Masaaki Yuasa has a new TV series starting in April entitled Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei, again made at Madhouse. I haven't seen an official English title, but it needs one, cause it sounds interesting in Japanese but is pretty unwieldy to translate: Four and a half mat myth compendium. But then again, maybe that's a perfectly sound anime title, if A Certain Scientific Railgun is kosher. Nobutake Ito is again the character designer. The designs are extremely attractive, with the visual sensibility of Taisho-era illustrations, and again a big change from everything the team has done before. Judging by some of the movement in the second half of the video clip visible on the site now, I'm sure Nobutake Ito and the animators will be creating some great movement with these designs. The color design looks vivid and wild in the vein of Mind Game, and the chamber music is quite an interesting and unusual sound for anime. The script sounds cerebral and witty, the series being based on a novel this time around. This promises to be the best thing since... well, Yuasa's last project.

Te Wei, one of the great animation artists of the last century, passed away a short time ago. He was the originator and master of the brush ink animation style. He didn't produce many shorts in his patented style, but the three that he did shine on decades later as unsurpassed masterpieces of serene beauty. They seem to me to bridge the centuries and channel the poetry of another age. Watch them if you haven't. It's time for me to revisit them to remember this great artist.

I'd like to see another good feature from Korea. Mari iyagi was great, but Yobi was disappointing, and Wonderful Days I didn't like as a film because I felt it too indebted to anime, remarkably technically adept though it was. Aachi & Ssipak, if you're able to stomach the over-the-top crassness and violence, was much more creative and interesting as a concept and just plain fun, with some excitingly choreographed, well-animated action sequences, and a much more original vision.

On a related note, I just saw the crass and violent Dante's Inferno, and it featured work by a number of Korean studios, some of it quite good. It's an awful film that's jettisoned the original's poetry for a linear first-person slasher video game with one level boss after another, and is interesting almost solely for the variety of styles brought to the table by the different studios. I usually like this sort of thing by default because I enjoy the idea of seeing the same subject interpreted by different visual artist, and I did enjoy it in that sense, but in the end it's more one of those films you feel obliged to see because there happens to be some technically worthwhile work in it than one that you watch because it's actually good. It wasn't even the violence and crass visuals that put me off so much as the inept script that yammers away constantly, non-stop in every single solitary shot. That's one thing that makes it patently obvious that the script was written by a westerner - American animated features don't know when to shut up. They're uninterested in or incapable of letting the visuals or the atmosphere do the talking, Pixar being a notable new exception.

There have been a number of multi-studio anime omnibuses in the last few years, but where this differs is that it's one continuous story, so that from one moment to the next, in the same uninterrupted narrative flow, the character designs, art, animation and directing suddenly do a 180. I personally enjoyed it. And I'm actually inclined to suspect that this approach wouldn't be that shocking or off-putting to general audiences, as people have become much more acclimatized to visual experimentation in recent years. Heck, seeing these different approaches side by side was the only redeeming feature of what otherwise just felt like a stupid video game - and what's worse, a video game where you don't even have any control. Which is ironic considering the source material is one of the great poems of western literature. Sadly, there's some decent work in this film. I just hope that it doesn't always take shallow projects like this for talent to get work.

The opening by Film Roman sure isn't where the decent work comes. The good work starts quite a ways in after the Saturday morning cartoon animation, with the section from Manglobe directed by Shukou Murase, which is visually the sleekest and overall one of the strongest in the film. The pacing is cinematic and the staging elegant and formal. The drawings are delicate and the faces realistically drawn, albeit in a somewhat 'generic western face' kind of way. Ironic that the Japanese can draw a better westerner than a western studio. (though the first section, too, appears to have been entirely animated by Korean studios) Murase not only directed but was character designer and his own sakkan, so he's in large part to thank for the exceptional quality of the section. Nobutake Ito is one of the animators in his section.

The next section from Dongwoo directed by Jong-Sik Nam, looks very different, much more loose and cartoony, with lots of movement going on constantly. The drawings were a little too crude for my taste, but there were a few moments that stood out as having interesting movement, and generally I appreciate that it moves a lot. The first section moves a lot too, but all of the movement sucks.

It was the next two sections that most impressed me. The fourth section looked to me like the work of a Japanese studio, with its very Kanada-ish approach to movement, while the fifth section immediately struck me as the work of a Korean studio. Surprisingly, both were the work of the same Korean studio - JM Animation. Looking into it, I now see that JM Animation is the studio behind Wonderful Days, which makes sense. I haven't watched it, but JM Animation produced a piece of animation for MTV last year on the subject of human trafficking. (important subject, but looks lame) Both sections four and five are very strong in terms of the visuals and directing. I particularly liked section 5, directed by Kim Sangjin, with its excellently rendered grotesque character designs. This section's visuals are some of the more unique and assured in the film. Section four, directed by Lee Seunggyu, is quite well done, with a more unified stylization of the characters than the previous section, where the characters just look kind of sloppily drawn. I thought they were a little too ruly and clean for this material and preferred the edgy shapes of the fifth section.

The last section, from Production I.G. and directed by a surprising face for the studio, Yasuomi Umetsu, was well-produced but surprisingly dull considering the pedigree. 'Stolid' is the term that comes to mind. The pacing was sluggish and the staging seemed badly done. There are way too many distant or oblique shots striving for a cinematic feel that comes off better in the Manglobe film. The Korean and Japanese films here batray a clearly different approach to presenting the material, with more of a focus on the characters acting things out in the Korean films, but more oblique framing and slow pans or moody distant shots for you to savor the drawings and framing in the Japanese films. It's like the Japanese approach their animation with the mentality of live-action cinematographers, and they try to animate things in a realistic way to achieve impact, whereas the Koreans know they're making animation and achieve impact through more expressive animation and less of an obsession on detail and realistic timing and careful framing. Animators include Koichi Arai, Seiichi Nakatani, Nobutoshi Ogura, Nozomu Abe.

Continuing in my quest to dig up obscure old OVAs, Bounty Dog maybe isn't that obscure but it's another older OVA I never saw back then but just checked out. What jumps out at you first about this thing is the color. For some reason the whole thing has this weird sickly yellow sepia tone that's kind of nauseating to look at and doesn't really make any sense artistically. There is some decent mech drawing and animation, but nothing extravagant. The character drawings aren't interesting, and the directing aims for a sort of gritty low-key realism seemingly inspired by Patlabor 2 from the year before, but it doesn't work, not helped by bad art and an uninspired story with no interesting characters, and just feels sluggish and boring. Not nearly as interesting as some of the other OVAs made around this time. Animators in ep 1 include Toshiyuki Tsuru and Takahiro Kishida. Animators in ep 2 include Yasuhiro Seo, Hiroyuki Morita, Masahito Yamashita, Masahiro Koyama, Nobuyoshi Habara (under his Mamoru Konoe pen name), Toru Yoshida, Toshihiro Kawano, Tomohiro Hirata, Tadashi Itazaki.

Riki-oh is another 2-episode OVA from this period - this one from studio Magic Bus from 1989 and 1990. Toei did a great 6-OVA series called Crying Freeman in this vein of big manly muscle men committing acts of gory violence right around the same time, and theirs is infinitely better in all respects - story, directing and animation. Riki-oh is like a lame knock-off of Crying Freeman. The two episodes are an interesting study in contrasts in terms of how to handle the 'macho style' - in episode 1 the drawings are by Yasuhiro Seo, whom I remember for a solo episode he did in Gankutsuoh, and they're great, really bringing alive the personality of the villains through densely rendered drawings full of lines and ruffles that give each of the grotesquely ugly villains' faces a unique look. The second episode is very different, with character designs by Akio Sugino. The bodies and faces are drawn a lot sleeker and smoother and without the grotesque detail that's the whole raison d'etre of this drawing style, and without good drawings, there's very little to maintain interest. The animation isn't particularly remarkable per se; it's more about the drawings themselves, which make this ridiculous material kind of fun to watch with an ironic mindset. I noticed two interesting faces in the inbetween credits: Kenji Mizuhata in ep 1 and Shuichi Kaneko in ep 2.

Three animal shorts for you:

Sankichi and Kojoro from Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, by Hirokazu Fukuhara.

Dreams by Chie Arai.

Old Fangs by Adrien Merigeau.

The last one was sent to me by 'sanafabich', and I really liked it. A number of commenters have noted some astute criticisms, and I agree with some of them, but lack of quicker beats isn't something that bothered me about the film. In fact, I think that that is one of the film's main assets. Slow pacing can be a hard thing to pull off, and a shot without dialogue is anathema to most ADD-afflicted western animation, but good filmmaking isn't just about cramming in as much as possible. It's about creating a space for a story to breathe, and I think they've found a nice style for the material they wanted to convey. I like that they inserted those shots of live-action leaves at the beginning. I think the designs are great, meshing well with the stylized, angular backgrounds. The music is spot-on. I think it's a pretty ambitious subject to tackle, especially using those designs, and I like how the film creates an atmosphere midway between real life and a fable. It does a decent job of evoking some weighty themes with very few words - the chasm that separates us from our memories of the distant past, the desire to reconnect with our estranged loved ones. Of course, it does feel like something is missing, as it doesn't quite achieve a strong enough impact. It all remains a bit too oblique and hinted-at. Maybe it's that the two friends accompanying the young wolf don't seem to serve much purpose, or the storytelling is a little too clipped, or that I don't know what the little wormy thing the father was holding was, or the brief glimpses of the boy's childhood seemed kind of random and unnecessary, or the dialogue wasn't necessary... not sure. But I still love the visuals and the directing sensibility - the way that random shot of the crows scuffling was inserted at just that moment was just magic. I find it a much more interesting and enjoyable film than a lot of more popular and laboriously produced shorts I've seen in the last year.

I'm with Charles Huettner about this list of the top 10 animated features of the 2000s. Here's my list:

Waking Life
Mind Game
Waltz with Bashir
My Dog Tulip
Persepolis
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Azur et Asmar
Secret of Kells
Mari iyagi
Les triplettes de Belleville

I think the other list caters way too much to classical western animation aesthetics. Even Spirited Away seems like it's there only because it's the closest fit of any non-western animated feature within that aesthetic. The key thing to remember is that each list is a reflection of the writer of the list, which is why I prefer not to pretend to be objective. These are ten of the 'more interesting' animated films made in the last decade. IMO. I feel bad leaving out a lot of the great anime films, but that would probably be a different list. What I value is when a film carves out its own narrative and visual ethos and its technique complements the material, rather than simply relying on some classical template the way most big-studio western features do, and I think most of the films above do that to a greater or lesser extent. So many films are made each year around the world now, though, so I wonder if there are any really great films that I missed. I know of a number of interesting-sounding features from the last few years that I'm curious to see: $9.99, The District, Princess, Mary and Max, Legend of the Sky Kingdom, We are the strange, Blood tea and red string... It would be nice to hear what people with a more international bent think are the ten most interesting films of the last ten years.

Many of the more significant anime directors of the 1970s and 1980s learned the ropes at Toei Doga or Mushi Pro in the 1960s. The different approaches to animated filmmaking learned at each respective studio consequently provide the foundation for these directors. Some started out at Toei Doga but migrated to Mushi Pro when it was founded, and flowered as artists there. Such is the case with Rintaro, who after starting out at Toei Doga moved to Mushi Pro, where he debuted as a director on Atom in 1963, and went on to develop one of the most identifiable and idiosyncratic directing styles of any anime director. He's one of the best representatives of the Mushi Pro school of animated filmmaking.

It's difficult to define the Toei Doga/Mushi Pro schools, as every director is a unique individual with his own personal proclivities and influences, and there's no reason to needlessly shoehorn creativity into a box. But one very basic notions that understandably underlies many of the ex-Mushi Pro directors is a more image-based storytelling style. That doesn't mean ex-Toei animators can't create beautiful visuals, of course. And Rintaro's films have some of the lushest animation out there; it's not a black and white issue. But you might say the visuals are the aesthetic object that is constantly played with and reinvented from project to project, rather than merely serving as a tool to tell a story, in Mushi Pro alumni like Rintaro. You can obviously trace this back to the sort of animated filmmaking that had to be done on Atom, where they didn't have the means to use lots of animation drawings, so they had to make due with still shots and fancy camerawork to hold the audience's attention.

One of Rintaro's most significant early works would be as director of Sabu to Ichi Torimonohikae, a series that built on this approach where interesting directing and still drawings carry the narrative forward. It was groundbreaking when it was released in 1968 due to its adult and avant garde atmosphere. Just as the 'style' of Atom was to a great extent the product of necessity, so was the style of Sabu. Much of what makes anime identifiable is the little tricks that were devised to make limited animation more interesting in this way, and Sabu seems to have been one of the '60s shows where stylized fudges were devised, and these fudges turned out to be so catchy and cool looking that they would later become favored over conventional expressions.

One example from Sabu is a scene where a character is slashed by a sword. They didn't have the means of actually animating the whole action, so instead, first they showed a drawing of the character swinging the sword; then they inserted a quick 6 or 7 frames of a drawing that is completely black except for having a single straight white line running diagonally and a bright spot of light shining in the middle of the line; and then they cut to a drawing of the character slashed by the sword. This is illustrative of how style is often a matter of convenience adopted as a product of necessity, rather than being purely voluntary.

To bring this back to the matter at hand, I find that Rintaro is a director who creates his best work when he is able to improvise in images the way great jazz artists improvise with music. The metaphor isn't random, of course, because Rintaro is known for being a jazz musician on the side. As it happens, jazz plays an important part in a 1987 OVA he directed entitled Take the X Train. The title of the film pays homage to the famous Duke Ellington standard Take the "A" Train, and for the soundtrack Rintaro got one of Japan's best jazz artists, pianist Yosuke Yamashita, to provide a soundtrack improvised on the theme of Take the "A" Train. The jazz metaphor, then, is explicit in this case, and the film itself has a playful looseness about it that shows this artist at his most instinctive, free and appealing.

Continuing with jazz metaphor, Rintaro has himself likened the act of creating animation to the act of a jazz trio creating music. The members of the trio, in this case, would be the director, the animation director and the art director. What makes Rintaro so identifiable isn't any one style, although his quirky directing certainly has identifiable traits from film to film. It seems to be more that, in every film, the animation is expressing itself, and the art is expressing itself, all while the directing is expressing itself. It's not art and animation being subservient to the directing. All three stand on the same footing and contribute their voice to the harmony.

Take the X Train is a very good example of this approach. Each of the three elements is extremely appealing in its own right, and together they help create a very unique little film. Like Isao Takahata, what defines Rintaro isn't a particular drawing style. His style changes from film to film, because he collaborates with different talented animators each time to devise a style of animation suited to the material at hand. In this case, as with the short Kenji Miyazawa OVA I mentioned in the last post, he got a very talented animator by the name of Yoshinori Kanemori to design the characters and act as the animation director.

Kanemori started out around 1971 at a small subcontracting studio called Asahi Film, where he worked on Toei shows like Gegege no Kitaro. He then quit and briefly worked at two other studios before founding his own studio, Studio Bird, in 1976. From Studio Bird, starting with Galaxy Express 999 in 1978, he and fellow members Yoshinobu Inano and Hiroshi Oikawa acted as the central staff in a number of Toei productions throughout the 1980s, both designing and helping to maintain a high level of animated quality, including Stop!! Hibari-kun in 1983 and the third Gegege no Kitaro series in 1985. You can see the rudiments of the style of Take the X Train in the drawings of the adults that he did in the Studio Bird episodes of Hibari-kun, such as episode 2.

Kanemori has a way of drawing the face like no other anime designer out there, and Take the X Train is a delight to watch because of his drawings. The faces are very three-dimensional, with the lips, nose, chin, jaw and other curves all exaggerated in a really skillful caricatural way. The expressions are funny and believable, the face contorting and being pulled and stretched very elastically to emphasize a certain feature or expression. I like that the faces feel identifiably Japanese despite being so stylized. The faces are more real in the way the nose is clearly drawn like it would be on a human face, with actual nostrils. The lips protrude from the face, the ears stick out, and the teeth are clearly drawn. But you wouldn't call his drawings realistic.

The designs look very peculiar at first sight, but that's not a bad thing - it's a refreshing shock and a change from the homogeneous look of everything else. If anything, after seeing this, it makes you wonder why everything else looks so boring. They're great because they're based on this animator's observation of reality, arranged into a creative form by his imagination, rather than being merely based on an industry template. I love Yoshinori Kanemori's work because he feels like a real designer who has come up with his own approach to designing and bringing characters to life.

The art director is Masashi Aoki, and the art directing is quite interesting in its own right. The art is pop in its sensibility and coloring, and the film is full of humorous, unrealistic, formalist compositions. The layout of the screen at the beginning of the film, pictured atop, is typical of the art, with its weird elements in the various parts of the screen - random billboards in the top left, a big picture of a woman's behind in a thong in the top right, and the attendees at the meeting strung like beads along the bottom of the screen facing us, as if it were the last supper according to Andy Warhol or something.

Every once in a while throughout the film, little thought bubbles or onomatopoeia will pop up next to a character's head and display some incongruous text. When the main character sees a fancy car drive past, the text "AMERICAN OFFROAD MACHINE" appears in a speech bubble above the protagonist's head in typically quirky and ironic Rintaro fashion. There's always some fun and strange thing going on with the images on the screen, be it the composition, the animation or the directing.

The presentation of this strange story is typical of Rintaro in the way linear narrative flow is de-emphasized in favor of staccato, panel-based storytelling. It's like we jump from one interesting animated painting to another, each replete with its own miniature story. That said, the film has a satisfying structure, starting off slowly introducing the protagonist in the funny and visually playful first half, and building up to a burst of kinetic action in the second half.

In the first half, there's one of the funniest sex scenes I've ever seen in animation. The sex is treated frankly, with adult humor, rather than with the usual childish prurience with which the subject is handled in anime. The advent of the OVA must have been appreciated by directors like Rintaro for how it afforded the opportunity to treat the subject of sex for the first time. (Shinya Ohira regretted having to cut the length of the sex scene in his Antique Shop OVA from a few years later.)

In the second half, Rintaro creates some wonderfully memorable images out of the X train, which is embodied in the form of lightning that flows and writhes dynamically around the pitch black screen in a manner reminiscent of Yoshinori Kanada's fire dragon in Harmageddon. Rintaro creates some truly thrilling shots in the climax, with the action being depicted not realistically, but in the very stylized way that he was so good at. For example, when the protagonist's truck hits the X-train, instead of animating it all, it's shown as a very detailed slo-mo pan of the van with lots of debris drifting past on various layers moving at different speeds, with the background flashing black and white. It's a classic example of Rintaro's skill at coming up with interesting visuals using minimal means. The character animation and art rules the first half, and the dynamic and exciting directing and effects animation rules the second. Also, the free jazz going crazy during this climactic sequence achieves a really amazing effect, making for a perfect unity of animation, directing and sound.

This film is the ultimate example of Mushi Pro-style visual storytelling. I love the pacing of this film, because it feels like Rintaro at his most unfeigned and authentic, doing what he loves best - having fun and creating sequences of images that feel good and feel right. As if to mirror how much fun he's having jamming to this tune, he occasionally inserts cards with shorts English phrases, like in the old silent movies, with interjections that sounds like something you might hear during a jazz session. This is one of the craziest, most unusual and fun OVAs ever made. There was certainly nothing like it back then, and after 20 years it still looks and feels just as crazy and fresh.

Each era in the history of anime has its distinguishing qualities. One of my favorite periods is 1990-1995, when you get OVAs with a sort of crazed energy in the directing and storytelling, and realistically tinged yet fun and manic animation. Unlike in the late 80s, one of the things in the air at this period was realism, presumably influenced by things like Akira, and a lot of animators were producing realistic yet highly expressive and individualistic animation that after all these years remains extremely appealing, sitting as it does comfortably in the zone between pure, stale realism and over-the-top Kanada-school chaos.

The pinnacle of this kind of OVA is probably Hakkenden, which is representative of this era in its very unbalanced approach to the animation in the way a lot of good animators with very different styles are thrown together into a single film without being unified. The result was a film with a lot of variety in the style of animation, to say nothing of the characters' faces, which seem to look different in every shot. 3x3 Eyes is another OVA from this period with a similar sort of epic but hyperactive storytelling and realistically influenced but very expressive animated energy. The OVA has been an important outlet for the more outre urges in anime, offering unique freedoms in storytelling and animation, and there is a lot of good animation buried here and there over the years.

I just ran across a fairly obscure OVA from 1993 entitled Crimson Wolf, directed by FX animator Shoichi Masuo, that seems like another good representative of this period of OVA history. It reminds of Hakkenden in its frenzied directing and raw and extremely uneven but frequently exciting animation. I actually sought this thing out because I saw it in his filmography and was curious to see what an OVA directed by this great animator might look like, and more importantly, if it might not have some good animation. Even if they are often not very good, I find that the very first few films directed by great animators are often fun and crazy and full of great animation. Ichiro Itano's Battle Royale High School comes to mind as just such an example from the previous period in OVA history - insane and ridiculous fun with lots of fighting and very uneven but always lively and occasionally awesome animation. Much to my delight, such indeed turned out to be the case with this film.

Crimson Wolf is about as manic and crazed as they come, and I mean that as a compliment. This OVA exemplifies many of the qualities that first attracted me to anime, with its breakneck pace and story cramming in way too much information for its own good. It's an unpredictable and implausible mishmash of car chases, shower scenes, kung-fu fighting, sex, political intrigue, and cybernetic reincarnations of Genghis Khan out to take over the world. In other words, everything that makes anime great.

The animation is quite an interesting beast. Most of the time the drawings are nothing more than functional, but in quite a few spots the quality suddenly jumps, as the baton has obviously been handed to a great animator with a great sense of timing and drawing. The fighting scenes usually have a dynamic and heavy feeling to the movement reminiscent of Tatsuyuki Tanaka's dojo fight in episode 9 of Hakkenden, with its huge hands and limbs flailing about wildly in an exaggerated but tremendously entertaining fashion.

Typical of this period, many of these scenes just scream a particular animator in the idiosyncrasy of the drawing and movement. The most prominent such scene is the scene that takes place in the woman's apartment, where she is attacked in the shower. The drawings and movement here just scream Norimoto Tokura. I've long wanted to see more from Tokura in the style and quality of the work he did in the Lion and Pelican short in the Ai Monogatari omnibus film that was released the same year as Crimson Wolf. It had a rich and dynamic approach to the animation that seemed like one of the best representatives of this era's unique animation mindset. The scene in the apartment here is probably the best thing I've seen from him after Lion and Pelican. It's a bit rougher around the edges, but it's got the same very fluid and detailed body movement and distinctive aggressive, bulky way of rendering the form of the face. I've attached a pic from the two at right for reference. I know the similarity is not that obvious from these pictures, but these are the best comparison shots I could find.

The most impressive scene in the film in terms of the animation, unsurprisingly, is the climax, with its extremely fluid and well rendered dragons flying through the air. It's the best dragon climax I've seen since the climax with the little prince fighting the hydras in Little Prince & the 8-Headed Dragon, animated by Yasuo Otsuka with the help of Sadao Tsukioka. It seems clearly like the work of Toshiaki Hontani, another great FX animator. It's not surprising that a film directed by Shoichi Masuo would be brought to a climax by an extravaganza of great FX animation, and Hontani was the perfect animator to use to give this scene its requisite gravitas and power. Nobody knows how to integrate good FX like a good FX animator.

What makes me suspect the climax to have been done by Hontani is the similarity of the smoke to the smoke he did in the capsule breaking open scene in Akira, with its heavy, deliberate movement of each bulge in the cloud. The dragon is also animated with the same minute attention to detail that contrasts dramatically with the more crudely expressive animation in the rest of the film. The animation convincingly portrays the scale of the scene and the massiveness of the dragon, and is one of the better examples in anime of how proper casting of a great animator can make a scene have a strong impact on the viewer. This definitely feels like the best thing I've seen from Hontani after his work in Akira. I'd like to see what other animation he did around this period, to see if he did anything else in this vein.

There were also a number of explosions here and there throughout the film that were drawn in a distinctive pink, hazy style that is the distinguishing trademark of a talented but little-known FX animator named Hideaki Anno. Compare the effects drawn by Shinya Ohira, Toshiaki Hontani and Hideaki Anno to see just how dramatically even effects animators differ. Every animator can come up with a different way of expressing even the exact same natural phenomenon. That's what makes animation beautiful. Hiroyuki Kitakubo is also there as an animator, although I have no idea what his style was like.

By some lucky stroke, yesterday as I was browsing through a Japanese second-hand book shop, I found a copy of the "Yoshinori Kanada Special" book that was published in 1982 by Tokuma Shoten. It's undoubtedly the single best book published on Yoshinori Kanada, and probably among the better anywhere on a single animator. It is jam-packed with Yoshinori Kanada's awesome, loose, free drawings, which are massively invigorating to look at. I find the freedom of his drawings not only appealing, but liberating. It's the same feeling I get from his animation. I hope that there will be an updated and expanded version of this book published soon, supplementing the coverage of his first 12 years in this book with the last 25 years of his career. This book was published before Birth was released in 1984, and contains a lot of conceptual sketches for the film, as well as scads of genga from all of his most important work up until then. Also, I love the tag-line: Now, The Super-Hero "IKO" Shoots Your Anime-Spirit!

There's an essay by Hayao Miyazaki about Kanada at the end. Kanada had never worked for Miyazaki at this time, but was to do so soon on Nausicaa, for reasons that will become obvious below. I like how throughout his career Miyazaki regularly picked out great new animators outside of his circle of connections like Kanada, and more recently Ohira - both animators who stylistically hardly seem suited to a Miyazaki film - and invited them to work on his films, utilizing their skill as animators while allowing them to do work that preserved their individuality to an extent. Anyway, here's my translation. It's quite old, I know, but most of the things he says remain relevant and insightful about Kanada and about animators in general. His imaginary reconstruction of Kanada's development is quite perceptive and continues to apply today to many animators. Miyazaki himself, after all, must have gone through much the same process.

He's been true to himself throughout his work. - Hayao Miyazaki

Around the time we were wrapping on Cagliostro's Castle, I remember one day Tomonaga Kazuhide coming up to me and saying how he thought "This Kanada guy at Z is really good". It wasn't long after that at a get-together somewhere that I first laid eyes on Kanada ("met" isn't the right term). As I watched him go-go dancing amid the fracas of youthful animators letting loose, I thought to myself, "Now this guy is the real thing."

I already suspected him to be the "real thing" for being able to incite such barely concealed respect-combined-with-rivalry in an animator as grounded and professional as Kazuhide Tomonaga, but the way he shook his booty with zealous abandon that night only confirmed my suspicions. All of the great animators I know have some kind of behavioral quirk that sets them apart. With Yasuji Mori it's his subtle wit. Yasuo Otsuka is great at doing impressions of people (he does a good Hirohito - one of these days he's going to get killed by some right-winger). Watch out when Kotabe Yoichi gets drunk, ladies... etc.

So I was convinced that Yoshinori Kanada had to be a good animator. We met a few times after that at various get-togethers, but never really got a good chance to talk, apart from one phone conversation where I did most of the talking. I'd never even really had a good look at his work. Yet I was determined to work with him some day. I made the mistake of saying that aloud one day, which is why I was asked to write this essay. Try as I might to squirm out of it, I got tired of fighting off the repeated video education sessions and decided to give it a go, accepting that what I say here might be way off the mark.

I have no intention of trying to analyze or critique his work. For one, I've never worked with him, and for two, he's obviously doing something that people today feel is relevant, so it's not my place to stand on a pedestal and talk down to him. The only thing I know for sure is that he's a person who seems to have been true to himself throughout his work. I like animators like that.

What does it mean to be a real animator? It's a hard concept to define, and defining it would probably be meaningless. I'm sure there are plenty of talented people I've never heard of, and I'm sure there are new ones developing this very moment.

But if we narrow it down to animators who are able to create animation whose drawings and movement (including their sense of timing) feels good as animation - then the number becomes much smaller. Yoshinori Kanada is one of the few animators who can create that kind of animation.

It's easy to imagine why his unique brand of explosions and wild action has bred a league of followers. But that unique feeling in his work can't be achieved by simply copying a template pattern, as will undoubtedly be illustrated by the stale and stultified feeling of battle scenes drawn by his imitators.

The work of a great animator can only be drawn by that animator. Every element of a piece of animation - in other words, the technique providing the foundation for that piece of animation - is the product of the innate sensibility of that particular animator, which is something unique to that animator.

Very few animators have a firm grasp of how weight, momentum and acceleration affect the properties of objects, and are able to instinctively visualize in their heads how a movement might play out in space. Even fewer are able to not only do this, but go beyond logic, integrating physics with instinct to create animation that can't be explained but that simply works in the eyes of the viewers. The ability to create animation that works comes from first achieving mastery of how the laws of physics such as weight and momentum work, and then going beyond those rules - saying to yourself, "Drawing it this way would feel better", and drawing it based on that feeling. It's a mistake to think that his style can be mimicked simply by surface imitation of his crazy poses and rough drawings.

Gatchaman, for example - sorry to name names - certainly impressed with its various innovations, but in terms of the movement turned out to be a classic example of how, no matter how many quick movements or cuts you might string together, the movement simply doesn't feel good or even convincing if it completely ignores the laws of physics.

You've just started out as an animator. Suddenly you have to draw your first genga. You don't know what to do. You're worried, you're afraid. But you tough it out and just draw. Eventually, you don't know why, but you stat to get a sense for how to do it. You start to get little ideas for how to make a movement interesting in this or that scene in the storyboard. Then you start changing the storyboard. At first it's subtle, but it gradually becomes more prominent. Sometimes the director agrees, other times you have to muscle your idea through. Sometimes what you tried doesn't work and you come out with egg on your face. But you just can't hold back this uncontrollable urge to draw things the way you want.

Eventually, the scenes you animated start to stick out from the other sequences, standing apart for how much more lively and individualistic they look and feel. People start to be able to guess what part you did. Your courage starts to build. Usually with this kind of animator, the characters are way off model. Even if he drew the character designs, they're still way off model. You start to notice that, even when you think you drew a character close enough to model, for some reason other people seem to think it's way off. But you don't let it get you down.

Then you're given the chance to handle a whole episode in a TV series. The episode winds up looking nothing like the rest of the episodes, but it's interesting, so you don't let it undermine your newfound confidence.

You give sakkan'ing a shot, but you realize that you're not cut out for it. All it does is make you want to re-draw everything in your own style. You couldn't do that day in and day out, for one, but more importantly, you want to spend all your time drawing movement that you're satisfied with, not correcting other people's drawings. But sakkan's are at the top of the ladder in the animation industry, so you feel torn. You start to feel troubled by how in magazines and the like even the best animation work winds up being attributed to the director or to the animation director, or even to the original creator.

You start to find that you can predict how a piece of animation will turn out if it's drawn this way or that way. And yet, the more this feeling grows, the more you begin to feel a growing emptiness inside.

You take part in some big name projects. You decide to lay aside your issues with the structure or the storyboard or the subject of the film, and just make your part the best you can make it. Your work even receives recognition as a result. You feel like you've achieved something. Another part of you, though, begins to wonder if it's enough to simply chug along as a cog in the wheel. You begin to awaken to what it really is that you want to express as a creator.

If I may be so bold, that is the kind of animator I imagine Yoshinori Kanada to be.

The work of Yoshinori Kanada and Kazuhide Tomonaga on the Galaxy Express 999 movie (viz) was characterized in some corners as a victory for contract animators. But the issue of contract vs. subcontract is beside the point. What's really happening is that a new generation of animators is replacing the old. That's all. The problems faced by the new generation of animators are otherwise the same. If some in-house animator someplace lords their sense of superiority over you, they're not deserving of respect anyway, so just leave and go somewhere else.

When the youthful days of experimentation are past, and you've accumulated experience, and it's time to build on that experience, what kind of projects you will encounter and what kind of people you'll work with will unfortunately remain largely up to chance. But it is also undeniable that what work comes your way will be partially dictated by the kind of work you've done up until now. As we head out of this 'anime boom' towards the age of mass consumption of anime, I imagine that not only Yoshinori Kanada, but also many other animators with talent, ambition and endurance, must be holding out hope that they will encounter work that is truly meaningful. I hope sincerely that they will encounter such work.

I'd very much like to work with him, but so far the opportunity to offer him a job hasn't presented itself. I know how hard it can be to be picky about work without losing heart. I hope he takes care of himself and perseveres.

I got to see my first Miyazaki film on the big screen last night, and it couldn't have been a better film. Ponyo is my favorite Miyazaki film in a good long time, thanks in large part to its rich and dynamic animation, which makes it a film that truly benefits from being seen on the big screen. It's one of those films that renews your faith in the power of hand-drawn animation. This is how exciting hand-drawn lines can be! the film seems to say, beaming with pride.

The film feels eminently hand drawn in any number of ways, from the patently obvious lines used to draw the characters to the storybook backgrounds to the animation of the vigorously shape-shifting sea. This film feels closest in spirit to Totoro, which has long been my favorite Miyazaki film, in its atmosphere of childlike wonder and its abandonment of the trappings of logic and common sense in favor of sheer sense of wonder and magical realism. I find that Miyazaki's seams start to show if he gets too close to reality, but his genius shines brighter than anybody in the world in the realm of pure imagination. I feel this film marks a high point in his achievement, despite feeling a bit fractured, underexplained and confused, and seeming to trail off suddenly at the end. These didn't bother me too much in light of the rich moment-to-moment texture of the story and animation. In fact, I quite liked that certain things weren't overexplained. Trying to long-windedly explain down what has just happened would not only kill all the magic, it would seem extraneous and inane. It's a rare thing for a director to be able to make a film that feels so purely intuitive, and yet remains so cohesive, entertaining and meaningful.

This was clearly a film in which the director set out to make a film that forefronted the fact that it was animated. Miyazaki has long had great respect for the films of Frederic Back, and this film feels like Miyazaki's attempt to create that kind of film - a film in which the animation was alive and voluptuous and active in every single shot. In every single shot, either the animation or the simple colorful images grab your eyes and don't let go, are the vehicle of communication. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first ten minutes or so are dialogue-free. Like the first ten minutes of the late great Yoshinori Kanada's Birth, this magnificent entry sequence prepares you mentally for a film in which the visuals are meant to be the means of communication, as they should be in an animated film.

I couldn't wipe the smile off my face watching this film. Few films have ever done that for me. I've never felt so consistently 'in the moment' in any previous Miyazaki film except perhaps Totoro. Ponyo achieves a truly sublime texture through the combination of Miyazaki's genius sense for storytelling and the technical mastery of his crew. Miyazaki is now presumably hands-off with the animation, but that only allows the incredible animators he has working under him to show off their skills all the more. Katsuya Kondo is a genius and one of the best animators in the world. Despite the usual connotation of 'sakkan' or animation director being a corrector of drawings, in this case I sense that he is in no small measure to thank for the quality of the animation in this film. His philosophy of movement permeates the animation of the characters. Among my favorite moments in the film were the moments at the beginning where Sosuke is carrying the pail of water up the stairs, and where his mother is waving at him by the portico as he leaves. These brief moments showcase Kondo's genius for succinctly capturing human movement and posing in a minimum of lines and drawings. Despite their subtlety, these shots, presumably animated by Kondo, are no less magnificent than more obviously spectacular animation of the action sequences to follow.

Water has long been one of the central challenges in animation - a challenge that when overcome can create amazing results. You can trace the history of the best water animation around the word, starting from Disney and coming full circle through to Yoichi Kotabe in Animal Treasure Island and more recently Norio Matsumoto in You're Under Arrest OVA #3 and many other places (such as Toshiyuki Inoue in Peek the Whale, Yasunori Miyazawa in Moomin, etc - see my FX post for a bit more on this). Norio is the reigning master of water animation in anime, but what's amazing is how varied are the approaches. Kotabe's approach couldn't be more different from Matsumoto's. Kotabe excels at expressing the macroscopic undulation, whereas Matsumoto's genius resides in expressing the minutiae of splashes. There are any number of ways water can be expressed, all of which together shed light on its nature. Shapeshifting water is by its nature the perfect medium for the mercurial expressive possibilities of animation. The animation here is a wonderful addition to that lineage, pushing Kotabe's style in the direction of more expressive freedom.

I can't think of a feature film with so much awesome and exciting animation of water. This is a film all about water, both in terms of the animation and in terms of the theme and of the story. Water isn't just a pretty accessory to animate. Miyazaki evokes the elemental power of water and its importance in humanity's history through the awesome, overpowering waves that lap at the land like wild animals in this film. Those scenes are among the most profound animated scenes I've ever seen in their combination of animated power and thematic depth.

Miyazaki's Nausicaa, in which water played such an important part thematically, funded a film that painted the picture of man's complex but inextricable relationship with water - The Canals of Yanagawa, directed by his comrade in arms Isao Takahata. The elemental forces of nature have always played an important role in Miyazaki's films. It's good to finally be able to see a film that tries to express the brute, majestic power of the sea the way this film does, as that's something that has never been truly done in animation. There have been films in which water played an important part - such as The Sea Prince and the Fire Child - but usually these films don't go beyond the surface level technical challenge of animating water. Miyazaki's water is mythical and elemental, and not merely a technical challenge. Although it's a cliche to say this, it's true in this case that this film is a fairy tale both for children and adults.

I think the animation of the waves during the storm was the standout achievement of this film in terms of the animation. They're animated like no other waves I've ever seen. They're not necessarily realistic. They're supernatural waves, waves of the imagination, and in that sense the expression of the water in this film is new and interesting. The way they're animated is smart, too, or more likely deliberate and calculated, because using simple, bold shapes that undulate like the goo in a lava lamp avoids the chore of having to animate the spray and foam in detail the way Matsumoto does. I remember seeing water animated this way in the Shigeru Tamura films. But needless to say, here, the water actually moves, and moves something amazing. The image of the car racing along the road by the water, with the water bubbling up into the sky in all sorts of strange configurations to the side, is unforgettable in its tension and surreal power. All of the scenes during the storm achieve a remarkable feeling of tension and imminent danger presumably because we all instinctively know the wrath of nature and the ocean. These scenes seem to me to invoke that mythic fear and reverence we've had for the ocean since the beginning of time, as first expressed in things like the Odyssey.

I liked the animation in this film because of the very specific balance of visuals they achieved. So even the scenes that weren't particularly well animated were quite enjoyable to watch as animation. But the well animated scenes were indeed magnificently animated and the highlight of the film. The central spectacle of the film is of course the storm scene, and from what I can gather, for the animation of the most spectacular sequences of the storm scene, we have to thank primarily Makiko Futaki, the Ghibli mainstay I talked about before who has long been responsible for animating natural phenomena in the Ghibli films, and Akihiko Yamashita, the ex-Bebow animator I mentioned in my last post. Together they appear to have animated many of the more impressive shots in the storm scene. More specifically, Futaki is credited with doing the bits where Ponyo is running on the fish/waves chasing the car, and Akihiko Yamashita is credited with the shots of the car in the storm, to say nothing of the amazingly detailed sequence with the trawler at the beginning.

These great action sequences rank among the best to grace any Miyazaki film, alongside Kazuhide Tomonaga's opening car chase in Cagliostro, the sword fight on the ship by Yoshinori Kanada in Nausicaa, the scene with the golem coming alive by Nakura Yasuhiro and Shinji Otsuka and the fight on the railway by Hirotsugu Kawasaki in Laputa, the bike ride by Toshiyuki Inoue in Kiki, the flight scenes by Yoshinori Kanada in Porco Rosso, the action in the fortress by Shinji Otsuka and the action in the forest by Atsuko Tanaka in Mononoke Hime, the chase through the building by Kenichi Konishi in Spirited Away, and the mid-air transformation by Shinya Ohira in Howl's Moving Castle, to name but the ones that spring to mind immediately.

There were many other standout shots besides these sequences. First and foremost, of course, is the magnificent opening sequence, for which we have veteran Ghibli participant and Telecom animator Atsuko Tanaka to thank. (refer to my post on the women behind Ghibli for more on her and Makiko Futaki as well as Megumi Kagawa, who did the scene at the kindergarten). Shinji Otsuka's running on the fence near the end was typically well timed and exciting, reminding simultaneously of his running sequences in Millennium Actress and Mononoke Hime. Probably not coincidentally, he was also given another running sequence in the film - Ponyo running towards Sosuke when they're first reunited. He also apparently did the very impressive action scene where Ponyo transforms and escapes from the ship. It's no surprise that Otsuka is again one of the main animator stars of the latest Ghibli film. He and Akihiko Yamashita stand out for having done among the most - and most exciting - animation in the film. (for more info about who animated what scene in the film, consult this post in the forum)

Needless to say, it's animators we have to thank for making the animation in this film so amazing, although you'd never know that looking at the credits at the end of the dub I saw in the theater last night. Credits are there to say what the people who worked on the film did, right? To "credit" them, so to speak? The curious thing is that, in place of credits, there's just a long list of names here. I'm not kidding. It's just a big roll of hundreds upon hundreds of names, without any credit or anything. Not only that, they abbreviate the first name. Sure, I bet most people who are going to watch the dub couldn't care less, but it's nothing less than an insult and a slap in the face to every person who was involved in this film. I've seen some botched credits in my day, but I've never seen such a travesty. "We made this film" indeed.

Aside from this glitch, the dub is fairly passable. Anime dubs have come a long way from the horrible dubs I recall from the 90s. Liam Neeson is perfect as Fujimoto, as is the child actor playing Sosuke, Frankie Jonas, although the rest of the voices are hit or miss. Needless to say, the next time I watch the film it's going to be in the original language, so that I can appreciate the film as it was intended to be seen. Even dubbed, though, the power of the animation is entirely sufficient to make the film work, so if you're hesitating whether or not to see it because of that, I'd say go for it. The impact of seeing it on the big screen easily overcomes any minor drawbacks in the dub.

A lot of OVAs were produced in the 1980s, most of which have been forgotten today, usually for the best. Some have been forgotten undeservedly. Cool Cool Bye (1986) is one of the ones that's been undeservedly forgotten.

Not only does Cool Cool Bye boast one of the most awesome titles ever, it also boasts some of the best and most unique animation to ever grace any anime. Cool Cool Bye is one of those OVAs I like to call a 'karisuma animator OVA', referring to a handful of OVAs made in the 1980s as a showcase of a particular animator's genius that remain essential viewing as perhaps the densest example of that animator's style. Birth was Yoshinori Kanada's karisuma animator OVA, and Cool Cool Bye is Tomonori Kogawa's karisuma animator OVA.

Kogawa has left behind a number of other items for which he is better known, foremost among these perhaps his work on Yoshiyuki Tomino's Ideon (1980-82) and Xabungle (1982), but Cool Cool Bye in many ways represents the pinnacle of Kogawa's evolution as an animator. It came at the end of several years of experimentation with Kogawa's approach, and at the period when his studio, Bebow, was at its zenith, and was soon to scatter to the four winds.

Perhaps the thing I like best about Cool Cool Bye is that its animation and designs are a unified whole. The designs were conceived with motion in mind, and in the final product every line of the characters comes alive vividly at the hands of the animators in a boundless variety of exciting movements and poses. It's not just that the action sequences are excitingly choreographed, which they are. It's that every line feels right in every drawing of every movement. The animation feels like the creation of a master animator who not only knows how to draw a character well from any conceivable angle, but who can freely bend the lines used to draw the limbs and and facial features any number of ways in order to heighten the emotion of the expression or the velocity of the limbs in action. Every single line always feels just right and controlled in every drawing, even in drawings that are extremely deformed. It's pretty common to see deformation in anime, but usually it falls at one of two extremes: It's either taken from conventional symbols used throughout the industry, or is deformed too much, in a way that destroys the unity of the character. Kogawa's Cool Cool Bye is one of the best examples I know of a design specifically giving rise to an approach to movement.

Kogawa actually made another 'karisuma animator OVA' before this, Greed (1985), but its animation is somewhat low-key and not nearly as emphatic as the animation in Cool Cool Bye. Partly this is because Greed is twice as long, and they were able to pack every moment of the shorter Cool Cool Bye with great animation. But more saliently, the animation is the specific purpose of Cool Cool Bye, which it wasn't really in Greed. Cool Cool Bye strikes me as a kind of experiment to see how far he could push his animation in a certain direction - in the direction of vivid movement as opposed to low-key acting. It feels like a pilot film also in the very clipped storytelling, which seems there to pitch the world view to a prospective sponsor more than to be comprehensible.

Kogawa is often remembered as one of the proto-realistic animators of Japan due to his more realistic rendering of the character in Ideon and so on (which were even more realistic in the original concept, before Tomino turned them down and told Kogawa to make them more accessible, i.e. cute). But Kogawa struck out in a very different direction right afterward in Xabungle, with its more cartoony and pliable designs and very fast and exciting animation. Cool Cool Bye strikes me as an attempt to perfect that style of animation. Episode 1 of Xabungle (which used 9000-some drawings) is perhaps the closest comparison in Kogawa's oeuvre. They're both one-of-a-kind creations and among the most exciting 30 minutes of anime out there, packed full of exciting animation in a style like no other. So I find it a shame that we never got to see Kogawa build on what he achieved in Cool Cool Bye. Even the people who learned under Kogawa never made anything that pushes the style and approach developed here, which is among the most appealing I've ever seen in anime. A 13-episode TV series made at this steady level of quality would have been a classic for the ages - though it might have bankrupted whatever studio made it. Of course, what makes Cool Cool Bye great is not budget; it's talent. The animation is actually somewhat limited a lot of the time. It's just that what drawings there are are extremely skillfully manipulated.

Simply put, Cool Cool Bye is great animated entertainment. Kogawa showed with this OVA what real animation is supposed to be about. It is extremely fun to watch from start to finish, has a variety of interestingly designed characters, and is filled head to toe with great animation and inventive action sequences. Not a minute is wasted or boring. The characters are fun to watch, and each moves in a way that is unique to their character design and personality - something all too rare in anime. The action sequences are cleverly choreographed, and the characters go through some incredibly entertaining calisthenics, all expertly rendered by the animation. Bodies twist and turn about in all manner of ways, run and leap, stretch and squash. This is a movie that is all about characters running around doing things, reminding a lot of Yasuo Otsuka's Future Boy Conan. But whereas Otsuka's drawings had a sort of loose, anything goes freedom, Kogawa's animation is far more logical, deliberate, thought through. They both, in their very different way, created extremely fun character animation that more than ever seems to have a lot of lessons to offer animators in today's Japanese animation industry. Kogawa's animation strikes a masterful balance between having fun with the animation and maintaining a sense of unity.

We often speak of schools of animation in anime, such as the Kanada school, but Kogawa is interesting because he has been a big influence, but his influence can't be pinpointed to any one style the way Kanada's can. The innovation he brought to anime was more in relation the to technical aspects of how to draw characters, many of which were gradually adopted in the natural course of the overall improvement in the base level of drawing skills over the years in the industry. Kogawa seems to have been one of the people who where there kind of pointing out the little mistakes that people didn't realize were mistakes. Rather than trying to lord a style over people, he was just drawing things right, the way they're actually supposed to be drawn.

The most famous example of Kogawa's innovation is the simple act of looking up. The image here pretty much sums it up. Kogawa was one of the first people to actually think through and properly draw how a face should look from any angle, particularly when it's tilted up like this. Before going on, let me backtrack a little. Kogawa actually came to animation kind of late. The art that interested him growing up had been oil painting, at which he was pretty adept by the time he graduated with a degree in oil painting from the famous Musashino Art University. Nowadays sculpture is what really interests him, an interest clearly reflected in his very three-dimensional characters. Needless to say, most animators working either back then or today don't have degrees in art, and this training in the fundamentals of art undoubtedly permitted him to see things that the veterans with whom he worked had never realized. One of these things is how to draw a face when a person is looking up.

Kogawa started out in animation in 1970 at age 20, when he joined the Tokyo Movie studio. He stayed there for under a year before quitting and going on to do a lot of freelance work for Tatsunoko. It was during his time doing work for Tatsunoko that he began to notice that the veteran animators who were working on the same shows didn't know how to draw a face when it was looking up. The proportions would be messed up. And the funny thing is, when he drew the face the right way, it would often get corrected back to the wrong way, simply because that's how those animators had grown accustomed to drawing things in anime. That's one of the pitfalls of not learning the fundamentals of art, and not observing the world around you and basing what you draw on that (at least in a very basic sense of knowing how it's supposed to be done, and then modifying that appropriately based on the need).

It doesn't take much to get the proportion of the nose, eyes and mouth right. For example, you can draw a box, tilted at the desired angle, and place the features on one surface to get a basic sense of how they should be drawn. If you try to eyeball it without doing this, the features can come out skewed and wrong-looking, which is obviously what was happening with the veteran animators. Kogawa was, then, among the first to draw a character in various poses in a way that actually made physical sense. This is one of the things, I now realize, that made his work feel so different to me back when I first discovered it. Cool Cool Bye is interesting because the animation is very loose and exaggerated, yet at its core it feels solid and real and plausible. It's a perfect example of how grounding in the fundamentals can make even unrealistic animation more convincing.

It was his dissatisfaction with this contradiction -- that the animators who were supposed to be inspiring him knew far less than him about the very basic things -- that led him, in 1979, to found his own animation studio, Bebow. It was from this now legendary studio that Kogawa would go on to provide the animation for which he is most famous today, in Ideon, Xabungle, El Gaim and Dunbine. In the course of this work, he personally trained many of the more important animators of the next generation, including Ichiro Itano, Akihiko Yamashita and Naoyuki Onda, to name but some of the more striking examples.

My favorite work by Kogawa is without hesitation Ideon, particularly the final movie, in which his animation brought the characters alive and made them feel real like virtually no other anime I've ever see, especially back then. His work on this show was revolutionary in its dispassionately real rendering of expressions and poses, even if the designs and situation were not particularly realistic in an obvious sense. This is perhaps one of the first times I'd ever seen an anime in which I always felt I understood why the character was doing any given pose. It always made sense to me. There were other well-animated shows, but this is the first one where the actual drawings and the content of the drawings felt real to me in both the rendering of the drawings and in their psychology. His drawings also had a raw power that I'd never seen before. The characters' emotions came through very powerfully, and their acting was simultaneously more restrained and more believable than anything I'd seen before then.

Another aspect that made Kogawa's characters in Ideon unique is that he determined their color, and did something that was unheard of back then - he based the enemy side (the so-called 'Buff Clan') on a white base, and did daring things like using no highlights in the eyes and using colors rather than black to trace their outlines. This accentuated the already strong drawings to create a truly memorable impression. The Buff Clan's angular hairstyles were distinctive and cool looking, and a match with the appealing design of their clothing, which was rather ahead of its time with its sharp, minimalistic, tasteful style.

One of the things I admire about Kogawa, besides his incredible skill as an animator, is the fact that he always changed his style from show to show, and he challenged himself to try new things every time. He went from the realism of Ideon to the opposite pole in Xabungle right afterward, drawing very soft and loose characters with more heavily stylized features and proportions. In both cases, however, the spirit behind the character designs was suited to the material at hand, as well as playing a major role in determining the show's atmosphere and its impression on viewers. Kogawa's characters in both cases were striking and like nothing that had come before, and in both cases they were extremely beautiful to watch, either still in motion. Kogawa's drawings have the fundamental strength of a sketch by a master's hand. In both El Gaim and Dunbine afterward, Kogawa would again change his vector by 180 degrees each time.

From the very beginning, Kogawa had intended to keep the studio only for about a decade, so that he could train animators for a while and do a few things in commercial animation, and then move on. That is exactly what wound up happening. For a few more years after Cool Cool Bye, the studio switched from doing contract work for Sunrise to doing contract work for Tatsunoko on various shows like Southern Cross, but the most talented animators appear to have left either before or immediately after the last big bash that was Cool Cool Bye. Hence, this OVA comes across also as the final summation of what the studio stood for. Kogawa had achieved his goal of training a lot of talented animators, and those animators scattered to the four winds. A number of these animators went on to do a lot of very nice work in the late 80s and beyond, and remain among the more important animators active today. It's somewhat shocking to hear of the names who passed through the doors of Bebow, because it's a fairly large swath of the most talented animators of the 1980s - Hidetoshi Omori, Hiroyuki Kitazume, Toshihiro Hirano, Ichiro Itano, Naoyuki Onda, Toshiyuki Kubooka, Narumi Kakinouchi, Akihiko Yamashita, Atsushi Yamagata, Tomokazu Tokoro, Junichi Watanabe, Masami Kosone, Keiichi Sato, Satoru Nakamura, Toshihiro Yamane and Shino Masanori. If you watch anime regularly, chances are you've seen work by at least one of these guys in the last week on some show somewhere, old or new.

Akihiko Yamashita is one of the names that jumps out at you these days as being among the most obviously talented of the ex-Bebow staff. He has become one of the pillars of Ghibli's animation since Howl. Hidetoshi Omori and Hiroyuki Kitazume were perhaps the two most prominent Bebow animators in the years immediately following Cool Cool Bye, with their work on Robot Carnival and Urotsukidoji. Robot Carnival is a good place to start to get a quick sense of the style of Kogawa's two biggest disciples, as both created a short in their own patented style. Omori's style is very close to Kogawa, with its angular shapes and more limited animation, while Kitazume is more rounded and cute and fully animated.

Many people in Urotsukidoji used a pen name, so for a long time I wasn't too sure who was behind this show. It's actually very well animated despite the content - it's quite possibly one of the best animated adult titles ever. It turns out that most of the staff were probably ex-Bebow, so it's one of the more important pieces featuring work by the Bebow animators after leaving the studio. At the very least, it included Hiroyuki Kitazume, whose distinctive designs give him away, Hidetoshi Omori using the pen name Zen Kingoji, Yamashita Akihiko, Masami Kosone and Keiichi Sato. It probably included others.

Ero anime was in the air in 1987 for the ex-Bebow staff, because they also made a short OVA called Body Jack, this time virtually 100% using pen names. The only person I know for sure was involved is Hidetoshi Omori, because the characters are unmistakably his. But I'm sure there must have been a bunch of other Bebow people. For an OVA probably nobody has ever heard of over here, it's a surprisingly decently done piece, with a few fun action scenes. Hiroyuki Kitazume, who formed a short-lived studio called Atelier Giga together with some other ex-Bebow staff, is perhaps best remembered for his work on Gundam ZZ and the Char's Counterattack movie. The latter included quite a number of Bebow staff, including Hidetoshi Omori, Shinichiro Minami and Naoyuki Onda. Onda did a lot of good work in his very identifiably refined and lush style after leaving Bebow, especially on OVAs like To-Y, Ai no Kusabi and Armitage, and to this day continues to be very prolific and very talented.

Many of the staff behind Giant Robo were ex-Bebow staff. Tomokazu Tokoro directed one of my favorite series ever - Haibane Renmei. Toshihiro Hirano and his wife Narumi Kakinouchi worked at Bebow in the early 80s before migrating to AIC, where they defined the look of that studio in classic OVAs like Iczer 1, Dangaioh and Vampire Princess Miyu. The late Junichi Watanabe was the monster designer in a lot of these shows. Atsushi Yamagata is perhaps best known as the character designer of AIC's Hakkenden OVA series. You pretty much can't swing a stick without hitting an anime involving Bebow alumi (only slightly exaggerating).

Besides the quality that Bebow stood for, it also comes across as having been very much of a family, with a very warm and healthy atmosphere at the studio. For example, to keep the animators in good physical shape, they all did regular exercise together and had their own baseball team. (though this is of course a very typical thing for Japanese companies) The Cool Cool Bye tape came with a great little 15-minute documentary at the end showcasing a dozen or so of the animators at that time, with brief interviews and playful animations. Some of the interviews were done at one of the studio's baseball games, so in the shots from their interviews above you can see a number of them wearing the studio's baseball uniform.

After Cool Cool Bye Kogawa moved away from being a full-time industry animator. Over the period that Cool Cool Bye was in production he published a set of books on animation techniques (which were recently republished in a new edition), and from then on out seems to have focused more on his work as an educator. He mostly did isolated work here and there, often using pen names, such as Legend of Galactic Heroes (1989), Casshan (1993) and Medarot (1999). His only real big job was Ashita Genki ni Nare (2005), a movie about the experiences of a sister and brother living in the ruins of Tokyo after the end of the war, on which he served as character designer and animation director. He also recently did all the key animation for episode 5 of Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (2008). He was heavily involved in the old Yamato series back in the late 70s, most notably as the character designer and animation director of the second movie version made in 1978, and he is reportedly serving as the character designer and animation director of a new movie version that is in production and slated for release in the near future.

GREED (1985, 57 minutes)

Creator/Script/Storyboard/Character Designer/Animation Director/Director: Tomonori Kogawa
Art board: Shinichi Hirao
Animation Directors: Hidetoshi Omori & Hiroyuki Kitazume

Animators

COOL COOL BYE (1986, 30 minutes)

Creator/Script/Character Design/Director: Tomonori Kogawa
Storyboard: Bebow
Animation Directors: Tomonori Kogawa & Hidetoshi Omori
Mechanical Design: Katsuya Nozawa
Concept Assistance: Akihiko Yamashita
Art Director/Backgrounds: Kenji Matsumoto

Animators

Inbetween Check
TSUJI Kiyomitsu

I remember trying to watch Dragon's Heaven (1988) way back when but being unable to get past the atrocious and pointless tokusatsu opening. I braved it again today because I was curious to see Shinya Ohira's work on it, and it was worth it. To anyone who wishes to see some very unique visuals for anime, or to see some good early Ohira, I recommend just skipping past the baffling section and proceeding right to the animation. The film itself is an absurd little confection utterly devoid of dramatic weight, a pure product of the 80s OVA boom, but it's of interest today for its visual style, which remains even after all this time very unusual if not unprecedented in anime, and more saliently, for its strong effects and mecha animation.

I first became aware of Makoto Kobayashi's name not that long ago when I got to see some of his conceptual designs for Samurai Seven and was quite impressed by his style and imagination. As a director and storyteller I'm not so convinced, at least going by this OVA, but as a designer and artist he's got a very nice voice that is especially welcome in the context of Japanese design sensibility. It's a breath of fresh air, despite the work here seeming kind of a Moebius knockoff (elements of Nausicaa are also an obvious inspiration). What I found deeply disconcerting about this OVA was the conventionally stylized anime character heroine plopped right in the middle of all these beautifully byzantine robot and scenery designs that look straight out of a European comic. It's curious how they could be so creative with everything else but hit a wall when it comes to the characters. If you cut out all of the shots of the heroine, it's a good looking little short, but together they're amazingly mismatched. They had all the talent there; it's unfortunate that they weren't able to make a film more conceptually unified. I could have envisioned this being a a great little film in the manner of Cannon Fodder. The dialogue, directing and story were all equally weak.

It's sad that this is the case, because the drawings are of a high caliber. This short OVA maintains an even tone and quality throughout thanks in large part to the work of Shinya Ohira as the mecha animation director. (Although I've heard that Makoto Kobayashi was heavily involved in the drawing side of things, so I'm not sure to what extent the strength of the drawings is thanks to Ohira.) Ohira has said how Masahito Yamashita was his main influence in his early years, and this film is important because it features the two working side by side. Yamashita animated the opening sequence, and it's probably the most impressive single sequence in the film, with its geometrically shaped arcs of flames animated in lush detail. It's a good place to see how the baton-touch between Yamashita and Ohira occurred. Ohira brought a maniacal level of detail and brilliant draftsmanship to the mecha. The designs of the robots were actually done by Makoto Kobayashi's little brother, Osamu Kobayashi. Yes, it's apparently THAT Osamu Kobayashi, in what is possibly the earliest anime gig I've seen from him. Ohira does a great job of bringing the robots to life with his masterful drawings, which are precisely but tastefully rendered. Without Ohira's drawings, there would be fairly little of interest in this film.

Besides acting as the mecha sakkan, though, Ohira also did key animation in the film, and from what I'm able to tell it looks like he would have done some of the shots of the smoke and explosions and so on. The shape of the smoke as the ship descends into the cloud and the smoke rising from the ground as the tanks land reminds me of the jagged swirling clouds he did in Akira the same year, not to mention his earlier Captain Power work. Seeing the two side by side helps to understand in what way Ohira was influenced by Yamashita. Yamashita created effects animation packed with exaggerated detail, weird shapes, distorted perspective and unusual timing. He had a very strong sense of line, creating animation that really spoke through the movement of lines. Building on Yoshinori Kanada's legacy in stuff like the fire dragon of Harmageddon, he created effects that pushed the stylization further, creating an undulating mass of geometric patterns that felt great as animation. Ohira seems to have built on that approach to effects by pushing it in a more realistic direction. Even his more realistic effects work of this period feels deeply indebted to Masahito Yamashita in spirit. The goal doesn't seem to be just to recreate nature; it's more about creating animation that is thrilling to watch, with richly nuanced, complex forms and timing, and an intricately detailed mass of pulsating lines, which is what Yamashita's effects animation was about. These are the people who made an art out of effects animation. Ohira's work has changed a lot in the intervening decades, but his artistic underpinning seems to remain the same: creating dense, idiosyncratic, relentlessly expressive animation that thrills purely through movement.

For anyone who can read French, I wanted to point out a nice homage to Yoshinori Kanada just posted by Manuloz on his anime news web site Manganimation.net. There were a lot of things written about Kanada when the news hit the net that he'd died, but I find that very few people seemed to really understand who Yoshinori Kanada was as an animator, and where his true importance lay. Manuloz's article does an admirable job of providing an overview of Kanada's history, which can be a challenging thing to do due to the man's seemingly incessant studio-hopping. I should try to do a similar write-up in the future so that there's a comprehensive overview available in English, too.

In the years to come we'll surely see some text written about Kanada's history, influence and importance in Japanese, but hopefully in English too. His legacy lives on like that of no other animator today. There was a lot of imitation of Kanada-san in the 80s, which in the 90s seemed to diminish a little. In the 2000's, especially in the last few years, it feels like we've seen a resurgence of the style. History often has this kind of cyclic character. What exactly is it about Kanada's brand of playful animation that seems to attract young animators today more than ever? That would be an interesting topic on which to ruminate. Every season I'll see at least a few shots by some brash young animators having fun with the TV animation that reminds me of the kind of animation Kanada was doing back in the late 70s, some of it being pure imitation, some of the more memorable being work trying to develop its own voice much in the way Kanada was doing back then. Maybe that's the secret. Kanada's mindset as an animator seems particularly well suited to permitting young animators to both have fun and attempt to express their budding individuality.

As people digest the news, we're seeing more posts and things about Yoshinori Kanada's recent passing, and as I expected, that includes more videos being uploaded covering his work. A nice new video was just uploaded containing extended clips from five key series Kanada worked on in the late 70s, in chronological order: a clip from an episode of Gaiking (1976), a clip from the same episode of Zambot 3 (1977) I mentioned yesterday, a clip from ep 2 of Daitarn 3 (1978), and a longer and better-quality clip from the ep of Don De La Mancha (1980) that I linked. It gives a good slice of some of his best work of this period, and shows his evolution over the years towards even freer forms and richer and wilder movement. One example is the background animation. Birth is rightly famous for its scads of lively background animation. In this sequence of clips you gradually see background animation becoming more and more prominent, culminating with the full-fledged background animation of Don De La Mancha. It wasn't long after this that Urusei Yatsura began broadcasting, and a young Masahito Yamashita picked up Kanada's torch and created some of the wildest background animation sequences of this era. Kanada was probably one of the first ones to make an art of background animation, to turn a background animation sequence into a platform for showing off his animation skills, and to really go crazy with the animation. You feel watching the sequence that he was having as much fun animating it as it is for us to watch. I also like that the clip covers just the TV work he did over this period, as I find Kanada's work more lively in the TV format. His movie work is good in that it's more worked, but it's also more constrained and less spontaneous.

Someone also uploaded the Kanada episode of the NHK TV program Anime Yawa, which is great if you understand Japanese. (no subs) Guests include Takashi Murakami and Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Takashi Murakami talks about Kanada's influence on him, showing one of his art books in which stills from Kanada's work are juxtaposed side-by-side with Murakami's paintings. I like Murakami's positing that single stills of Kanada's intricately gnarled fire dragon or other effects can be taken apart and still stand on their own legs for their abstract beauty and the latent energy they emanate. That's an aspect that seems to have been inherited, consciously or not, by animators like Shinya Ohira - the compelling paradox of animation that is beautiful art in motion as well as frame-by-frame (in an abstract sense quite apart from the question of resemblance to a deliberately designed character).

Zambot 3 is a classic example of a decent series dragged down by bad animation. It's easily the worst animated of the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino shows. And yet, it rises above the shoddy drawings and movement to be one of his best pieces due to the good directing, hard-edged story and surprise ending, which were a milestone in the day and certainly influenced a a number of popular shows in later years. It's not that I blame the animators, although many of them probably weren't that talented. None of the episodes had an animation director (sakkan), and many of them were drawn by a single person, presumably in about two hours. The series has some touchingly dramatic moments thanks to Tomino's storyboard, but their impact is unfortunately lessened by the crude animation.

Standing out dramatically amongst this cavalcade of botchery are the episodes with animation by Yoshinori Kanada - 5, 10, 16 and 22. The most notable of these in terms of the animation, among other reasons, is episode 16, the infamous "human bomb" episode, which is still shocking even seen today. If you only see one episode, it should be episode 16, because it was only animated by two people - Yoshinori Kanada and Kazuo Tomisawa - whereas these two are joined by Osamu Nabeshima and Masakatsu Iijima in the other episodes. It's the episode with the most distilled essence of Kanada in the series, or of anything I've seen by Kanada from this period. (his work on Gaiking from a year earlier in 1976 is also among his best and worth checking out)

Kazuo Tomisawa had worked as an inbetweener on an episode of Dokonjo Gaeru with key animation by Kanada a year or two before. The credits in Zambot only say "animation", without splitting it into key and inbetween, so I'm not sure what the breakdown is - whether Kanada drew the keys and Tomisawa inbetweened, or they both just drew straight animation - but I'm willing to bet that it's more the former, because the episode looks and feels like it was entirely drawn by Kanada.

This episode is one of the best episodes to watch to get a sense of what Kanada's style was like in the mid-70s period, when he was already starting to develop his personal style and really having fun with the TV work, but hadn't quite reached full maturity. The drawings are rough and quick like most episodes, as befitting uncorrected animation, but the facial expressions and poses are always rendered skilfully rather than sloppily as in other episodes, and more than anything, there's lots of fun little movements and gags littered everywhere.

This episode happens to contain one of my favorite sequences of animation by Kanada - this one. I love this sequence because of its combination of dynamic action with bold line work and quick cutting. The timing and choreography of the movement here shows what it was that set Kanada apart from the other animators of his day. He had an instinct for creating motion that felt exciting to watch, and his animation communicates expressly via movement and drawing. His movements and drawings were always doing something, and were a delight to watch, even when they weren't particularly highly worked. Kanada could do a really quick and sloppy drawing that felt spot-on and was absolutely hilarious. Most animators in TV anime in the 70s used limited repeats and jumps of the kind that Kanada uses, but none of them quite seemed to know how to make them interesting and fun until Kanada showed the way.

It's instructive to compare the movement and drawings of this episode with the other episodes. It will show you immediately what I'm talking about. You don't see the characters in the other episodes making the kind of amusing faces and little movements you see them doing here. An example is this shot of the robot swinging the sword, in which he inserts lots of drawings with a zippy timing that makes it fun to watch and interesting as animation, followed by a funny pregnant pause before the laser swats him away. It's a world apart from the stiff, boring animation of the robot battles in the rest of the series. It's an innocuous shot, but it distills the essence of Kanada's innovation - the attitude of having fun with the work, and of turning what many animators seemed to treat as rote drudgery of having to churn out TV animation quickly and badly into an opportunity for personal expression and fun. Kanada showed that even limited animation could be an art form. Kanada's masterful manipulation of timing and drawing developed over the course of the early 70s to me exemplifies Japan's unique contribution to animation.