Urusei Yatsura is So Good

I've been watching more Urusei Yatsura, although not in any particular order. I just got Vol. 22 and 31, although I haven't watched any of the latter yet. Vol. 22 is probably the funniest set of episodes I've seen so far. In particular, episode 83 "Big Battle! Ten vs. Ataru" has a ton of insane animation, and a simple premise that leaves lots of room for crazy gags. Basically the plot is that Jariten (Lum's baby cousin) and Ataru have a fight.

This episode is drawn in a much looser, gag manga-like style than the others that I've seen. It starts off with some Road Runner/Coyote-style gags, with Jariten as the coyote.



And then there's this face. It will haunt your dreams.





The writing and direction are fantastic, full of hilarious reveals and bizarre ideas.



This sequence with Ataru trying to open his lunchbox in class with a bandaged hand is amazing. It's actually fully animated, and chock-full of crazy, distorted drawings and wacky poses. I also find it funny that throughout the sequence, the guy behind him is frozen with his mouth wide open.

And then his teacher transforms into a pig.

...Of course.


None of the other episodes on this disc contain as much funny animation as this one, but they're all pretty good anyway.

From an episode that's basically Hitchcock's The Birds only with potatoes attacking instead:




In the next one, a giant robotic chalkboard eraser, who used to be Lum's space-elementary school teacher, returns to punish her and her friends for pranks they pulled on him as kids.



Then the last episode on the disc has the characters travel back in time to figure out why one of them is claustrophobic.












...And this is from the preview for the next episode. It is now my civic duty to buy the next volume and see this in full:


I used to prefer the early episodes of the series because I felt they were more pure comedy-oriented, whereas the later ones that I'd seen featured weird attempts at serious drama. Turns out that what I'd seen was unrepresentative of the majority of later episodes. I'm glad I've started watching them now-- I can see why people called these later Mamoru Oshii-directed years of the show its golden age. The early episodes really are a lot cruder compared to these ones, in just about every respect.

One thing I noticed on this volume is that for no particular reason, the show keeps using a version of "Your Mother Should Know," done in the usual primitive-synthesizer style, as background music. I have no idea how they got away with this. I've also heard them use "Magical Mystery Tour" in another episode.


School and a freelance animation job are taking up most of my time at the moment. Apart from those, I'm mostly working on the third Fester Fish cartoon. Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to record the dialogue yet, so the number of shots I can animate at the moment is limited. While doing clean-up and colouring, I've been listening to my new favourite podcast, "Dynamite in the Brain," which is anime-themed and hosted by Brian Smith and Anthony Askew. Brian's blog Awesome Engine is what got me onto this current Urusei Yatsura bent, since he's written reviews for the first two-thirds of the series.

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Mamoru Hosoda's One Piece Movie 6

I haven't seen a lot of One Piece. I think I caught a couple of episodes on TV once, and I know the basics of the show and characters, but I haven't seen anything that really made me want to seek out more. The series has some aspects I like, but they aren't the primary focus and it's too frustrating to see those elements perpetually sidelined for typical shonen fights. However I recently watched the sixth One Piece movie, Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island since it was directed by Mamoru Hosoda. While the story was nothing to write home about, the direction was great and the animation was fun. At times it was almost like a cross between Hosoda's other films and Masaaki Yuasa.

The character designs have been simplified enough that they can easily be animated, much more fully than most anime (including most of the other One Piece animation that I've seen). Compare this shot of the characters as they appear in this movie...

.... To this picture of their designs elsewhere.

I've seen people refer to that usual One Piece art style as "very simple," presumably compared to other anime, but to me it looks just as bogged down in individual hair strands, muscles and fabric wrinkles as almost all anime and manga these days.

Anyway, in this movie they're handled very loosely, and heavily stylized. The exaggerated perspective is probably one of the main things that reminds me of Masaaki Yuasa.


As with lots of anime over the last decade, it does suffer from some incongruous CGI like the giant fish in the above image... Other than this instance, it's mostly just used for moving backgrounds though.

And of course since it's a Mamoru Hosoda film, it's full of wonderful deep compositions and many scenes with nice muted colours.



The original character designs for the movie are also pretty fun:



I have a feeling the story would have had more weight if I were already invested in the characters from having watched the TV series, but even with my limited knowledge and no emotional attachment to them, it was still a pretty fun 100 minutes.

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Some Anime I've Been Watching

I keep meaning to post about various anime shows I've watched over the past few months but I haven't had time until now. So here's a big Frankenstein monster of a post, stitched together from half-written ones from months ago.

I watched Mind Game director Masaaki Yuasa's pilot episode for the series Vampire Kids, or "Nanchatte Vampiyan." His pilot film is much darker than the series itself eventually turned out, both literally and in terms of mood. I love these backgrounds from it. They have a great sense of atmosphere. It would be fun to work on something in this style, with limited pastel colours and distorted perspective.








Yuasa injected some of his usual idiosyncratic style into the film, although it was so early in his career that not all of his recognizable directorial traits were fully in place yet, and most of his input was abandoned when it became a full series. Some of the more extreme character animation, camera movement and non-sequitur gags give his presence away though.

I've also been watching some of Mamoru Hosoda's work. I really like the way he dispenses with shading on the characters. Most modern anime emphasizes heavily shaded, detailed drawings with very little movement, but he does the opposite. It creates a striking, somewhat flat look, contrasted by his extreme (for animation, at least) use of depth in his compositions. And of course it allows the animators to focus more on the action.







Like just about everybody else, I was introduced to Hosoda's work in the 90s, watching Digimon. The single episode of the series that he directed, somewhere around episode 20 I think, had a completely different feel than the rest of the show-- much more low-key and contemplative. And of course, being set in the real world for once, it was much more based in reality.
Watching that episode when it came out (and even more so the two theatrical Digimon films he directed), I was fascinated by seeing these familiar fantasy characters engaged in relatable real-life situations rather than fighting some giant monster-of-the-week, which was starting to bore me even at that age. I particularly liked Hosoda's attention to mundane details, like kids running around their home in their socks rather than shoes. It sounds obvious, but most cartoons don't pay attention to that kind of stuff and I found this very refreshing as a kid.

More recently, I got to see Hosoda's films The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars. Both of them retained what I liked about his earlier work.

I think my favourite work of his is still those two theatrical Digimon films though, maybe just for nostalgic reasons. They were some of the first anime I saw with decent animation, after being used to cheap stuff like Sailor Moon, Pokemon and Dragon Ball (although that one did at least have fun designs early on, before it started to take itself seriously).

Obviously I also like Hayao Miyazaki (because who doesn't?), but I think he's a little over-rated. I could name lots of other anime directors I like just as much as him. I think the main reason for his fame is simply that he's done so many family-friendly films and created an instantly identifiable Studio Ghibli brand. Generally, anime directors only get to do a handful of original films if they're lucky, most of the time being stuck working on existing franchises. Miyazaki did spend a lot of his early career on Lupin III, but because he was there right at the beginning, he was able to put a lot of his own ideas into it. Even today, the Lupin III anime is heavily based on what Miyazaki did with it early on.

Mamoru Oshii is one of those directors who was stuck slaving away on a series for a long time, and it happens to be another one that I like -- Urusei Yatsura. Based on Rumiko Takahashi's first manga series, the anime version was helped immensely by Oshii's presence; he often gave the show a surreal dream-like feel, and brought a sense of depth to the repetitive throwaway plotlines and gags of Takahashi's original comic.



If the show's humor feels a little bit cliched, it's because this is the series that invited most of those anime cliches. It's hard to imagine a time when 'face faults' were unexpected and fresh, but that is literally how influential this series was. Just about every aspect of it was copied in some way. For instance, the female lead Lum's shtick of giving people electric shocks when she's mad was ripped off by the Pokemon anime.

The series never had a chance to become really popular in North America-- it was already pretty old by the time anime started to become popular here, so a lot of people ignored it. Furthermore, a lot of the verbal humour doesn't translate well, because it's full of Japanese wordplay. Probably because of this, there's never been a successful English dub of the series. It would be almost impossible to reproduce the energy of the original vocal performances anyway. Some of the screaming on this show is hilarious-- sometimes louder really is funnier.

...Anyway, Mamoru Oshii's contributions to the show were summed up perfectly by his final work on it, Urusei Yatsura Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer. He provided the original story for the film, and was thus finally able to delve completely into what he found compelling in the series. The result was an unusually quiet, atmospheric film in which the characters find themselves caught repeating the same day... nine years before Groundhog Day!



As a longtime fan of the series, it was interesting to see the characters thrown into a more somber, lyrical story. Later on, Oshii became better-known as the director of Ghost in the Shell, which is a pretty amazing movie, but I prefer his lighter, earlier work.

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Merry Christmas

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The Gutsy Frog On Brubaker's Blog

Charles Brubaker just did a great series of posts on his blog about another 70s anime with pretty funky animation -- "The Gutsy Frog." I highly recommend reading them.

http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2011/11/gutsy-frog.html
http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2011/12/gutsy-frog-continued.html
http://bakertoons.blogspot.com/2011/12/gutsy-frog-part-3.html

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Robotnik Skipping

This is a pencil test I shot about a year ago for school. It's not the best one I did, but it's my favourite. We had to animate a character jumping, and then skipping (I think the original idea was to have the character jumping rope, but there was a miscommunication and our class ended up doing this instead). Anyway, we had the option of either designing a character or using a pre-existing model sheet to work from, so naturally I picked Milton Knight's Robotnik design from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog.

At one point the teacher commented that it was too rubbery and stretch-and-squashy. He questioned whether it was "on-model," so I showed him the hilarious model sheet, which includes the legendary direction "Keep it loose and distorted. Draw EXPRESSIVELY, not WELL." This clearly bothered him, but he allowed me to continue with the animation. He eventually had me correct a few things and tone some of the stretch and squash down, but this is an earlier version that I like better. The biggest mistake that sticks out to me now is the popping of the stripe on his back during the skip. I should've just left that off.

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Yuzo Aoki's Crazy Lupin Movie

I've finally found another animator I like as much as Rod Scribner and Jim Tyer, thanks to Ben Ettinger's Anipages blog (which has really been on fire lately with some amazing posts).

A while ago I did some posts about a weird Lupin III episode. Ben not only told me who was responsible for the wacky drawings in it, he also told me what else they worked on in the franchise. If you're interested, just read his recent posts on Lupin III, specifically this one and this one.

I don't want to re-iterate too much of what he's written, but to make a long story short, it turns out there were two artists whose work I was noticing in that episode: Yoshio Kabashima and Yuzo Aoki. As I suspected, they co-directed the animation for the 1978 Lupin movie Lupin vs Clone, or The Secret of Mamo as it was called in the US. That movie has tons of really funny drawings too, but like the episode I posted the images from, the animation is often pretty limited, so the drawings don't really shine like they should.

After reading Ben's posts, I decided to look into the "pink jacket" Lupin III cartoons from the 1980s, since Yuzo Aoki had a much bigger part in them. This third era of Lupin was generally disliked by the Lupin fan base, for a few reasons. The music, colour and overall style are pure 80s cheese. (On a side note, Yuji Ohno, the long-time music composer for the series, renamed his band "the Super Sexual Transport" during this period. I just thought that was funny.) The stories became even sillier and more far-fetched than either of the previous Lupin TV series. Take a look at these demented episode titles:

"Good Afternoon, Hell's Angel"
"Lupin has Come with a Tank""The Man Is Called the Death Garb"
"Virgin Mary's Getaway Strategy""The Copy-Man Comes Expensive"
"Code Name Is Alaska Star"
"The Alaska Star Is a Ticket to Hell"
"Pops Boils over with Rage"
"Plunder the Pyramid of Insurance"

I know you can make anything sound stupid by translating it literally, but I just needed to share those gems... Anyway, another reason people didn't like the 80s Lupin was because anime fans often have a very narrow definition of what constitutes good animation. Sometimes they're right -- the art was inconsistent, and occasionally just plain bad. But Yuzo Aoki's work on the pink jacket series and the accompanying 1985 movie was fantastic. Not much of his work on the TV series is available for immediate viewing online, but here's an opening sequence he did.



The Lupin III anime has never looked this much like the original manga by Monkey Punch. Apart from Aoki's weird design of Fujiko, you'd swear Monkey Punch just learned to animate and did this himself. The posing is so inspired and demented. And the stylization of details like the wrinkles on the clothing is really well-done. This is what I love about the Lupin comics, and Aoki's animation of the characters is just like watching the comic in motion. Even the well-animated 1969 Lupin pilot film looks watered-down to me now, compared to this animated distillation of the Monkey Punch style.

I have the 1985 movie on VHS, but I hadn't watched it recently until Ben's posts on Aoki, who was the character designer, animation director and layout supervisor for this movie. So he was almost completely responsible for its visual style.





The film is pretty much 100 minutes of the kind of hilariously drawn slapstick comedy in the original Monkey Punch comics, and sadly that's probably why it turns off fans of the other Lupin anime. This is Lupin III at its absolute craziest. It's a far cry from the stiff, formulaic tedium of the franchise today. It actually feels like this movie was written with the intention of giving the animators interesting things to animate, sometimes to the detriment of the plot or any kind of structure. I'm not surprised that this movie is so rarely talked about. It's kind of an anomaly -- too wacky (and in some sections, simply incoherent) for anime fans, and it's an obscure part of an overwhelmingly long-running franchise, so there's almost no way a Western viewer would see it unless they're specifically looking for it. Of course, it doesn't help that it's been out of print in North America for years.



This is a movie where Lupin and Zenigata ride motorcycles in and out of the various orifices on a giant face for no reason. The face changes its expression several times, and sneezes.






It's the kind of movie where Zenigata sends dynamite on a zipline attached to handcuffs he throws around Lupin's neck... And Lupin can make the dynamite turn around by holding up the appropriate sign. And of course when it does explode, the characters are just charred for a second before healing completely.



There's also a robot with a hat. It eats money.


This is not a botched translation.

The story is confusing at times, but certain scenes in this movie are among my favourites in the entire Lupin III canon. Screenshots will not do them justice, so here are some videos. (In case you're wondering, Lupin's name is written as Rupan in the subtitles because for a while, no US anime distributors were allowed to use the name Lupin. It's a long story.)


Watch Lpn Bbln Train in Anime | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

This is part of a scene in which Lupin and his pals are on a train being chased by Inspector Zenigata, and a bunch of gangsters. There are so many insane poses in this sequence, and it's great to see them fully-animated instead of just one or two per shot. It's still not quite "full animation" in the traditional Western sense, but that seems to be mainly on purpose; Aoki has a idiosyncratic sense of timing that involves a lot of short holds. I wish I could upload these clips in a format that allowed frame-by-frame viewing. (Don't you love all the weird little noises Yasuo Yamada does as the voice of Lupin? They really add a lot of energy and humour to the character.)


Watch Lpn Bbln Rucksack in Anime | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com


Watch Lpn Bbln Crt in Anime | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

More funny animation and funny Yasuo Yamada noises.


Watch Lpn Bbln River in Anime | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

If you can find this movie, I'd recommend taking a look. It's very uneven, but you won't see animation quite like this anywhere else.

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