Kick-Heart at AX2013

Today I went to Anime Expo 2013 here in LA. I got to meet my favourite director, Masaaki Yuasa, and see the North American premiere of his new short Kick-Heart. Yuasa was kind enough to do drawings for everyone who asked, and I asked him to draw Hiroshi from Crayon Shin-Chan (which he worked on early in his career).

Kick-Heart did not disappoint. I won't spoil anything, since it hasn't been sent out to the backers yet, but it was amazing. The opening credits alone were spectacularly funny and vivid, and from there it just got better and better. There was some very interesting sound design later in the short, and the animation was brilliant throughout. The audience was laughing out loud almost constantly. It flew by incredibly fast, feeling much shorter than its 12 minutes.

The producers stated at the Kick-Heart panel that they didn't currently have plans to release it other than to the Kickstarter backers and on the festival circuit, so if you didn't contribute then, I hope you know somebody who did. You need to see it!

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Finished Watching Kemonozume

 It only took me four days to finish the series. Probably the closest I've come to actually marathoning any show. I planned to spread it out over a longer period of time and savour each episode a bit more, but I just couldn't help myself-- Almost every episode ends on such a riveting cliff-hanger. I'd read that some viewers weren't satisfied with the way things progressed in the final episodes, but I didn't mind the ending. The villain does get pretty over-the-top, but he was extremely entertaining while doing it so it didn't bother me. Breaking the fourth wall has been overused in comedy for a long time now, but using it just a little bit in a mostly serious work can still be effective, as he proved.

The middle of the series brought a couple of slight dips in the art and animation, but that was more than made up for in the final episodes, particularly the last two. I'm so glad I finally got around to watching this series. It somehow manages to balance drama, horror, comedy, romance, action and suspense. It's one of my favourite shows ever, animated or otherwise.

I really liked how each episode had a different mood and feeling. So many different artists with unique, but generally complementary, styles worked on the episodes, and the series really embraced that, in a way rarely seen in animation (Ren and Stimpy springs to mind as another example, in a drastically different style obviously).

I have a lot of favourite episodes. #1 and #2 felt the most purely Yuasa-driven to me. #6 was hilarious and gave us a proper introduction to my favourite character, Bon. #9 had a wonderfully light atmosphere and provided a nice breather from all the craziness in the surrounding episodes. #12 was entirely animated by Michio Mihara. I'd just seen his Okashina Hotel short, and was really excited at the chance to see so much more of his work in one place. It completely lived up to my expectations. #13 had just as much amazing animation, but in that case it was the work of several animators. It also had some classic Yuasa insane action.

I think overall I prefer this series to Kaiba. Somehow it felt both more substantial, and easier to comprehend. It's difficult-- and probably pointless-- to compare the series, since they were so different stylistically, but I did find Kaiba maintained its quality more evenly than Kemonozume. It didn't really have anything as mediocre as Episode 4 of Kemonozume, which was the one notable blemish on the series. But on the other hand I feel that Kemonozume reached greater heights and was more ambitious in its art style. And I definitely thought it had stronger characterization. One problem I had with Kaiba was that, for a show where the hero gets put into a different body in each episode, he didn't have much of a personality for the viewer to hold onto. He remained a cipher throughout the series, which made it less interesting to follow his body-switching. I do still love Kaiba though.

As I mentioned before, Bon was probably my favourite character. I was happy to see him reappear later in the series. Now I want to go through the series again at a slower pace, particularly so I can study some of the animation and direction more closely.

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Rambling Reviews

Time for another round of my thoughts on things I've watched lately.

Paranorman
Despite the main character being annoyingly passive and whiny for most of the film, I liked it a lot. The designs are great, both in the characters and their environments. They're full of unusual shapes and angles, and the result is a film with a really unique look to it, which is rare. The story and characters felt pretty familiar, but the filmmakers did throw in a couple of clever twists. The ending sequence was genuinely creepy, and featured really impressive animation. Overall Paranorman was truly a breath of fresh air in American animation. I'm now interested in what else Laika has done, which means I'll have to finally see Coraline.
 
Download
Directed by Rintaro, this OVA from 1992 has impressively loose, wild animation. Yoshinori Kanada did the character designs, as well as some animation. It also has some amazing Tatsuyuki Tanaka scenes, which are what made me want to track it down.Unfortunately this thing is ridiculously obscure-- it's never even been released on DVD in Japan, let alone translated into English. And obviously the name makes it difficult to look it up online. So I couldn't understand most of what was going on in the story, but it was very enjoyable.

Neo-Tokyo
I may have covered this late 80's anime anthology before on my blog, I can't remember. But anyway, here's what I thought upon seeing it again recently-- I absolutely love the first segment, "Manie-Manie" which is also by Rintaro. It's probably one of my favourite animation pieces ever. It's packed with neat ideas in the designs, the direction, the animation and the sound work. Too bad it ultimately doesn't seem to have any real point. "The Running Man" has lots of great FX animation but again, there's not much of a story. This one feels longer than it is. The final segment by Katsuhiro Otomo, "The Order to Stop Construction" feels a bit like a warm-up for Akira. It's pretty fun. All three shorts work better as mood pieces than as narratives, in my opinion, but they all have great visuals. I'd say it's worth seeing.

Samurai Champloo
I'm only up to Episode 9, which has the Masaaki Yuasa animation sequence, which was just as amazing as I'd expected. Overall I like the show, but it's not quite as absurd as I hoped. There are some hip-hop elements and some funny moments (my favourite example of both being the vomit scratch-cut in Episode 6) but neither the hip-hop flavor or the comedy are as prevalent as I'd expect from a series that bills itself as "samurai/comedy/hip-hop." So far it's mostly just been a bizarrely anachronistic samurai series. I do love the main title sequence though.

Shin-Chan Season 1 Part 2
I picked this up cheap and I'm really enjoying it. Up until now I'd been avoiding the English dub because I didn't think I'd like all the extra dirty jokes they added, but it turns out I do like a lot of them, and I already knew I liked the original series so this is turning out to be a lot of fun. I'm now trying to get the other volumes at a decent price. The English voices are surprisingly close to the Japanese originals. My only problem is that they cut the great opening theme short.

Yellow Submarine
Every time I watch it I feel the same way-- there are a ton of cool visuals, and obviously the music is spectacular, but the script is a jumbled mess and I find it hard to watch the whole thing in one sitting.

Tenguri
(a late-70s one-off short by the staff of Lupin III)
The story is ridiculous and childish but the Miyazaki-animated scene near the end is fantastic. Between this and his epic battle scene in Animal Treasure Island, he's become one of my favourite animators. His animation work is a lot more cartoony and wild than I'd have thought from his directing style.

Roujin Z
Written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, soon after Akira. The budget is noticeably lower but there is some very good animation in certain scenes, and it's generally a well-told satire about how society treats the elderly, with a wacky science-fiction bent to it. I like the character designs, even though they're not as caricatured as the stuff I usually prefer. They don't really stand out that much but there's enough variation within the characters to keep them interesting. The ending theme has been stuck in my head for days now.

I also re-watched Shin-Chan - The Adult Empire Strikes Back and Urusei Yatsura - Beautiful Dreamer which are both still great.

In other news, I'm back to school for my final year. It's going pretty well so far. I'm also working on Scout Raskin's Bakerman and the Bunnymen short, coming up with ideas for another project and working on designs for Fester Fish t-shirts. The shirts should be available soon, I hope...

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Catsuka page on Masaaki Yuasa

Taking a break from the Fester Fish countdown to post something I found really cool, and infinitely inspiring.

I'm sure most animation fans are already aware of Catsuka, but until recently all I looked at on the site were the model sheet pages. Recently I stumbled across the "Focus On" pages, which are fantastic galleries and collections of videos related to specific animators. And there's one for Masaaki Yuasa! The site's mostly in french, but it's still pretty easy to navigate through. There are MADs of his animation, and a whole whack of concept art that I'd never seen before. There are even some awkward early drawings he did as a teenager. I found the page really inspiring and thought I should share it.

I also recommend the Hiroyuki Imaishi page and the Tatsuyuki Tanaka page. The Tanaka MAD is gold. I wish Tanaka would return to that looser, more high-energy style he used in stuff like Green Legend Ran and Download, before he entered that more subdued but equally impressive Toujin Kit/ Canabis Works era. Don't get me wrong, I love all of his work, but as any reader of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of wild, cartoony animation.

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Working Hard and Watching Kaiba

Hi everybody, I have no major news but just some updates on my life-- I taught a two-week summer workshop on Flash at Max the Mutt Animation School. I've also just finished my first big freelance job (still not sure if I'm allowed to talk about it... I'll wait until the company posts it online themselves). I've also started work on "Bakerman and the Bunnymen," an independent short written and directed by Scout Raskin, for which I'm doing the character designs, animation and backgrounds. On top of all this, I'm in the home stretch of production on my third Fester Fish short, "Fester Makes Friends" and I'm working on designs and concepts for another personal project. At some point I still need to finish off the audio for my third-year school short and post it online, although it's not terribly exciting.

The main thing I wanted to say in this post is that I've finally started watching Kaiba, the 12-episode anime series from 2008 created by Masaaki Yuasa (director of Mind Game, my favourite anime film). Oh my goodness, this series is amazing. It reminds me a bit of Galaxy Express 999, which I also love, only Kaiba is much cartoonier and less melodramatic (most of the time). It's not meant to be a comedy though, so at times the cartoony designs feel a bit misleading.

It's jam-packed with glorious full animation of beautifully simple but crazy designs, done by some of the best artists in the industry. The backgrounds are magnificently stylized and imaginative. The story is full of interesting ideas and it's the first time in years that I've seen something that feels so new and fresh. Even more so than Mind Game, because this takes place in a universe of pure fantasy. I think I still prefer Mind Game more though, just for its comedy and unbelievable energy, but this is definitely another winner from Yuasa (has he ever been involved in anything that wasn't utterly brilliant?)

The stellar direction and pacing make you feel like you're watching a long, particularly good indie short rather than an episode of an ongoing series. Not because it's inconsistent or meandering-- it's just constantly changing, and never really settles into a formula. Every episode I'm surprised at where they take the story.

 

The semi-abstract environments are reminiscent of Dr. Suess, or Yuasa's own earlier Nanchatte Vampiyan pilot which I posted about a while ago. I love the look of this show. It feels so complete and singular in its vision.

As I watched the first episode, I was blown away by the scope and imagination of the show's universe. I'm almost finished the series now, and the sense of wonder still hasn't really worn off. Go check out Kaiba, now. NOW YOU FOOL. SCHNELL, SCHNELL!!

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Pink Jacket Lupin 6

This post covers Episodes 39-42.

Episode 39 was done by the Oh Production studio. It has a lot of nice solid animation, although it's generally on the tamer side for this series. It also features the return of the guy who loves adding extra limbs during big movements, as well as the guy who does the great flailing/running scenes. Which may be the same animator, although so far I don't think I've seen any extra arms during the running sequences.

Episode 39 also has a scene remarkably similar to one in the Mamo movie, where Lupin, Jigen and Goemon are getting chased through a city by a helicopter.

Then we come to Episode 40. This one is amazing. It's got more Tatsuo Ryuno animation than any other episode so far. He seems to have done almost the whole thing himself.

 There's a long sequence where Lupin is trying to sneak into a heavily-guarded area and then joined by Zenigata in a chase through the subway, that's entirely animated by Ryuno, full of the weird posing and timing I've come to love about his style. The drawings become deliciously simple and distorted, as if Ryuno was just taking a few seconds to scribble out a loose gesture, practically animating the scene in real time. You can tell that he was animating straight ahead, completely focused on capturing the intensity and desperation as Lupin struggles to avoid being killed by the security system. In certain shots, the sense of proportion and construction completely break down, giving way to purely expressive drawings that vary wildly in shape. Combined with Yasuo Yamada's manic vocal performance as Lupin, the scene is one of the highlights of the entire series.

Goemon has three arms in this drawing. As I've mentioned above, somebody at Oh Pro really likes drawing three arms on people. But Lupin and Fujiko give away that this shot was drawn by Tatsuo Ryuno, and the drawing is held throughout the scene. There's no particular reason for him to have three arms. But he most definitely has three arms. Animator's mistake, or subtle act of rebellion against an oppressive society that demands two arms per person? ...We'll never know.

This is what American currency looks like to the Japanese.

 Apparently somebody on staff really liked Linda Ronstadt... And "Pe-", whatever that is.

Unfortunately since we got a really good episode, we have to pay for it with some boring ones. Episodes 41 and 42 have very little of interest in the animation.

 

Episode 42 is the first episode in the series that hasn't yielded any funny drawings to share. But things will pick up for the conclusion to the series. There are some Yuzo Aoki/ Tatsuo Ryuno episodes coming up.

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