One of the animators I discovered while watching Dirty Pair was an animator named Saburo Sakamoto, who died around age 61 in 1996. He was an interesting figure for the fact that he was originally involved with the famous Tokiwa-so manga group from the 1950s that included luminaries like Fujio Fujiko and Fujio Akatsuka. Instead of continuing down that path, he changed careers and became an animator, much like fellow Tokiwa-so member Shinichi Suzuki, who eventually went to work for Ryuichi Yokohama at Otogi Pro before co-founding animation studio Studio Zero in 1963 with many of the members of Tokiwa-so. Saburo Sakamoto was primarily involved in Toei and Sunrise TV shows throughout the 70s and 80s, having perhaps most famously been heavily involved as an animation director in the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino productions of the early 80s. In Dirty Pair, he was an animator in episodes 3, 5, 6, 13, 20 and 23 of the TV series.

I've mentioned several important animators who have passed away recently here in the blog, including Reiko Okuyama (1925-2007), Daikichiro Kusube (1934-2005) and Koichi Murata (1939-2006). Not surprisingly, many of the important figures of the very first generation of Japanese animation production are no longer with us - including Yasuji Murata (1896-1966), Kenzo Masaoka (1898-1988) and Noburo Ofuji (1900-1961), perhaps three of the most important figures from the very first generation who paved the way for everyone who came after. Kenzo Masaoka lived to a respectable 90, so he got to see a considerable many of the changes that overtook the industry since he left the world with masterpieces like The Spider and the Tulip (1943) - and not all of them good. More than 60 years later, the latter remains an unsurpassed achievement in many ways.

Two of the important figures of the next generation, Ryuichi Yokoyama (1909-2001) and Masao Kumakawa (1916-2008), also lived into their 90s. Masao Kumakawa worked under director Kenzo Masaoka as an animator, having animated the ladybug in The Spider and the Tulip among many other of the best pieces of animation from the 1940s and 1950s, even going on to work as an animator in the first few classic Toei Doga films until around 1964. Ryuichi Yokoyama, meanwhile, famously founded animation studio Otogi Pro, which I touched very briefly upon way back when and would like to expand upon eventually.

Otogi Pro notably featured one of the great animators of the next generation after Ryuichi Yokoyama: Shinichi Suzuki. Also from the generation of Shinichi Suzuki, but following a very different path from the latter, was Yasuji Mori (1925-1992), who seems to be one of the successors of the work of Masao Kumakawa and Kenzo Masaoka at Nihon Dogasha. Mori in turn went on to train and influence many of the figures of the next generation who worked at Toei Doga in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Daikichiro Kusube and Reiko Okuyama. Chikao Katsui was another now-departed animator of this generation who started out at Toei Doga and went on to work at Mushi Pro. At Mushi Pro, meanwhile, an animator named Shinji Seyama passed away at a prematurely young age just a few years after drawing, among other things, the animation of Aldin walking out into the desert in the very last shot of 1001 Nights. Thankfully many of these animators have lived full lives, but there have been a number of tragically premature deaths, and Seyama's is among the first one that stands out.

Both Koichi Murata and Kazuo Komatsubara (1943-2000), among the founding members of Oh Pro and among the greatest animators of the 1970s and 1980s in Japan, passed away what feels like too early, as did one of the greatest animators of the generation afterwards, Yoshifumi Kondo (1950-1998), who left behind some of the best work of each decade in which he was active right since the year of his debut in 1968.

A number of figures from the next generation have already left us in tragically early deaths, including Junichi Watanabe (1962-2007), a director who started out at Tomonori Kogawa's legendary studio Beebow; Hiroshi Osaka (1963-2007), who was very prolific and much relied-upon for his drawing skills as an animation director, leaving behind much great work as an animation director and animator, including work on most Bones shows of the last decade; and Toshiaki Tetsura (?), among whose most memorable work was his work as visual director, mechanic director and layout supervisor on one of Akiyuki Shinbo's best early works, Soul Taker. Among his last contributions was animation in the first two episodes of Shinbo's masterpiece, Cossette. Among other scenes, he animated the scene in the cafe at the beginning of ep 1. He was also heavily involved in Yamamoto Yoko under Shinbo on the mecha and effects side of things, as well as in the movie Shin Kaitei Gunkan (1995). He had a sharp, refined style as an animator that immediately set him apart.

I've been stuck in a wilderness chalet for the past week, so I've been unable to post here. I've had a chance to watch the first arc (i.e. the first two episodes) of the new series Mononoke directed by Kenji Nakamura as a follow-up to his acclaimed Bakeneko segment of the horror omnibus Ayakashi. I was simultaneously pleased and disappointed when I heard the news that they were making the series. I was glad that we were going to be able to see an entire series directed by Nakamura, who already has an original style despite not having many years under his belt as a director (which makes it particularly nice that the producers gave him a spinoff just because his segment was so popular), but honestly I would have preferred to see him do something new instead of just re-hashing what he'd done in Bakeneko. Bakeneko was great because it was so unexpected and new. But at the same time, I thought it would be interesting to see in what new directions he might push this material. Even if weren't anything new, it would still probably be tremendously watchable stuff, so it seemed like a win-win situation.

Well, this series maintains the same level of quality as Bakeneko in terms of directing and animation and storytelling, so it is no disappointment. Beyond the newness of the directing and the use of the CGI interior, the story of Bakeneko was powerful and interesting in its own right, which was undoubtedly an important part of what made it so watchable. Vivid directing combined with appealing characters and an unusual situation, and the results were great. The story here is also very interesting, reinterpreting the traditional idea of the 'bakemono' with a historically informed perspective. What happened to the women who worked in the red light districts of Edo Japan who happened to get pregnant through their line of work? It had to have happened a lot. What happened to the children? This series opens with an unexpectedly moving story that touches on this topic. This historically informed background makes it all the more engaging.

I was holding out judgment until I saw more than episode 1, which was done by Kenji Nakamura himself, because I wasn't so sure how well the material would hold up in anyone else's hands. Shinbo Akiyuki's work is interesting when he's the one doing the storyboarding and directing, but in a series his style is watered down and completely loses its appeal, and I thought the same thing might happen here. But no, episode 2, which was done by a different team and indeed by a very small team of animators, was almost up to the level of the first. The first built on what made Bakeneko so fresh and new, that use of CGI mapped interiors to create a strong feeling of the characters moving through and inhabiting this vast mazelike space, with the camera zooming around and being moved around into all sorts of different locations constantly. The scene with the camera moving up the stairs here retained that feeling, and generally the camera moved very freely and unexpectedly around the space as before, creating that bewildering feeling of disjointed time and space that Nakamura is so good at creating, mixing the past with the present and the imagined with the real, so that the fabric of the narrative is full of logical gaps and question marks that you have to fill in for yourself, making the experience much more enriching.

I think using the CGI space as the defining concept of the story is a savvy idea, too, since it permits even a small team to create that unique feeling that defines the show without putting too much of an onus on the frames. You just move the camera around to create an interesting spatial feeling. In the end, that's been the defining strategy of anime since the beginning (focus on interesting story and directing to distract from the technical limitations), so it's an interesting update on that.

The animation is allocated like in the original - very spare throughout until being unleashed during climactic moments when the camera whirls around like crazy throughout the CGI space as the monster reveals itself. Takashi Hashimoto has admitted that people tend to turn to him when they need some kind of 'special animation', such as smokes or explosions. In this case the monsters are animated in a very tactile and expressive way when they finally appear on screen. The slow buildup of tension to this burst of interesting animation has great effect. Also typically Japanese is the way that playing around with the shots draws attention away from the lack of animation drawings. All of the action occurs off-screen, and shots shift disjointedly without explanation revealing unexpected sights. We're supposed to piece together what's just happened, keeping the viewer guessing and engaged. I noticed even all of the the 'zashiki warashi' were usually cut-'n'-paste copies colored differently, which was a good method - time-saving and visually satisfying.

Just before this Nakamura would have done episode 10 of Kemonozume, and a while back the first episode of Karas, which are worth checking out alongside Bakeneko to get a picture of this interesting new director's emerging style.

As I was watching ep 60 of Urusei Yatsura to see the Masahito Yamashita part, at one point I was taken by the strange feeling that I was watching Lupin. Not so much because of the fact that the scene in question was an obvious parody of the clock tower scene, but because the animation felt like it could only have been done by a Telecom animator. It turns out it was the work of Shojuro Yamauchi. They went to the effort of getting an animator who had worked on Cagliostro to animate a clock tower parody. Now that is dedication.

Yamauchi seems to have started out at Oh Production along with Kazuhide Tomonaga. His first job I can find is Jacky at Nippon Animation in 1977, after which he did some New Lupin and the first movie before working on every episode of Conan after 8 in 1978. Both of them transferred to Telecom sometime after this, where they worked on Cagliostro in 1979, the Miyazaki Lupin episodes in 1980, Jarinko Chie in 1981 and finally Holmes in 1982. Finally around 1983 several Telecom people including Yamauchi and Tsukasa Tannai transferred to Gallop, from where Yamauchi later worked on Grave of the Fireflies and Tannai on several Ghibli films. I suppose it would have been after Holmes that he worked on the TV Urusei episodes. He and Tsukasa were also in the second film in 1984.

Yamauchi was also one of the other two animators in Yamashita Masahito's famous library episode, of which Oshii provided an encore performance in his Beautiful Dreamer film. I remember Shinya Ohira saying that he saw the episode on TV when it first aired and almost choked on his dinner, and it was one of the episodes that influenced his development as an animator. Seen today I think it can be hard to appreciate Yamashita's early work, but if you project yourself into the dominant style of the period you can imagine the shock that Yamashita's deranged drawings and aberrant timing must have had on fans. It's hard to imagine what he must have been thinking when he drew that animation. In any case, it was a most curious thing to see the work of a Telecom animator side by side with that of Yamashita Masahito. I suppose you could compare it to the impact of seeing Ohira's scene in Spirited Away - it's two completely different ways of visualizing movement placed side by side. If you can posit an Otsuka school, which there isn't really, then Yamauchi belongs there, and Yamashita belongs to what you could call the Kanada school.

Masahito Yamashita is the most famous animator to have developed under the influence of Yoshinori Kanada (happy birthday), the animator active throughout the 1970s who came up with an original style all his own that combined strange posing, exaggerated perspective and an original and more dynamic approach to timing. Yamashita became interested in animation in part due to the influence of having seen Kanada's work on TV. In an age before VHS, it's a tribute to Yamashita's determination and curiosity about the art of animation that he took the initiative of filming animated films in theaters using a handheld video camera in order to be able to study it and figure out how it was made. Perhaps it's this bootstraps approach to learning animation that led to Yamashita's very personal and intuitive approach. Indeed, the work we see in his early years feels similar in spirit to work of gif-animators-turned-pros like Ryochimo in Noein who we can see appearing today. The internet has replaced the grassroots con movement that created that sort of fan ferment.

After Kanada influenced the generation of the 70s, then, Yamashita in turn influenced a whole new generation of folks, but ironically over the years he did a 180 and mostly abandoned the indiosyncratic style that had characterized his early work and attracted fans. Probably a lot of that had to do with pressure, as I'm sure there are some directors who didn't appreciate their animators changing their storyboards and designs and overanimating shots into the red. When Ohira started out he was something of a Yamashita epigone, but similarly found pressure on him to abandon that style, which is what led to him discovering his own.

Yamashita himself staged his debut as a key animator at the precocious age of 18 after a few months as an overimaginative inbetweener filling in the spaces with movements the key animators hadn't indicated. This was in 1980 at Studio No 1, a studio Yoshinori Kanada was involved in. After working there for about a year he left with Hirokazu Ochi to form his own studio, Studio Oz, in 1981, to work on Urusei Yatsura. The "studio" was in fact simply a room where the five animators/friends worked together, not necessarily on the same projects. Studio Hercules, which recently handled a large portion of the work on Basilisk, is a contemporary equivalent - not really a studio in the traditional sense but rather a handful of freelance animators with a similar mindset who work together in the same space, often not even on the same project.

Other animators at Oz included Shinbo Akiyuki (!) and Shinsaku Kozuma. They changed their name to Studio Tome (an ironic title meaning the ubiquitous "still") after they were getting too many phone calls mistaking them for another studio with the same name, and finally formed an actual company called One Pattern in 1984, where Yamashita worked for several years before joining Yoshinori Kanada's Studio Nonmaruto in 1989, rejoining many of the people he'd worked with at Studio No 1 years before. The studio actually took over the space that had up until that point been occupied by Studio 4°C, which had presumably just moved to its present location.

Another "studio" formed around this time was Kaname Production, the studio most famous for producing Birth. The studio was formed by seven young people who left Ashi Production in 1982, and worked on the animation of various shows until 1983 when they produced their own show, Plawres Sanshiro, which featured work by Kanada and Shinsaku Kozuma. The next year Kozuma worked as an animator on Kanada's Birth alongside Yamashita Masahito and Hideki Tamura, another animator who was making a name for himself at the time pushing the Kanada style in new directions. Both Kozuma and Tamura then worked on Kaname's Leda in 1985, and in 1986 Tamura did the piece that perhaps best encapsulates his approach, the opening of Prefectural Earth Defense Force. The same year Kozuma created his own summum opus in the opening of Toei's Ikkiman. A great later piece by Kozuma, and the piece that introduced me to his work, is his animation in episode 54 of Yu Yu Hakusho in 1993, where he worked under ex-Studio Oz comrade Shinbo Akiyuki.

A decade later we can still find people carrying on the style, like Keisuke Watabe, who worked at Studio Z5 for some years in the early 90s before forming his own "studio", Studio Hercules. Studio Z5 was formed in 1980 by two people who had learned the ropes inbetweening Yoshinori Kanada's keys at Studio Z - Hajime Kamegaki and Satoshi Hirayama - together with Hideyuki Hashimoto, and was one of the more famous of these small collectives/"studios" active in the 80s, working on shows like Goshogun, Baldios and Cat's Eye. After being involved in shows like Tetsujin 28 FX, Zenki, Tottemo Lucky Man (with an op by Kanada) and Ray Earth, in 1995 Watabe did some work on Idol Project, including the animation near the end of the opening, that is among his more characteristic.

That same year Hiroyuki Imaishi debuted as an animator on Evangelion, and after a whirlwind development directed his first feature film 8 years later, inviting Watabe and other like-minded animators from all over the place to take part, including... Yamashita, which brings us back full circle. Imaishi, of course, also animated the recent opening of the Musashi game storyboarded/directed by Yoshinori Kanada. So in a way the "school", which is not really a school but more a mindset, is very much still alive.

The concept can be a hard one to define, but if the Telecom school would favor a more stable form, even frame rates and realistic treatment of weight and effects, the Kanada school would favor deformation, unusual frame rates and flashy, geometric effects liberally used. Obviously not every animator is going to have the same approach, as everyone is an individual and an aggregation of influences - many seemingly Kaneda-school animators were just as influenced by Kazuhide Tomonaga, to say nothing of the plethora of other animation out there in the world - and the style has infiltrated the vocabulary of anime to such a degree that almost everyone could be called a Kaneda-school animator to an extent. You can see Kaneda touches almost everywhere now. An upside to the overproliferation of programs right now is that the sheer volume seems to give young animators room to play a little, and there are still people appearing on the scene who seem to be carrying on that playful spirit.

Though this is merely a rushed and far from a complete overview, and there are surely a lot of other people who have made their own contribution to the development of the style, hopefully this gives a sense of the interconnections.

Filmographies: Yoshinori Kanada / Masahito Yamashita / Hiroyuki Imaishi

Though his key animation debut goes back to 1985 in Ninja Senshi Tobikage, the earliest piece I've been able to see from Mitsuo Iso is Wataru 27 from 1988, just because those early shows are that rare. Interestingly, one of those shows is coming out on DVD, namely the third anime version of Gegege no Kitaro, from 1987 (the fourth from 1996 had a few eps directed by Mamoru Hosoda), one of those Toei TV series with no chief director, for which he did inbetween work on ep 88 and then key animation work in four episodes in quick succession near the end. This offers a welcome chance to see some more of his work at this early period, as well as some early work from other people who were starting out at Toei at this time and have gone on to make a name for themselves, like Yasunori Miyazawa (33, 47, 71, 95, 100, AD+KA in 107, the second-to-last episode). Ep 3 has the intriguing combo of Shinbo Akiyuki, Shinsaku Kozuma (his only ep) and Katsuichi Nakatsuru, so perhaps this is where Shinbo got to know Kozuma, whom he later called on for that ep of Yu Yu Hakusho... Also, I've always been curious to see more of the work of Yoshinobu Inano, whose work I know mainly from the non-Itano mecha action in Be Invoked, as he's got a big reputation as one of the more unique animators of the period, and he did a lot of work in the show, including a solo ep. He'd been active with his unique style since many years before, and he reportedly influenced Iso, among others. He animated the ending of the Galaxy Express 999 movie, the parts not done by Iso at the beginning of Gundam 0080 1, and the part where Amuro and Char are talking to each other on horseback in Char's Counterattack, among many other things.

Shigeru Mizuki has long been a personal favorite manga-ka. I don't know how well known he is over here, but I was always amazed by his achievement, which was to handle serious themes like death and war, treated in a totally serious and uncompromising way, totally in his own style, and yet manage to do so in a way that was addressed to all ages and not just adults. He seemed to combine the avant-garde graphic sensibility and focus on psychological and social issues of Garo artists with a broad appeal that none of them had, together with a seemingly bottomless well of brilliant fantasy ideas. His figure drawings aren't really that great, but they have incredible power to convince, and when you get used to them they become downright beautiful. What made him really unique was that he combined these crudely delicious figures with photorealistic backgrounds of run-down buildings and hyper-realistic jungles. The combination was very important to the theme of his stories: The physical detritus of society is the home of his protagonists, who are by association human detritus produced by that society. It's interesting to me that he seems to have become known as a simple teller of children's ghost stories considering the uncompromising subversiveness of his message.

The backgrounds were drawn entirely with pen and with little or no shading, the way Yoshiharu Tsuge did (I think he worked as an assistant under Mizuki for a while, and there's a period when their work looks nearly identical), which is indispensible to the feeling of reality he was trying to achieve. Because despite the way the characters looked and the fantasy that was on display, you always got the feeling that it was grounded in reality. That feeling is something that seems to have been lost these days, probably because people nowadays simply haven't experienced the things that Mizuki Shigeru experienced and depicted in his manga. Through all this he creates an eerily realistic atmosphere that no other manga can approach.

Gegege no Kitaro is his most famous and long-lived story, but it's actually the one I'm least familiar with. I've long avoided the anime versions of this and any of his other work for the obvious reason that what makes Mizuki great cannot be transferred to any other medium. It simply has to be drawn by Mizuki's hand (the poor man only had one; the other was lost in the war) or it's not Mizuki. Where manga nowadays seems drawn to facilitate animation, Mizuki's manga seems to resist animation. His genius was non-transferrable and irreplacable. Now that I think about it, it would be a great achievement if someone could transfer what makes Mizuki great into animation. In that sense, I've long wanted to see Toshio Hirata's version of Sanpei the Kappa, one of Mizuki's masterpieces, to see if he managed to do it, because if anybody could, he could, though at the same time I think that even in hands as capable as his it's still an impossible task.

An interview with Mizuki Shigeru:

http://www.nyartsmagazine.com/pages/nyam_document.php?nid=597&did=1490

In updating the spamfile today to innoculate myself against the latest daily spam attack (you'll sometimes notice 50 spam comments at the top of the latest comments before I get to them), I inadvertently misplaced a comma, with dire consequences. Sorry about that.

Been rather quiet lately because I haven't seen much worth trumpeting about, and the rain is making me feel blah and unmotivated to dig any deeper. To try to fill in the holes in my Norio Matsumoto, I watched a few random old episodes to see if I could spot his work, but there were no major new discoveries. Neo Ranga 41-42 was fairly watchable thanks to Toshiyuki Tsuru's directing, Hirobumi Suzuki's animation directing and Takahiro Kishida's animation. Tsuru, Suzuki and Matsumoto were together again on the least impressive of the Matsumoto Naruto episodes, 48, the only one not by Atsushi Wakabayashi, and interestingly Suzuki and Tsuru were even credited with the 3DCG background in that ep. Around the same time Suzuki handled the photography of certain scenes of Akiyuki Shinbo's Cossette. The way he moved the camera in the latter was quite different and effective, really giving a feeling for a three-dimensional space, but it didn't work so well in the Naruto ep. Still, even the least impressive Matsumoto is far above the norm, and the shot in the latter where a character slips, loses his balance and falls on his back is quintissential Matsumoto in the excellent handling of the center of balance and timing, all expressed with only a few well-placed drawings.

Oh, I did see one thing. Steam Boy. To state the obvious, the animation was most impressive. There were a few scenes here and there where the actions of the characters felt particularly nuanced. There were a lot of familiar names. I was surprised to see Mitsuo Iso credited in the pre-production section for conceptual development. What surprised me most was that there were only seven people credited for the backgrounds. I suppose with nine years that's not impossible, but still. I only wish they had divided the animation credits into character and effect sections to make it easier to figure out. Perhaps work wasn't clearly divided that way. I could picture Toshiyuki Inoue doing either smoke or characters, for instance. I'm wondering how he got the idea to focus on the steam like this. Could it have been in part from seeing how incredible the impact of good FX animation can be after seeing the work of Shinya Ohira, Toshiaki Hontani et al. in his earlier film? It felt like the character animation suffered in the equation. As active as it was, it still felt lacking in oomph, in interesting movement. I rather preferred the way the animation in the earlier film was all over the place to the stability in this film, though it certainly jives with what he was trying to achieve with the film.

Philip asked me to put together a list. As usual with me, I wound up thinking myself into a corner by giving the question a lot more thought than rationally warranted, hounded by pedantic questions that I won't detail here. Suffice it to say that I decided to settle for a humble list of 20 anime TV episodes from the last few years that caught my eye for whatever reason, for the simple reason that anything less openly subjective would be too full of holes, and anything more stringent about quality would be a very short list indeed (besides which the notion of "quality" itself is subjective). Honestly, normally I wouldn't actively recommend most of the items on this list, so be aware of that. I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill this list out. The list is in roughly descending order of preference. So don't kill yourself if you can't find the lower items.

   ▫ 1 ▫    Naruto 133

For Norio Matsumoto's animation of the action scenes. Norio Matsumoto is a prolific TV animator, but this episode has possibly the highest volume of his work. It's his summum opus of sorts.

   ▫ 2 ▫    Paranoia Agent 8

For Satoru Utsunomiya's work (director/storyboard/animation director). Possibly the only episode I've seen over the last few years that is crafted in such a way as to stand entirely on its own, as a solid unit, without the series that gave it birth. If the other episodes are good, this one is great, and stands apart from the others in most respects.

   ▫ 3 ▫    Soul Taker 1

For Akiyuki Shinbo's directing. Later episodes are watered down, so that this is the only episode that feels 100% Shinbo. Shinbo's first fully mature work.

   ▫ 4 ▫    RahXephon 15

For Mitsuo Iso's work (director/storyboard/animation director/animator). Again a classic example of a film that is completely at odds with the containing series. Measured pacing and detailed visuals, and moments of animated genius. Focus on the lush animation and coloring of the rocks.

   ▫ 5 ▫    Haibane Renmei 8

For the directing, animation, story and mood combined, which are all a cut above the other episodes. A fine film that stands well on its own and holds up to revisiting, which I do often. The emotions throughout this series are well handled and strike close to home, but particularly so in this very well-crafted episode.

   ▫ 6 ▫    Tweeny Witches 20

For Yasuhiro Aoki's work (director/storyboard/animation director). Interchangable with his other episodes. A promising new face on the block who emerged in this series with a bold, in-your-face style of storytelling.

   ▫ 7 ▫    Samurai Champloo 18

A representative example of the work of writer Dai Sato/director Sayo Yamamoto in this series.

   ▫ 8 ▫    Popolo Crois (2003) 6

For Kanada Yoshinori's work (storyboard). Harkens back to a style of animation that might have gone the way of the dinosaurs but for folks like Hiroyuki Imaishi, who's involved along with numerous other similarly-inclined animators.

   ▫ 9 ▫    Samurai Seven 7

For Hisashi Mori's delectable animation in the first half, boldly done entirely in his own personal style full of jagged lines and realistically-inspired movements. An exceedingly rare moment when an actual person could be seen beneath the veneer of the dominant anime design style.

   ▫ 10 ▫    Windy Tales 5

For the unique designs and overall artistic conception of the world, highly unrealistic and stylized in a way that blends curiously well with the otherwise very low-key slice-of-life stories that are told, of which this strangely moving, dreamy episode seems exemplary.

   ▫ 11 ▫    Earth Girl Arjuna 9

For Omori Takahiro's work (director/storyboard). A very powerfully directed episode, the subject matter of which was too much for the TV station; they refused to air it.

   ▫ 12 ▫    Kino's Travels 2

A representative example of this well-written series. I was taken by the treatment of the screen. Every shot is totally washed out, as if blinded by the whiteness of the snow, and this grows apace as the story approaches the climax, which is among the series' more affecting.

   ▫ 13 ▫    Planetes 11

A representative example of this series, which against the odds used the sci-fi genre to touch on a variety of topical issues in a somewhat intelligent, albeit melodramatic, way.

   ▫ 14 ▫    Beck 1

For Osamu Kobayashi's work (director/storyboard/writer). The hip, cosmopolitan Kobayashi's taste comes through well here as he makes comparative good of otherwise well-tried subject matter.

   ▫ 15 ▫    Gankutsuoh 6

For Takaaki Wada's work (director/animation director/animator). Working totally with the given design, Wada manages to invest more life=anima(tion) into these characters than anybody else, and his handling of the drama is comparatively convincing, especially for someone who has a long history as an animator and only a short one directing.

   ▫ 16 ▫    King Gainer 1

For no particular reason, though perhaps as a high-quality example of the robot genre, and of recent Yoshiyuki Tomino, with his huge cast of characters and breakneck pacing.

   ▫ 17 ▫    Abenobashi Maho Shotengai 3

For Hiroyuki Imaishi's work (director/storyboard/animation director).

   ▫ 18 ▫    Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu 18

For Yuichiro Sueyoshi's animation of Dama, a rare example of animation that feels like animation in TV anime.

   ▫ 19 ▫    Ojamajo Doremi Dokkan 40

For Mamoru Hosoda's directing, with its humanistic touch and consummate attention to detail.

   ▫ 20 ▫    Here and There, Now and Then 6

For Tadashi Hiramatsu's gritty directing.

Do yourself a favor and read a book instead.

Around the time Mind Game had been completed and was waiting to hit the theaters one year ago, a new Shin-chan movie came out, Kasukabe Boys. For almost a decade Masaaki Yuasa had animated the climaxes for the films, but he hadn't been involved in them since starting work on Cat Soup. Having just seen last year's Shin-chan film, the last directed by Tsutomu Mizushima, I now realize Yuasa had come back to his alma mater right after finishing work on his own film, again to provide the climax. It's animated in such an unabashedly personal style that anyone seeing it will immediately know who animated it. I used to find that Yuichiro Sueyoshi's and Yuasa's styles were rather similar, but the difference here in their scenes is quite stark (Sueyoshi did the brawl - the faces all look straight out of Mind Game) and shows the direction in which Yuasa has continued to evolve. It's great, and kind of shocking, that they would keep those drawings in as is. The wonderfully strange and lively drawings and the incredible freedom of the movement (the soaring shot is particularly characteristic) help to heighten the feeling that this is the climax, and makes it a really exciting sequence. A new Shin-chan film by a new director came out last month (to very bad reviews), but Yuasa and Sueyoshi weren't involved. Reminds me of what happened to the old Toei films - as soon as all the good staff left in the years around 1970, they became pretty much unwatchable.

It's been about a year since the last Wakabayashi/Matsumoto piece for the series, but as hoped by fans, today's Naruto (133, D/S/AD Atsushi Wakabayashi, KA Norio Matsumoto, Atsushi Wakabayashi, Hirobumi Suzuki, Tokuyuki Matsutake, Atsuko Inoue) was indeed the return of 30 and 71, saying which should be enough to know what to expect for anyone who has seen those episodes. The team this time is expanded (Suzuki and Matsutake are both veterans of the genre - Suzuki's the CD, and most recently did CD/AD and some interesting photography in Cossette under ex-Wakabayashi partner Akiyuki Shinbo), and Matsumoto's parts are spread throughout, again presumably the effects. It's rare to see good action in a TV show, much less an entire episode at movie-level quality, and this team has produced among the most impressive action seen anywhere in the last few years in their work on this TV series. Quality over quantity is the keyword. Rather than pumping out episodes, they put in the time and spend time on raising the level of one episode. Their continued efforts to pool all their energy into creating these single, one-off masterpieces is really inspirational and goes against the typical style for TV anime in Japan, which is usually defined as a fight to see how much can be done in an extremely tight schedule. Matsumoto's a great animator because he can handle both, moving between TV limited and film full with the greatest of ease and always producing great results. (viz)

Mamoru Hosoda's new film will be coming out on DVD on July 21.

On rewatching Soultaker 1 today it popped into my head that Yasuhiro Aoki's recent artistic coming out in Arusu reminds me of the appearance of Akiyuki Shinbo on the scene 13 years ago in Yu Yu Hakusho. I hope Aoki has the chance to go as far as Shinbo has in Le Portrait de Petite Cossette, which, as unlikely as it may seem, was probably my favorite item from last year after a certain film. The subject matter isn't really the point. It's all about the style. I don't think I've seen anything in a long, long time, much less in anime, that was such a virtuosic and unrelenting onslaught of unpredictable shots and gorgeously baroque composition, and I applaud the producer who gave him the chance to finally do something 100% his own way. Shinbo is one of the most talented directors that nobody's ever heard of in anime, though there are plenty of those.

One obvious quality Aoki shares with Shinbo is the predilection for stringing together unpredictable compositions in a way that some might say distracts from the story but to me enhances it. A story can be told entirely via dialogue, but as Tadashi Hiramatsu mentioned in this interview, the locus of excitment in directing is the space between the shots, and the compositions. Aoki knows that, and that's what sets him apart. It nagged me for a while what it was that made his work feel different, why the work of the other people in the show felt boring in comparison and worse animated, and finally I hit on the simple fact that he always avoids having a character doing the goldfish on the screen. He plays around with the angles while they're talking in order to avert one of the most common and unsuspected mistakes in anime. Nobody thinks it's a mistake, but he noticed that it was, and figured out a way around it, which shows that he's thinking about his art and not just churning it out on automatic. That small invention immediately hides the quantitative limits of the animation, as he saves his resources for one of those quintissentially anime bursts of full animation that give his episodes a truly powerful feeling of buildup.

The fall lineup has hit the air, and the hilight for me turns out to be Beck ep 1, in which Osamu Kobayashi puts on an amazing one-man show: writer/director/storyboarder of ep 1, in addition to series director, character designer, animator, opening storyboarder/director/animation director, and ending illustrator. Not surprisingly a number of good animators are involved. The first three listed are Ken'ichi Konishi, Norio Matsumoto and Yasunori Miyazawa. The op is nice, with lip-syncing, which is unusual in anime, and it features Takeshi Honda, Tadashi Hiramatsu, Yusuke Yoshigaki. I hope this trend continues throughout the rest of the series. This is a nice followup to Paranoia Agent for Madhouse. It's good to see them continuing to use good home-grown animators rather than just outsourcing everything.

As far as I know this is Osamu Kobayashi's directing debut, and it has that unpolished feeling of youth and inexperience. But that's not a bad thing. By no means. It feels great to see someone actually spreading his wings and trying to find himself in anime rather than just following the crowd and pumping out cookie-cutter characters and situations. This is an auspicious debut. I can't think of another series in recent memory that had one man behind the visuals and the directing like this, and that gives it a real sense of unity. Also it's very rare for an anime director to also go to the trouble of writing an episode like Kobayashi has done here. That reveals the depth of his devotion to the task of making this thing good. Apparently he event did the "location hunting" himself, basing a lot of the scenes on actual places around Tokyo (like the ramen booth) that he went around and photographed himself. He probably felt this was his chance to prove himself to the world, and I'm impressed with the result. It's this sort of love that's missing most from anime these days.

The rest of the shows I had the misfortune to sample are depressing proof of the poverty of imagination in anime these days, with most virtually indistinguishable from one another. I'm eager for this moe fad to pass. Akiyuki Shinbo even did one, strangely enough: Nanoha. It's worth mentioning only becuase Ko Yoshinari did animation in the first episode. I think I remember hearing that in his section in the opening of FMA he handled the CG effects for his shots, and it looks like he did the same thing here. It's an impressive few shots, in what appears to be hitokoma or 1 cel/frame, clashing nicely with the rest of the episode. Yet another series by Shinbo started at the same time, Moon Phase, this time another vampire type thing more in line with his past work, but he didn't do anything in either first eps, so they're rather forgettable.

One of the series I was looking forward to somewhat but that has left me a little dissatisfied so far (if not disappointed, because I was half expecting it, and there's still room for improvement) is Takashi Nakamura's Fantastic Children. Again it's hard to understand why he feels he has to go through all those contortions, especially right at the beginning. If it's an attempt to pull the viewers in, it doesn't work, because it just leaves one in the lurch, dangling carrots the whole way without providing any satisfaction. Learn from Miyazaki. He didn't have to do that in Conan. Also, he jumps right into the deep end with the drama, which is a bad gamble, because without knowing what's going on it's impossible to empathise with what any of the characters are experiencing, so it's just kind of uncomfortable. One interesting thing I noticed was the use of hitokoma in certain transitional shots. I wonder whose idea this was? It creates a nice feeling of luxury, when in fact the animation is otherwise rather bland. It might be a Nippon Animation thing. I noticed that in a few of the late WMT series.

If anything, the best TV episode in recent weeks was episode 20 of Tweeny Witches, another one-man-orchestra episode by Yasuhiro Aoki. I'd say it's his best episode yet. He tries out all sorts of interesting ideas in the directing. I can't think of another figure striving to do more new and interesting things with directing on TV right now than him. Aside from that, Sunrise's Mai Hime was a dreadful concession to moe, and Haruka naru toki no naka de was an utterly pedestrian shojo anime, but done with amazing zeal and energy by the women at Yumeta Co. Not TV but new is the first ep of Gainax's revival of Aim for the Top, by Kazuya Tsurumaki. I was a little wary after seeing the trailer, hoping the actual episode wouldn't be like that, but it was, and frankly it left me puzzled. It seemed like a mess. There was no dramatic drive whatsoever. The animation was certainly spectacular and on par with FLCL in certain spots (which only makes sense because it's largely the same production staff) but I wasn't convinced by the directing or the writing. I don't know what they were trying to do, but it just felt clunky and meandering. Still, there's no way to know what's going to happen from here on out, so it's not a lost cause.

I don't know if it's record-breaking or not, but more than 20 different TV series starting within about the same week (to say nothing of those still running) seems indicative of the anime industry being spread out way too thin.

And for this reason sometimes we do not know, when such stimuli occur in our soul from an earlier sensation, whether the phenomenon is due to sensation, and we are in doubt whether it is memory or not. (On Memory and Recollection)

I'm typing at you through shades because I lost my glasses while swimming in a lake today.

A few random bits before getting down to business.

It turns out Canada is about to rectify the slip of having let Japan beat them to the McLaren DVD set -- in a big way. Not three, four, five or six, but SEVEN DVDs. The NFB is going to be releasing The Master's Edition DVD set sometime in early 2005. This is going to be way better than the Japanese set. (The Japanese aren't very good with extras.)

I had a chance to watch the first episode of Soul Taker the other day, and was duly impressed. I had no idea Shinbo Akiyuki had managed to go this far with his style already. I mentioned his work in Yu Yu Hakusho in a previous post, and it was great to see that he has continued to develop his style. The first episode was fantastic. I get the impression the later episodes get a little watered down, which is only natural; he only storyboarded the first ep. The first ep was enough. At least here's a guy who's doing something moody and stylish and original on TV and it's not just another rip-off of Evangelion. I was actually disappointed to find out there was a story to the first episode upon further viewings. I so loved the bewildering randomness and colorfulness of it all that hits you on that first viewing.

As promised, here's a rough translation of that Newtype interview with Masaaki Yuasa, Koji Morimoto and Shin'ichiro Watanabe. Many thanks to Manuloz! Anyone else?

Morimoto: We'd been thinking of doing Mind Game at Studio 4C for a while when I saw Cat Soup, and I knew right then and there that Yuasa was the only man for the job. It was like a marriage made in heaven. (laughs)

Yuasa: My reaction was: Are you sure you want ME to do it?? Hey, so long as you're sure, I'll do it. But just don't come crying to me afterwards! (laughs) The original manga has a really improvised feel to it, like someone just wrote it in one sitting without thinking it out ahead of time. I wanted to transfer that feeling into the movie. To keep the images really loose and unpredictable, almost slapdash. Like I just decided to throw in some live action here, some CG there, without any thought, just for kicks. (laughs) That's what I hope the movie feels like when you're watching it, sort of unfinished, improvised, like a brainstorm in progress.

Morimoto: Rough drawings can have a lot more charm, but it's hard to make them work in a film. On the other hand, if you worry too much about how a drawing will look on the screen, it comes out looking too clean, without any life, without zip. It's hard to find the right balance between the two.

Watanabe: Just because you go and draw a half-assed picture doesn't mean it'll look "rough" on the screen. (laughs) You really have to calculate every line to get that rough feeling right.

Morimoto: The tension was palpable over in Yuasa's section. The two of us were next door working on Animatrix, and it looked like they were having so much fun over there. (laughs)

Watanabe: What with all these bizarre pictures they had pasted up all over the walls, it was like, what the heck kind of a movie are they making over there?! (laughs) I read the manga and it was great. But I thought, it would be such a shame to put just your everyday ordinary movie music for a manga like this! That would ruin it! (laughs) But nobody seemed to know who to get to do the music, so I sort of elected myself to the post of Music Producer. (laughs)

Yuasa: It's funny, I only heard about that much later. (laughs) One day they say to me, "Oh yeah, by the way, Watanabe's taking care of the music." "He is!?" (laughs) I had a certain idea of what I wanted, but I just didn't know who to turn to...

Watanabe: Yuasa-san had made a sort of compilation tape of songs to give a sense of what he wanted... and man, it was just all over the place! (laughs) From one scene to the next you'd jump from one song to something wildly different. Really not the sort of thing a normal person would request. (laughs) So I thought the only person for the job was the almighty Seiichi Yamamoto, the king of the alternative music scene. He'd done just about every sort of music imaginable. And his music has just the sort of rough-edged feeling that would fit the film. Plus they're both from Osaka! (laughs)

Morimoto: The music was perfect, it was just amazing. You know, my kids were watching the film the other day, and my wife turned it off at a certain point. It was the sex scene. She was pissed. "What the hell are you showing our kids!?" (laughs)

Yuasa: Aw, it's not that bad. (laughs)

Watanabe: That's an incredible scene.

Morimoto: I was amazed you'd reveal so much about yourself on the screen like that: "So this is the kind of sex Yuasa-san has!" (laughs)

Yuasa: No, trust me, I haven't revealed anything. (laughs) I'm much more... (pauses)

Watanabe: Not like that. (laughs)

Yuasa: I'm hoping the film is good entertainment, that's all... If people leave the theater feeling they had a good time, then I'll be satisfied. With a little luck maybe they'll see the world a little differently afterwards, but basically it's good, old-fashioned entertainment to appeal to the whole family. (all three burst out laughing)

Watanabe: I wonder... (laughs)