Slime 300 #06 was produced at Madhouse almost like a prelude to Natsume's upcoming work. Shinashina's attentive animation direction is a difference-maker, and so is the fact that his pal Keiichiro Saito animated 1/3 of the episode. Fun loose form compatible with elegance & beauty
Saito tags in at the halfway point and immediately makes his hand known. Good volume and weight, constant characterful tidbits despite the economical approach, plenty of looser art & charming shorthands, and instances of lowered drawing counts for comedic purposes. In short: fun!
The whole show is good at modulating the level of detail so all this is really doing is improving already existing qualities
The morning scene around the end of Saito's ~7 minutes long contribution sums it up the best: effortless back and forth of detail and stylization, elegance and goofiness, all for a pretty damn funny dumb gag
The rest of the episode's pretty great as well, for similar reasons at that. You can tell a special animation director is around when a simple flat shaded body in the foreground has details like wrist wrinkles while waving their hand (before erupting into more fun nonsense)
✋
Tactility is one of the things I really appreciate in animation so it was fun for a change to see a team that's pretty good at that deal with a ghost who can't be touched
It helps that it was probably the funniest episode in the whole show, with an incredibly telegraphed punchline that still got me. The visual humor carries it so well
Free her, she's just stupid in the brain. That's probably not a crime
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Been seeing praise for the small team on Eupho S3. Usual disclaimer: even with the proven efficacy of this approach, don't reduce anime credits to "lower number = better quality/conditions", they don't tell you everything & often lie. But it's a neat topic
KyoAni episodes across a show are split between key animator units in rotation. They tend to be led by a veteran (Hiroshi Karata in this case, I suspect he animated the fun intro) and have a handful more people, including some of the youngest staff. Presumed unit 1 in green here
For early episodes where things aren't settled in stone yet, or particularly tricky ones, you might see more than one unit credited. They may handle clean-up or entire cuts, involving a whole different unit, available individuals, or ace animators hovering above these norms
Been really looking forward to the Tengoku Daimakyou adaptation - out of excitement due to its interesting high-profile team, but also because I was curious how they'd navigate such a tricky series to adapt. So far, the anime's qualities far outweigh the compromises. Great start!
TDM is a dense series with maniacal foreshadowing, but at the same time a breezy and comfortably paced read. The manga balances the page-turner side with laid-back postapocalyptic adventures very well, and with just 1 cours for this long arc, the anime has to shift the approach
That makes me appreciate the involved series composition over just speeding through the manga as it was. The way they're finding new points to connect the two storylines & coming up with very effective cliffhangers of their own tells me they do get (at least part of) the appeal
Vibrant start to Hirogaru Sky Precure, one of the most energetic intros in the franchise at a time when you can't take that for granted. Wealth of amusing scenarios, witty irreverent script, and a bunch of neat animation that culminates in this cool & loosely expressive setpiece
Brought to mind Ryunosuke Kingetsu's older anime works, when he came up with many off-kilter worlds where surreal nonsense passes as their own normality - hope his wild ideas don't clash too much with Precure's rigid formula. For now they're letting him be a nasty freak, lol
I think the series has the right ingredients for the staff to offer genuinely diverse scenarios weekly, like how Sora is a parkour master so they'd be able to have her solve issues without her Precure powers. Pls let them have fun, o merch overlords
The stunning Yama no Susume Next Summit finale explains the unusual structural choices they made. Early recaps even at the cost of runtime, switching to full eps at the end, all for the sake of the conquest of the mountain Aoi painfully lost to *8 years ago*. Now, sweet revenge
The scenery alone is enough to move you to the core if you've been watching this far - for what it signifies, and because it makes it easier to tell that they put everything they had into this. Their own experiences, their own photos, carefully tweaked to fit YamaSusu's worldview
Yama no Susume (Mama no Susume?) NS #09-B was led by the opening team of Irei Eri direction x Yusei Koumoto supervision. The former's processing is the show at its prettiest & the latter offers the most lavish art, so it's no wonder they got called *2 years later* to make the OP
Hinata's view of Aoi's back as they climb brings to mind all the POV shots in that sequence. Irei's camera's movement emulates the eye so in this case it's got rhythmic swaying, while in the OP there's a wider variety with appropriate tracking, more stationary takes, etc
The most impressive aspect has to be the animation direction. There are many valid approaches to YamaSusu's design work and the show embraces that, but this is the most fully-realized one, obscenely detailed and still not compromising the usual expressiveness. Sasuga Yusei.......
Beautiful sequence regardless, a bit of an alternative retelling of the relationship the episode is all about. The looming Makima eye in their moment of intimacy got me good