime understanding the intricacies of the sport from the perspective of a pro. Or so the anime makes us feel. It's a dramatization of the sports in a way that is tailored to excite the mind of the manga's intended 13-year-old audience.

The sports anime kinship of Noboru Furuse's racing anime is underlined by the fact that starting around the same time (1988 onwards) he directed the Aim for the Ace! 2 OVA series, a continuation of Osamu Dezaki's quintessential sports anime.

All three of these racing anime are based on manga, so they feel somewhat compressed, but they focus the plot well on the character's growth by reproducing in geekishly obsessive detail the minutiae of his chosen sport, in this case cars and motorcycles. The vehicles are drawn and animated in detail from many angles. Considerable effort is expended in animating the vehicles. Back then it was a given that this would need to be done, so they set to the task with that goal in mind. But it's refreshing because we won't ever see hand-drawn racing anime anymore (Redline being a glorious exception). Even just five years on from Goddamn they used CG for the cars in Initial D.

These are OVAs as the OVA was intended, rather than the cop-out that many OVAs turned out to be: a format for lavish presentation of subjects too specialized (in subject, audience) for the big screen. Though the subject is not very glamorous, and people in the west have probably shied away from them because of it (like spokon anime), these are well made OVAs.

The last OVA directed by Furuse was Goddamn, which has the best title of any anime, ever. The story is the most interesting of the three. It takes a more adult perspective rather than follow the spokon template: The protagonist is merely a cog in the wheel of a big corporation that has aims to expand overseas into certain markets, and doing a rally race is just a means of achieving that goal. The car action is well directed and the plot moves along briskly in the adult world, without the usual silly high school antics or rival melodrama. There's nothing particularly impressive about the animation, but it works well with little budget. Noboru Furuse's drawings are simple but clean, and they're an improvement over the amateurish drawings of the manga.

The height of the animation in the three Noboru Furuse racing OVAs is the practice race in the first volume of Bari Bari Densetsu, with its driver POV shots that put you right in the action (pictured above). They're impressive because they're long shots and they're animated on 1s. It must have taken a very analytic mind to calculate all the different vectors of movement and align them properly, and hundreds of drawings for just a few shots. This could be done more easily with CG now, but what makes it such a bravura performance seen even today is that back then it was a real challenge.

It's clear that the animator who did it must have been Toyoaki Emura. He's one of the unsung heroes of 80s background animation. His chase through the tunnel in Akira (watch) is one of the film's iconic moments. Compare it with the animation of the biking scenes in Bari Bari Densetsu (watch), which was released two years before Akira. Just as Toshiaki Hontani made more realistic smoke FX animation than ever in Akira, Toyoaki Emura pushed background animation to its realistic extreme. Koji Morimoto and Takashi Nakamura did a nice motorcycle POV shot in the even earlier Bobby's In Deep (1985), but it was more dynamic than realistic. (watch)

Toyoaki Emura has his own web site. He has since apparently transition to working with CGI, a move that perhaps makes sense considering the nature of his animation prior to then. I can't help but feel it a shame, though, because he was really good. He went on to work on Venus Wars, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor 2, Like a Cloud, Like the Wind, Catnapped, Spriggan, Jin-Roh, and Innocence. Incidentally, in Akira, Emura was also responsible for the battle between Tetsuo and the soldiers in the hallway after he escapes his chamber, as well as the following scene where he attacks the 'kids' (up until #27 zooms away in his flying wheelchair). In Like a Cloud, Like the Wind he animated the very first 20 or so shots as well as the battle on the grass around the midway point. He was clearly relied upon for complicated shots that required solid skills and patience.

I wrote about Toei's fantasy adventure OVA Xanadu: Dragon Slayer Densetsu (1988) before. It was a slight outing redeemed by early work from Koichi Arai and ex-Bebow animators.

Well, a few years later, a two-episode OVA with a confusingly similar title was released: Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes (1992). It never seems to have made it over to the west like other good OVAs of the period, and you'd be forgiven for assuming that to have been because it was a crummy video game tie-in. But despite its obscurity, it's an impressively well-made action piece with a unique style. It might be the best fantasy/action OVA of the period that nobody has ever heard of.

A Wizardry OVA was released one year earlier in 1991 as a tie-in with the popular dungeoner video games, but it was boring and uninspired. Despite the talent at TMS's disposal, and despite TMS staple Kenji Kodama's storyboard, it was nothing more than a walk through a dungeon straight out of the game, with disappointingly staid animation.

Dragon Slayer bears little resemblance to the latter. It doesn't even feel like conventional fantasy anime. The fantasy plot seem like merely an excuse for the director to string together a series of action scenes of hair-raising intensity. With its frenetic pacing and expressionistic drawings, its post-Akira pedigree is obvious. The animation is lively and intense and highly worked. If anything, it feels closer in spirit to the manic Crimson Wolf (1993), with its speedy and dynamic animation and breakneck momentum. Another reference point is Sukeban Deka (1991), which featured thrilling, wildly deformed action animation by Masayuki Kobayashi. The action in Dragon Slayer is similar in style to Kobayashi's animation in Sukeban Deka - the timing ultra-fast and the drawings laden with deformed insertions to heighten the impact of the movement.

The film actually has had something of a cult reputation among Japanese fans due to its unusually fast pacing and animation. The animation at times seems excessively fast, as if the timing on the animation sheet had actually been kicked up a notch at the processing stage to give it more punch. Even the overall directing is unexpectedly fast. Scenes proceed at such a breakneck pace that dramatic moments like the boy's separation from his mother at the beginning border on the comical. That said, it's not badly done. It actually works. Sure, the budget is obviously not extremely high, and the drawings have a rough edge, but this isn't one of those shows that you would watch to laugh at it. The action sequences are creatively and excitingly choreographed, and the lightning-fast pacing of the narrative makes the otherwise generic fantasy plot far more entertaining than it rightfully should be.

The OVA was apparently not well received by fans of the game because the story was extensively overhauled for the anime. But who outside of a handful of Japanese fans from 1992 remembers (much less still plays) the game? They did the right thing to make the anime stand on its own two legs rather than make a faithful but impotent anime adaptation like Wizardry. As a result, twenty years on, Dragon Slayer still holds up pretty well.

Adding to the film's atmosphere are the character designs, which have a nice 'angry' feeling to them courtesy of onetime Nagai Go associate Ken Ishikawa, who also gave us the delightfully fierce and bloody Majuu Sensen AKA Beast Fighter. Yes indeed, this is anime as the lord intended it: fast, dynamic, and brutal.

Stretch and squash indeed

The Curtain-R-Nakamura connection

So, what studio produced this OVA? You'd be hard-pressed to say going by the credits. A variety of big corporate entities like King Records and Amuse Video are cited in production roles, but none of them are actual animation production studios. It takes some knowledge of the staff to extrapolate that informal artist gathering Studio Curtain was probably the 'brain' behind the show, and animation subcontractor Nakamura Production was probably the main production floor of the show's animation. One other subcontractor was also involved: Anime R. (The earlier comparison with Sukeban Deka is even more apt because Anime R was behind Sukeban Deka.)

What ties all of these together seems to be the old Sunrise cooking anime Mister Ajikko, which aired from 1987 to 1989. Most of the main staff of Dragon Slayer worked on (and presumably met one another working on) Mister Ajikko. The style of Dragon Slayer may even be indebted to the directing style of Mister Ajikko.

Dragon Slayer director Noriyuki Nakamura (no relation to Nakamura Production) may not be very well known, but he's a veteran who has been directing since at least 1980 and who continues to be very active on the front line storyboarding TV episodes.

Noriyuki Nakamura was the chief episode director of Mister Ajikko. By the time of Dragon Slayer in 1992, Noriyuki Nakamura was part of an informal animation studio called Studio Curtain, run by Masahiro Kase. Studio Curtain receives a "Special Thanks" credit in Dragon Slayer. Masahiro Kase, an animator in Dragon Slayer, was the chief animation director of the first 3/4 of Mister Ajikko. Masahiro Kase was at Osaka subcontractor Anime R at the time. Kazuaki Mouri, one of Anime R's hotshot animators, was the chief animation director of the last 1/4. Mouri is co-storyboarder and combat sequence supervisor of Dragon Slayer.

Perhaps the most recognizable name in Dragon Slayer is Tadashi Hiramatsu. He co-storyboarded and animated. I already wrote a bit about his early years in my post on Sukeban Deka: He started out at Nakamura Pro and eventually moved to Studio Curtain. Hiramatsu met Kase while working on Mister Ajikko. It's during Hiramatsu's period at Kase's Curtain that Dragon Slayer was produced. Hiramatsu relates that he learned a lot about directing from Noriyuki Nakamura.

The Nakamura Pro team of Tadashi Hiramatsu, Hiroyuki Okuno, Hisashi Hirai and Tetsuya Yanagisawa is credited together in Mister Ajikko episodes 38, 43, 48, 53. These four animators are present in Dragon Slayer. Hiroyuki Okuno is an animator, Tetsuya Yanagisawa is the monster character designer, and Hisashi Hirai is the character designer and animation director.

There's even a tangential Nippon Animation connection. Noriyuki Nakamura and Masahiro Kase both started out at Nippon Animation in the early 1980s, so it's possible they met there or at least recognized one another from that period. Meanwhile, Tadashi Hiramatsu wound up working on several Nippon Animation productions in the early 1990s after he joined Noriyuki Nakamura and Masahiro Kase at Studio Curtain.

Nakamura Pro

As I wrote in my post on Dirty Pair (1985), Sunrise has always made heavy use of subcontractors for their animation, ever since their founding in the early 1970s. Several other subcontractors helped with the animation side of Mister Ajikko, including Studio Live and Animaru-ya. But Nakamura Pro has always had a particularly close relationship with Sunrise, due to their shared origins.

Nakamura Pro was founded in 1974 by Kazuo Nakamura, who had started out at Mushi Pro. His studio was one of many, like Sunrise, founded in the aftermath of Mushi Pro's failure in what I've referred to as the Mushi Pro diaspora. It's ironic to think that Mushi Pro inadvertently influenced the course of anime history in probably exactly the opposite way they intended: Sunrise learned from Mushi Pro's mistake and did not let the artists run the studio. They instead turned to toy tie-ups as a way to ensure the studio's continued prosperity. This resulted in their becoming a robot anime studio. Nakamura Pro did most of its work for the robot shows of Sunrise and Toei in the early days, resulting in a whole generation of animators trained there and elsewhere becoming specialists in a sub-genre of animation that is unique to Japan. Some of the more famous animators turned out by Nakamura Pro include Ken Otsuka, Eiji Nakata, Shuko Murase and Hiroyuki Kitakubo.

Nakamura Pro has its own official web site, where they say they are hiring. Both Nakamura and Anime R are still alive and well doing subcontract animation work on today's TV shows.

It's all very complicated, but here is a basic breakdown of the studios and their animators in Dragon Slayer:
► Curtain: Noriyuki Nakamura, Masahiro Kase, Tadashi Hiramatsu
► Nakamura Pro: Hisashi Hirai, Michinori Chiba, Ken Otsuka, Hiroyuki Okuno, Shuko Murase, Yasuhiro Irie, Akira Nakamura, Tetsuya Yanagisawa, Kazuhiro Itakura
► Anime R: Kazuaki Mouri, Masahide Yanagisawa, Takahiro Kimura, Takahiro Komori

Aside: Although Noriyuki Nakamura bears no relation to Nakamura Pro, the other Nakamura credited in the show - Akira Nakamura, who is credited as enemy character designer - is the younger brother of Nakamura Pro founder Kazuo Nakamura.

Just to further confuse you, I'll close by briefly evoking another of the artist collectives that were so popular in the early 1990s - Gabo Miyabi (画房雅). It was founded by Masahide Yanagisawa after he left Anime R and moved to Tokyo. I don't know whether or not the group existed at the time of Dragon Slayer, but four animators credited in Dragon Slayer were part of the group: Masahide Yanagisawa, Shinya Takahashi, Takahiro Komori, and Yasuhiro Irie. The Sukeban Deka animator I mentioned before, Masayuki Kobayashi, was also part of the group. Other animators involved in the group include Kenichiro Katsura and Tatsuya Tomaru.

Other notable names in the credits include Masami Obari and Masashi Ishihama.

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Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes ドラゴンスレイヤー英雄伝説 (1992, OVA, 2x25 mins, dir. Noriyuki Nakamura)

Director & Story Framework:	中村憲由 Noriyuki Nakamura
Script:	松崎健一 Kenichi Matsuzaki
Art Director:	脇威志 Takeshi Waki
Original Character Design:	石川賢 Ken Ishikawa
Animation C.D. & Animation Director:	平井久司 Hisashi Hirai
Storyboards:	中村憲由 Noriyuki Nakamura 難波日登志 Hitoshi Namba 毛利和明 Kazuaki Mouri 平松禎史 Tadashi Hiramatsu
Combat Supervisor:	毛利和明 Kazuaki Mouri
Enemy Character Design:	中村明 Akira Nakamura
Monster Character Design:	柳沢哲也 Tetsuya Yanagisawa

Key Animation:		中村プロ Nakamura Pro:
		柳沢哲也 Tetsuya Yanagisawa
		板倉和弘 Kazuhiro Itakura
2nd Key Animation:		千葉道徳 Michinori Chiba
		大塚健 Ken Otsuka
		石塚貴之 Takayuki Ishizuka
Key Animation:		加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
		平松禎史 Tadashi Hiramatsu
		奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
		竹内昭 Akira Takeuchi
		柳沢まさひで Masahide Yanagisawa
		高橋しんや Shinya Takahashi
		大張正己 Masami Obari
		村瀬修功 Shuko Murase
		毛利和明 Kazuaki Mouri
		山川瑞恵 Mizue Yamakawa
		入江泰浩 Yasuhiro Irie
		工藤裕加 Yuka Kudo
		数井浩子 Hiroko Kazui
		青木哲郎 Tetsuro Aoki
		灘波日登志 Hitoshi Namba
		清水健一 Kenichi Shimizu
		木村貴宏 Takahiro Kimura
		重田智 Satoshi Shigeta
		石浜真史 Masashi Ishihama
		小森高博 Takahiro Komori
		亀井隆 Takashi Kamei

Cover of LD Vol. 1

UNDERSEA SILENCE REVORUTION

I sought out the two-part Submarine 707R OVA series from 2003-2004 because it was directed by Shoichi Masuo, one of the great effects animators of the last thirty years in Japan. I wrote a post about him before. The latter post was mainly about his work on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, in which he animated numerous scenes involving submarines. Directing a whole OVA of submarine action was an obvious next step for this animator. I assumed that the direct-to-video format and intervening decade-plus of advances in production knowhow would have allowed him the technical means, schedule and budget to create even better underwater sub action and visual effects than he was able under the constraints of the TV format.

I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I certainly wasn't expecting the unmitigated disaster that greeted me. There was so much wrong with this show that I had a hard time fathoming how it came to be produced. It just goes to show that you can't reason quality. There is no guarantee that a good animator will make a good director, even when the show seems like the perfect fit for a particular animator's talent. For every Masaaki Yuasa or a Takeshi Koike, there must be 10 Shoichi Masuos. I love the guy as an animator, and perhaps there were factors beyond his control during the production of this show that led to these results, but there is just no silver lining in this cloud.

What's even more amazing is that there isn't even very much compelling effects work in Submarine 707R. I'm the kind of geeky viewer who will gladly watch a show I otherwise despise if it features good animation by an animator I like. I would have been happy if it turned out to be a vapid, trite, sloppily-directed effects extravaganza. But there were barely 5 good explosions in the whole thing. What happened?

Shoichi Masuo clearly elected to adapt this manga into an anime because it would allow him to create exciting underwater sub action in the vein of the wonderful, classic scenes of that ilk in Nadia. As if to reinforce the comparison, Hideaki Anno directed the opening sequence, which depicts the 707 being assembled in the style of sepia-colored retro footage. We've seen the same sort of thing from Anno numerous times before; it's one of his stock tricks. But Nadia worked because it had a good directing team; advances in technology do not equate to better anime. Quite the opposite: The ease with which CGI can be deployed seems to have the effect of emboldening second-rate directors who do not have the attention to detail or the director's instinct to realize when a particular visual is simply not working. Back then a hack wouldn't have had the ability to animate such an arduous scene.

The scenes of the submarines in this OVA had the bland, half-hearted, amateurish quality of early CGI adopters from the 1990s - those shows that were brave enough to dare to combine hand-drawn animation with CGI mecha. They didn't know how to do it well, and it looked like crap, but it was kind of expected that CG anime had to go through growing pains. They had to start somewhere. I watched this OVA assuming, based on the evidence, that it was produced in the 1990s. I was shocked to learn it was such a recent project.

The CGI in this OVA is the perfect example of how paper-thin bad CGI feels. It entirely lacks the tactility and weightiness of hand-drawn animation. Even bad hand-drawn animation would have been better. The irony is that CGI was presumably adopted to animate the submarines as a way to make the underwater scenes feel more "real". But the hand-drawn submarines of Nadia felt infinitely more realistic. It's fascinating that the person responsible for those scenes, when working in the context of CGI, seems blind to the fact that the animation of the CGI subs is totally unconvincing. Merely being consistently on-model and easier to move isn't sufficient to impart a feeling of reality. The subs in Submarine 707R feel completely weightless -- and not because they're in the water. Masuo's animation in Nadia was the result of very precise calculations in terms of the drawing and the timing of the movement. The reliance on CGI appears to have short-circuited the most important faculty of animators.

But that's not even the worst thing about this OVA. The directing is a textbook example of bad directing in almost every imaginable way. The pace is astoundingly slow. It's like you're watching it in slo-mo. It feels suspiciously like they drew out 30 minutes' worth of material to 50 minutes. Characters appear in a context suggesting their reappearance, only to disappear. Narrative threads begin, only to be abruptly and capriciously replaced by entirely different narrative threads.

The character designs are a nonsensical mishmash of anime moeblobs, retro-styled characters straight out of an Osamu Tezuka manga from the 1950s, and just plain badly drawn characters. The character animation is nonexistent. The first fifteen minutes of episode 2 are a surreal succession of excruciatingly slow pans over sound effects, in a bald-faced scrabble to fill in the space left until the climactic sequence, which was obviously animated first. The rest of the show isn't much of an improvement.

The CGI floats against the hand-drawn animation like a sub does in the water - or more accurately, like a healthy turd does in the toilet. The two are bad in their own right, and they don't mix well at all. The music was awful generic tinny synth that did absolutely nothing to accentuate the drama and everything to accentuate the awful lack of budget. On the other hand, hollow-sounding orchestral synth renditions of W.W.II Japanese naval marches is the perfect musical expression of this show's awful subtext of jingoistic naval pride masquerading as action movie bombast.

The plot is a complete disaster. Most fundamentally, the motivation of the bad guy is never clearly explained, even though they drop vague hints in certain spots. He's the most transparent "madman bent on world domination" cypher ever - the dollar-store version of the bad guy in Mahiro Maeda's very similar and comparably successful Submarine No. 6, who was actually somewhat compelling because his motivation was thoroughly explored.

Skipping through it post-fact to remind myself what it looked like, I started to think, "It doesn't look that bad. Maybe I was being a little harsh." But sitting through both episodes was nothing less than agony. I don't mean to be mean-spirited. I usually focus on describing good shows to try to see what makes them good, but it can be equally educational about what makes a good anime to look at what makes a bad anime.

About the animation, it's sad that there was not more good animation. A few spots that stood out as having nice FX animation were probably the work of the late Toshiaki Tetsura, a talented mecha animator who died a premature death. Makoto Kobayashi, who is a great mecha designer with a unique style, is also present. In addition to helping out with layouts, he appears to have drawn various shots in the show, most notably the massive carrier seen at the beginning, pictured above. His style comes through clearly in the byzantine detailing of the deck of the carrier and the more 'melty' texture of the strokes. Soichiro Matsuda was also involved as an animator, so he may have done some of the good bits. The ubiquitous Kazutaka Miyatake was the mecha designer, and Hiromasa Ogura was the art director, though this is not one of his shining moments.

My disappointment stems primarily from the fact that I hold Shoichi Masuo in such high regard, and I would have liked to see an action-focused OVA that served as a dense summation of the great work Masuo had done in various places over the preceding decade and a half.

Toei has produced another little gem of highly stylized directing and visuals in their just-released OVA Kyoso Giga. The film is a fast-paced romp full of bright colors, highly deformed and active animation, and constantly surprising angles and layouts.

The directing is in the willful and flamboyant mold that characterizes all the great Toei directors of the last two decades, of which there is quite a long list, most notably Shigeyasu Yamauchi, Kenji Nakamura, Mamoru Hosoda, Takuya Igarashi and Kunihiko Ikuhara. They tell a story not by plopping characters in the middle of the screen and letting them talk, but cutting in an unpredictable rapid-fire between elliptical shots in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, and coming up with new approaches to visual presentation and stylization and pleasing new ways of combining the CGI and hand drawn elements. The director here pushes this style to such a breakneck extreme that I had a hard time following it and it left me dizzy and hoping it would stop soon, though I still enjoyed every moment. It feels very much of the Toei lineage, but it's directed by a director I've never heard of: Rie Matsumoto. Turns out she's a new face who has only come to prominence in the last few years. She apparently got interested in animation after being impressed by Mamoru Hosoda's Children's War Game, and decided to join Toei for that reason. She's been mostly active directing Toei's franchise for little girls Precure.

There isn't a moment that lets you rest in the 30-minute outing thanks to the constantly creative visual presentation, the beautiful background art with a nice stylized rendering of old Kyoto, and the edgy and high-energy animation. The designs of the characters and especially the monsters are fluid and full of unexpected angles. The monsters in particular are drawn in a loosely appealing way with flowing and jagged forms. The action scenes move something crazy thanks to a handful of powerful young animators working on the show, but even in the non-action scenes the director maintains interest through a mix of Hosoda-styled densely layered formalistic shots with different things happened on different layers, shifting unexpectedly between realistic images of the characters in the real world and highly stylized images of the characters walking through some kind of alternative universe of the imagination full of colorful decorations hanging from strings and eye-poppingly colorful geometrical patterns.

The animation director and character designer is Yuki Hayashi, who has made a name for himself in the last few years as an interesting animator with a sense for well-timed action that uses a minimum of means. Not coincidentally he also did most of his work on Precure. I like his youkai (monster) characters in particular. They're drawn with long, loose, flowing forms. But even the cute protagonists are cute in a way that isn't annoying for trying too hard to look cute. Their drawing style is clearly identifiable as recent Toei. Working under him are other talented animators like freelance ex-gif animator Shinichi Kurita, Toei regular and FX specialist Takashi Hashimoto and even Tate Naoki, the flamboyant animator from Toei's franchise for little boys One Piece. Hopefully Toei will rope in Hisashi Mori for some good work in a future episode. Tatsuzo Nishita would be nice too. Haven't seen him in a while.

The script by Miho Maruo is witty if a little frustrating in its deliberate ellipsis. You're obviously meant to not understand what the heck is going on in this episode - one of the characters even speaks for the audience: "I have no idea what the heck is going on." But it's well done, for what it is, juggling a lot of characters while keeping the story pulsing forward.

Not every AIC anime is about cute girls, mecha and guns. There's one exception: Mikeneko Holmes no Yuurei Joushu, a one-shot mystery OVA based on the novels of mystery legend Jiro Akagawa. No tentacles or lesbian aliens are to be found in this unostentatious and low-key outing. It's maybe the least AIC-looking of the OVAs from the golden age of AIC OVAs.

It's decent, but not undeservedly overlooked. The characters are competently drawn, if not particularly dynamic or exciting to watch. The mystery takes too long to arrive and isn't satisfying, and the directing is bland and lacking in spark, although you could say it's more watchable than many of their better produced outings because of that lightness and lack of fetishism. It's interesting perhaps most of all for being one of the earliest mystery anime, precursor of hit shows like Kindaichi and Conan. Once again, AIC was on the money in terms of sniffing out potential new formats.

This OVA was released in 1992, which is smack in the middle of one of my favorite periods in anime, the post-Akira period that produced OVAs like Crimson Wolf, Hakkenden and Sukeban Deka. The animation of this period gets my juices flowing like that of no other period in anime history. Like most AIC OVAs, this one has a smattering of good animation, and it's in the early 90s style that I love. Most of the animation in the film is not that exciting, but there are bits here and there in the first ten minutes that I really enjoyed.

The breakfast scene is perhaps the best. The acting in this scene is subtly nuanced and believable, but not lavish or flamboyant by any means. Take the shot where the protagonist reads the note while eating toast. Normally an animator would just have had the protagonist pick up the note and read it. But there's an added little touch here that makes it feel more real and life-like: he flips back the note to straighten it so that he can read it. It passes by so quickly it almost doesn't register. It's not flamboyant and in-your-face screaming "Sakugaaaaa!" Yet it feels really good as acting and as movement. Most of the time nowadays when you run across animation that is above average, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Not many animators are capable of this kind of subtle quality. I like animation like this that flies under the radar yet is very well done. The timing of the bit where the protagonist's buddy pats his chest at the front door is also exceptional. Have a look for yourself.

Animators in the credits include Tatsuya Tomaru, Jiro Kanai, Fumihide Sai and Osamu Tanabe. The breakfast scene is almost without a doubt the work of Osamu Tanabe, who I wrote a post about before. This was before he became famous for his work at Ghibli, right around the time he did such amazing but as-of-yet unrecognized work on miscellaneous shows like Hakkenden, Junkers Come Here, Lassie and Golden Boy. His work in all of these shows is also similarly notable for its subtle but realistic and believable acting.

There are some other spots during the first ten minutes that are also quite nice, like the dream scene at the beginning and the shot where the protagonist's buddy gets worked up after the play and the protagonist has to restrain him. The latter shot is quite nice and feels very 'post-Akira' in the style of the mouth and the exaggerated movement of the limbs. I like how the limbs and hands are very communicative in animation at this period.

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三毛猫ホームズの幽霊城主 Mikeneko Holmes no Yuurei Joushu (1992, OVA, 45 mins, AIC)

Based on the novels by Jiro Akagawa
Produced by AIC
Director, Character Design: Nobuyuki Kitajima
Animation Directors: Noboru Furuse, Nobuyuki Kitajima
Assistant Animation Director: Atsushi Okuda
Art Director: Kenji Kamiyama
Script: Arii Emu
Music: Kentaro Haneda
Technical Director: Takeshi Aoki
Key animators:

	Tatsuya Tomaru		Jiro Kanai
	Kado Tomoaki		Osamu Tanabe
	Tomoo Ikeuchi		Tadayuki Iwai
	Fumihide Sai		Masahiro Kase
	Harumi Izawa		Koichi Ishihara
	Miko Nakajima		Kenichi Ogawa
	Satomi Tanaka		Koichi Nakaya
	Masashi Yagishita		Masamitsu Outa
	Keiji Goto		Naoko Ozawa
	Masahiro Tanaka

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Here's a list of some of my favorite early 1990s OVAs (and one movie) where you can sample the style of animation that's unique to the immediate post-Akira period:

Gosenzosama Banbanzai (1989)
Explorer Woman Ray episode 1 (1989)
Hakkenden episode 1 (1990)
The Antique Shop (1991)
Sukeban Deka (1991)
Rojin Z (1991)
Green Legend Ran episode 1 (1992)
Ai Monogatari: Lion and Pelican (1993)
Crimson Wolf (1993)

Mind Game (2004) may be considered Masaaki Yuasa's debut as a feature film director, but in fact he had directed various short featurettes prior to that. Indeed, his first director credit came 12 years earlier in 1992 with a short film in an obscure little 6-volume direct-to-video series called Anime Rakugokan. Rakugo is a traditional Japanese live storytelling/comedy entertainment. Each volume in this series features a performance by a famous rakugo practitioner set to animation.

Back then Yuasa was at a studio called Ajia-do. Yuasa had joined the studio because it was run by two of his idols in animation - Tsutomu Shibayama and Osamu Kobayashi, who had been the figures behind some of the series that most influenced Yuasa over the years, namely the 1970s shows produced by Tokyo Movie with animation from A Production like Dokonjo Gaeru and Tensai Bakabon.

Yuasa directed the third volume of Anime Rakugokan in a style that was an intentional homage to the style of the masters who had influenced him. As a result, the film isn't immediately recognizable as Yuasa. It feels more A Pro than anything else he's since done. But the genius of the character design and animation are something only Yuasa could have created.

The video is currently up on Youtube. (search for かぼちゃ屋) Watch it while you can. Unfortunately it doesn't have subs so you won't be able to get the humor if you don't understand Japanese, but the fact is that every second of this film is a delight to watch just for the character animation, so it's well worth watching anyway.

I'd personally been looking for this film for years, and I just got the chance to see it today for the first time, and I was excited to discover how great a film it is. I've never seen this kind of character animation from Yuasa, but it's amazing. The character designs are great, and the way they're animated is constantly interesting. There isn't a single shot that I don't love in this film.

The character drawings in particular are really out there, but they work. The floating eyebrows on the squash seller are really something. I adore the way the hands are drawn with these big blocky forms. The hands are very emotive in this film. The faces are so supple and squishy. There's some new fun expression in almost every shot. There's even a tinge of caricature in the old man who hires the squash seller that reminds me of the great Japanese caricaturist Shoji Yamafuji. And the animation has a sense of split-second timing that's unique to Yuasa. The guy with the five o'clock shadow the squash seller pisses off in the street is the most obvious throwback to the A Pro style. He looks like he could have come straight out of Dokonjo Gaeru.

I even love the very flat, simple layouts of the film. The characters are right up there in your face, filling the screen in every shot. There's no pretense of realism or perspective or other mimetic fakery. It's a proudly cartoony film. At the same time, despite the simple layouts, more effort is put into the animation than many shows nowadays that consist mostly of close-ups of characters. Every character drawing is full of life and vitality. No two drawings of the characters are the same.

What's best about it is that its 'cartooniness' has nothing to do with western cartoons, which I have a hard time appreciating. It's a cartoon aesthetic that was essentially invented by the Japanese TV animators who forged their own approach to the medium in the 1960s and 1970s. It's inspired by the work of the A Pro animators, which itself was something truly new and unlike anything ever done before, but completely re-invented through Yuasa's pen.

The impressive thing about Yuasa is that even obscure shorts like Slime Adventures and the Nanchatte Vampiyan pilot that for years remained unseen and unobtainable turned out, when I finally saw them, to be great little films exploding with just the sort of incredible animation and visual creativity you'd expect of Yuasa. The same applies to The Squash Seller, in its own unique way.

Yuasa himself has said in an interview that he's embarrased about the film and wishes people wouldn't watch it, but that's just typical Yuasa humbleness. This is an awesome little gem that looks and moves like no other anime out there. The character style is obviously inspired by the classic A Pro shows, but Yuasa creates a look and feel that is uniquely his own. He learns from and surpasses the masters. I honestly wish he would do more stuff like this. We need an A Pro-style long-running slapstick comedy TV series directed by Masaaki Yuasa in the spirit of Tensai Bakabon or Dokonjo Gaeru.

This lost gem proves once again what a unique and multifaceted talent Masaaki Yuasa is. Thanks to Charles Brubaker for pointing this video out to me.

One of the other films in the series is also up on Youtube, but the contrast is instructive. It's the first volume, directed by Osamu Kobayashi. Kobayashi's character designs are appealingly oddball in a Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi-kind of way, but the animation is totally uninteresting compared with the electric and dynamic character animation of Yuasa's outing.

The other one I'm curious to see is the second episode, because it's animated by Masaya Fujimori, who is perhaps the best animator to emerge from Ajia-Do in the 1990s after Masaaki Yuasa. The second episode also features nicely stylized designs by Tsutomu Shibayama.

Bask in the delightful character drawings of Masaaki Yuasa's The Squash Seller:

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Anime Rakugokan アニメ落語館 staff list

Volume 1: Uma no Dengaku (16 mins, released June 5, 1991)
Structure and director: Osamu Kobayashi
Animation: Yuji Shigekuni, Masahiro Koyama
Art: Hideo Chiba

Volume 2: Okechimyaku (16 mins, released June 5, 1991)
Character design: Tsutomu Shibayama
Structure and director: Yumiko Suda
Animation: Masaya Fujimori
Art: Hideo Chiba

Volume 3: Kabochaya (21 mins, released July 5, 1992)
Character design, structure and director: Masaaki Yuasa
Animation: Masaaki Yuasa, Masayuki Sekine
Art: Seiki Tamura

Volume 4: Tenshiki (21 mins, released ?)
Structure and director: Yumiko Suda
Character design and animation director: Hideyuki Funagoshi
Animation: Yukio Omori, Yoshiaki Tsubata, Yuji Shigekuni, Masato Tamakawa, Hideyuki Funagoshi
Art: Hideo Chiba

Volume 5: Tarachine / Tsuru (8 mins each, released ?)
Tarachine
Director and animation: Hideo Kawauchi
Art: Atelier Roku
Tsuru
Director: Kazuki Okonogi
Animation director: Takeshi Shiki
Art: Atelier Roku

Volume 6: Hitomeagari / Kawarime (8 mins each, released ?)
Hitomeagari
Director: Kazuki Okonogi
Animation Director: Takeshi Shiki
Art: Atelier Roku
Kawarime
Director: Kazuki Okonogi
Animation director: Michishiro Yamada, Reiko Suzuki
Art: Atelier Roku

I just wrote about Telecom's very early work on Lupin. Well, they're still very active as both a subcontractor doing animation work on other people's shows and producing their own projects. Their latest was one of the other four Project A films released in 2010: Grampa's Lamp.

Set in the early decades of Japan's period of modernization around 1900, Grampa's Lamp traces the advent of modernity to Japan during its so-called "bunmei kaika" period in the late 1800s. It does so through the story of a boy growing up during those times. He begins by embracing the flood of changes entering his country, only to soon find himself irresistibly overtaken by that same flood. With surprising subtlety it paints a picture of the double-edged sword of modernization: for every step towards the future, something else is irretrievably lost.

Historical anime for children of this ilk is often heavy-handed and reductive, presenting an anti-war or other message in a way that is lacking the complexity and subtlety of real life, but I found Grampa's Lamp did a better job than most other period anime in balancing narrative clarity and simplicity with moral ambiguity and psychological complexity. I enjoyed it and found its characters believable. My only disappointment is that the drama leading towards the climax felt forced and unnecessary. It's like they felt obliged to create a dramatic climax but couldn't figure out how to do it.

Grampa's Lamp is pretty much unrecognizable as Telecom if you're looking for the hallmarks of late 70s Telecom like high-energy car chases and exhiliratingly improbable character calisthenics. The studio itself has gone through much over the intervening years, and this project itself much more low-key and down-to-earth in its goals. The film is more Only Yesterday than Cagliostro.

But what hasn't changed is the studio's philosophy of creating rich character animation. Everything moves, and moves in an interesting or meaningful way. The characters act out their emotions and personalities, and the way they behave is more realistic and believable than in typical anime, where the animators often fall back on stock movements. They behave like people, not anime characters. The directing isn't geared towards creating pretty images, but rather towards bringing the characters to life in animation.

Crowd scenes actually have moving people, not just a single drawing. Kids playing cops and robbers zip around adopting all sorts of poses. The old lady running the shop moves differently from the way the middle-aged waitress moves. When the protagonist assembles a lamp, each component of the action is meticulously depicted - pouring the lamp oil through the sieve into the body, wiping off the sieve, replacing the ladle into its bin, screwing back on the lamp, twisting the knob to raise the thread. And he does all these things with an ease and fluidity that clearly is the product of many years of experience. That's what it means for animation to communicate personality.

Kazuhide Tomonaga, who after his work on the second Lupin series went on to become one of Telecom's most important members through the decades, was the "Acting Supervisor" in Grampa's Lamp. This is a role I've never before seen in anime, and the presence of this role goes a long way to accounting for the quality of the character animation.

Unlike in a typical production, prior to drawing the layout and the genga, each animator was first obliged to draw a thumbnail outline of the action they intended for a shot. Only after Tomonaga inspected the thumbnails and approved them was the key animator allowed to move ahead with drawing the actual key animation. It might seem at first sight like adding this extra step might slow down production, but it probably actually has the opposite effect. It also avoids waste by making sure there's no need for retakes after the key animator has begun drawing a more finalized key animation drawing. On top of that, it increases the overall quality of the movements by forcing the animators to think about the movement first, separate from the drawings.

Drawing thumbnails was one of the tasks the animators of Grampa's Lamp were assigned as a part of Project A. The idea of using thumbnails was apparently something recommended by Yasuo Otsuka. He finds that many young animators today are unable to create everyday character acting. People draw cool poses or drawings, but forget the bigger picture. He suggested using thumbnails as a way to train their skill at conceptualizing movement. Having a thumbnail sketch of a movement also makes it easy to get input from superiors or colleagues about how to improve an action.

The first person credited in the key animation credits is Hisao Yokobori, who is a veteran Telecom animator who has done much good work in recent years. Presumably many of the names under him are the new faces who were being trained on the project.

I also had a chance to watch Production I.G.'s outing, Wardrobe Dwellers, but it was excruciatingly boring and uninteresting. I was looking forward to it to see what Kazuchika Kise would do as a director, as he's a fine animator, but the material just wasn't interesting enough to support the slow pace.

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Earlier this year it was announced that four more films in the series will be released together next year under the moniker "Anime Mirai". Luckily Telecom is back with another film next year, and I was surprised to find out which film it is they're producing:

Telecom: Buta (d. Kazuhide Tomonaga)
Production I.G.: Wasurenagumo (d. Toshihisa Kaiya)
Shirokumi: Feigned Ignorance (d. PON Kozutsumi)
Answer Studio: Juju of the South Seas (d. Hiroshi Kawamata)

Six years ago I wrote a post about a project called Buta headed by a Frenchman named Christophe Ferreira. It would appear that the project had a rough time getting off the ground, and sadly Christophe is only credited with "Created by" in this particular film, so it is not the vision that he had originally been working towards. But it is nonetheless Telecom, and directed by Kazuhide Tomonaga no less, so it looks like it will be an exciting and fun action piece going back to the roots of what made Telecom so great.

You can see some images from the episode up on the official page at animemirai.jp. Apparently the project is now called Anime Mirai (Anime Future).

It would be nice if this could lead to an ongoing project that would foster the production of more episodes in that vein of freewheeling action adventure. I find it hard to believe they'll be able to revive the brilliance of the early Telecom films, but it's great to see they're trying to go in that direction. Interesting to note is that this film is presumably serving as on-hands training for several younger animators - which is basically what the early New Lupin III Telecom episodes were.

Speaking of which, supposedly a new Lupin III series is in production, so with any luck we may be able to see some new Telecom Lupin III episodes.

I must say I'm also quite curious about the Shirokumi film. It looks very beautiful, with its pared down black-and-white sketchy aesthetic. It's the only film in the project so far that doesn't look like regular anime. I'm glad they're greenlighting more visually unorthodox and creative projects like this too. The director directed many episodes of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi under his real name, Kazuaki Kozutsumi, so he's a good choice for this kind of visual material. I'd like to see more Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi OBs given the chance to do this kind of higher-quality production. More recently he did an amusing series of super-short animation inserts about a monk and his cat. I love what he's able to do with so little. Just a few drawings in three seconds and each one tells a little story.

I was hoping to see Kazuyoshi Takeuchi's name when I saw that Answer Studio had done one of the films, as I liked what he did in Flag, but he's not involved. I'm still quite looking forward to it. Production I.G.'s film looks the least interesting, though I'm sure it will be competently done.

Hyperkinetic action animation so fast it blurs the outlines of its characters into an abstract painting. You might expect to see this in one of the latest Street Fighter outings, not in a family show. But that's what makes Kizuna Ichigeki so unique. The tagline phrases it well: "Hard-boiled action comedy for the whole family".

This deceptively diminutive, densely packed little 25-minute gem is one of the films produced under the auspices of the so-called "Project A" or Young Animator Training Project being run by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Bunkacho. The Bunkacho has done much to support their native animation industry over the last decade or so, most notably running the Japan Media Arts Festival that has rewarded exceptional productions like Mind Game, Summer with Coo and most recently Tatami Galaxy.

The action is hard-boiled, and the family fun is quite soft and fuzzy. It sounds like a guaranteed disaster, but it actually works fairly well thanks to the two veterans helming this unique project: Director Mitsuru Hongo and Animation Director/Character Designer Yuichiro Sueyoshi.

The director does a good job of fleshing out each character as an individual and creating an appealing and fun atmosphere of a family that works together as a unit. The animation director meanwhile keeps the visuals interesting at all times with his creative approach to character designs, with heads and bodies drawn in all sorts of delightfully odd shapes.

The action scenes are truly thrilling to watch. They're intricately animated, full of interesting poses as the characters attack and parry, and the camera zooms around following the action. Fights never drag on to the point of self-indulgence, but always feel satisfying, without being gory or bloody. It's a clean, safe kind of action that's nonetheless extremely satisfying for action fans.

The film segues seamlessly between family drama and truly hardcore martial arts action as the little Kizuna has to participate in title fights to pay to keep the family together. A tiny little whisp of a girl, she deals out whoop-ass with an assurance and skill well beyond her years and size. The scenes where she stands off men three times her size (literally) are amazing for not being completely laughable. The magic of animation makes you believe she could do it. The show has an effortless and genuine atmosphere of whimsical fun.

Mitsuru Hongo was the one who made the Crayon Shin-chan film series into the long-running hit it's become. His Shin-chan films were suprisingly sophisticated packages of oddball fantasy, witty whimsy, exciting action and believably handled drama that attracted adults and children equally. The glue holding together this bizarre melange was the unexpected inventiveness and creativeness of the visuals and the animation, the product of the imagination of a brilliant animator and designer who would soon afterwards go on to make a name for himself: Masaaki Yuasa.

Yuichiro Sueyoshi started out as an animator in Shin-chan TV series and movies, and has in recent years been involved in several notable feature films: first Mind Game under the self-same Yuasa, and then in a very different turn, Summer with Coo under Shin-Ei compatriot Keiichi Hara. Keiichi Hara himself got his start under Mitsuru Hongo storyboarding Hongo's Shin-chan movies until finally graduating to directing them himself. Hongo is a remarkable director for not only his own work but also for his fostering of talent.

Kizuna Ichigeki's success comes in large part because it follows something of the same pattern of creative seeding as the early Shin-chan films. The visual concept is laid down by a talented animator, and Hongo then comes in and builds a drama around the visuals. Yuichiro Sueyoshi is credited with "gensaku", meaning "Created by Yuichiro Sueyoshi". Hence this project was his concept. It's a project created by a great animator, obviously intended to be a vehicle for producing interesting animation.

A one-off like this is nice, but what would be better would be if this would lead to a TV series. We need a TV series like this that creates a simple framework of a story and situation, and provides the animators with pliable and easy-to-animate designs that predispose towards more freedom and fun in the animation. You sense that different animators would have the freedom to do each episode in their own way without worrying too much about adhering to model or atmosphere. That's what makes this concept really interesting: It's carefully crafted to be open-ended and to inherently promote more exciting and adventurous animation. Providing such a platform on a long-term basis would be the best way of fostering the young animators of Japan.

Although of course Kizuna Ichigeki was intended to foster young animators, the key animation credits are headlined by three veteran animators: Masahiro Sato, Hideo Hariganeya and Nobuhiro Osugi. They are presumably there as the guiding spirits of the animation, the lead animators. The remaining six, who are credited separately, are presumably the young animators who were being 'trained' on the project. I don't know to what extent the veterans were involved in the training of the young animators, or whether they just did their own thing like usual and weren't actually involved in any training, which isn't their job normally anyway.

The three veterans have been involved in the Shin-chan movies over the years. Masahiro Sato in particular has come to prominence as one of the great action animators of our time. Masahiro Sato's section here is easily identifiable for its excellent draftsmanship, choreography and sense of assurance - the fight with the redhead. I'm not sure what the other two did, but there were two nice sections: the fight with the red-coated guy, and the amusing section where the grandfather tells stories that turn out to have nothing to do with Kizuna - one of them a clear parody of K-On and the other a parody of generic robot shows, with its dramatically anguished protagonist piloting a mobile suit against his will.

What's nice about this show is how each of these sections display a distinctly different approach to animation in terms of the timing and the choreography and even the drawings, yet they all blend together beautifully in the final product, and the heterogeneous styles even lend the film strength. Masahiro Sato's section isn't drawn all sketchy like the rest of the episode, and the animation is much more straight-through and fluid. The fight with the red-coated guy is quite different yet equally enjoyable - sparer and not as weighty, full of sprightly poses of Kizuna and more Yuasa-esque loose, angular character drawing. Hongo and Sueyoshi have created a framework in which animators can work freely in their own style, and it not only doesn't wreck the atmosphere, it fits in perfectly.

One of the things that jumps out at you about the animation is the sketchy style. It's kind of reminiscent of Tweeny Witches OVA 3 done by Yasuhiro Aoki, as well as Windy Tales, Kemonozume, and most recently Shoka. The finished animation is drawn in a way that deliberately looks unfinished and sketchy. Yet the drawings are strong and the characters are well drawn from all sorts of angles. I like the variety of the faces in the crowds. The crowd scenes were very fun to watch.

I like the cat character. That's something I think they did a good job in getting the audience to want to see more of. He looks and behaves very much like Kotetsu in Jarinko Chie. At certain moments he stands up on his hind legs and strikes some wicked-looking karate poses. I left the episode wanting to see more stories about the cat in action.

The production studio behind this film is a new kid on the block: Ascension. The producer heading the studio is one Hitoshi Shigeki. Although Sunrise was the studio that produced Keiichi Hara's latest film Colorful, the animation was actually outsourced to Ascension. They have two home-runs with their first two productions, let's hope they can keep that record up. They're a studio worth looking out for. They don't have an official home page yet, only a Twitter feed and a Facebook page.

You can see some cleaned up key animation alongside the finished image on the Janica page for Kizuna Ichigeki. It's quite interesting to compare the corrected keys with the finished picture. You can see what kind of work an inbetweener has to do in terms of cleaning up the lines, removing stray marks, etc.

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Kizuna Ichigeki (25 minutes, 2010, Ascension)

Producer: Hitoshi Shigeki
Created by, Animation Director, Character Design: Yuichiro Sueyoshi
Written by, Storyboard, Director: Mitsuru Hongo

Key animators:
Masahiro Sato
Hideo Hariganeya
Nobuhiro Ohsugi

Ho Yeong Park, Keiko Tamaki
Hidekazu Ebina, Satohiko Sano
Ryota Sakaguchi, Norifumi Kugai