Thread by @fufuro_moe

If you've been on anime or sakuga Twitter in the last few hours, you've surely seen this scene.
Frieren has kept providing some fantastic animation this season, but Myoun's dance sequence on #15 has become a big topic. Let's get into some of what makes it special

First, let's introduce the key animator
Myoun is a young Korean artist active since 2017, who quickly specialized in character acting on works like Wonder Egg Priority & Akebi-chan's Sailor Uniform
They also worked with director Keiichirô Saitô once before, on Bocchi the Rock #05

What made their work on Bocchi special was the use of CG reference at the layout phase to represent the performance more accurately
Myoun's animation on Bocchi might've been too close to the CG -it does feel stiff- but their work on Frieren shows how far they've progressed

Indeed, the dance from Frieren heavily relied on motion-capture reference. Madhouse asked for the help of the Tatsurô Otake Dance School, whose dancers Misaki Tsuyuguchi and Satoshi Tateishi provided a choreography and reference footage

It's not just the dance that relied on real-life footage, as composer Evan Call also noted that the orchestra playing the music was also recorded on video so that the movement of their bodies and fingers would be accurate

This scene was clearly a special one. Storyboarder and episode director Izumi Sekiguchi (who debuted on this episode, congrats to them!) shared the storyboard, and you can see how much room they left to the choreographers and animator

Director Saitô seems to have been really supportive of all the staff. When Sekiguchi shared their incertainties to him, especially regarding how much detail they should put in the animation, the director replied "do as you want, we'll find a way to make it possible"

And certainly, a lot of energy went into this scene. Besides the use of reference, the in-betweens were partly done in-house - something rare those days, which ensures the quality of the drawings and of the scene as a whole

Myoun themselves didn't spare any efforts, doing the second key animation themselves - not that rare but nothing granted these days - and animating everything in utmost detail

This sequence is obviously pretty complex, with the choreography requiring a strong awareness of space and the creation of a sense of volume and presence. In that sense, the reference footage clearly helped

But what's by far the most impressive has to be the fabric animation. The way Fern's dress folds and unfolds in a follow-through effect is admirable.
The same applies to the hair, and you can notice the attention to detail by looking at how the shadow always perfectly matches it