Forum - View topicThe Best Anime of 2016
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Kikaioh
 Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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If you could point to a direct source, it would be appreciated. A lot of people seem to have confused "hand-drawn" to mean that rotoscoping isn't involved, and I'm not sure that that's the case with the show, given that some of the production art seems to suggest that they used computer models as the base for the hand-drawn skating sequences. @zrnzle500 and @Starbuckets: Kyoto Animation is smooth and polished looking, but has the benefit of largely being limited to movements that can more easily be referenced in day-to-day life, which isn't as interesting. I've also watched all of OPM, most of Space Dandy and Mob Psycho, as well as various sequences from Flip Flappers, and I unfortunately wasn't much impressed by most of them. I find that, although they're well-produced, a lot of the animation lacks a weight and realness to them that makes the characters seem floaty and have less impact. That said, I've seen parts of the more recent animator expo shorts that had some impressive animation, though it's disappointing not to see as technically impressive sequences in regular TV shows or OAVs as I've seen in the past (I've seen some in GitS Arise and Gundam Unicorn that looked good though). If you all could point out some of the more recent standout examples though, I would certainly be interested to see. @Valhern: I actually don't feel like those examples are all that impressive. They're floaty, not as certain on the perspective and motion, and a bit ways more flash than substance. For reference though, here are some examples of what I personally consider to be fairly impressive animated sequences in older works: https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/8943 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/4427 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/13451 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/28488 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/13631 Last edited by Kikaioh on Sat Dec 31, 2016 1:12 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Valhern
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But did I quote you? No, so I wasn't talking with you. If the argument I was talking about was so different from yours, how did you infer that my post was about you? |
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Vaisaga
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Sigh. Are you really going to bring playground logic into this?
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Color2413
Posts: 49 |
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Zac -- Because you liked "Shelter" and hoped for more EDM-oriented shorts, please let me recommend " ME!ME!ME! CHRONIC" (Japan Animator's Exposition). Turn off the lights, get close to the screen, and be prepared to experience the closest thing to an acid trip as you are likely to get while stone-cold sober. It's technically hardly more than a light show (no touching characters here!), yet it's pure kinetic energy in visual form--the sort of thing that only animation can do. I dunno if it's officially available in the West, but it's worth seeking out.
While I was *thrilled* by Yuri's out-of-left-field, genre-busting success, my AOY has to be "Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu," thanks to a script as deep as a proverbial well. And my third choice, would be "Ajin," which, if you can get past its idiosyncratic CGI look, had by far the tightest, most thrilling action script of the season. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3017 |
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Note: if you don't care about Touhou, ignore this post.
So, Zac's inclusion of "Shelter" in his list this year got me thinking of other anime music videos... no, not AMVs, but professional or semi-professional videos commissioned by doujin music artists to promote their songs on NicoNico. In particularly, I thought the "First Memory/Next Memory" video that Joyful and Silve did for the Akatsuki Records x Liz Triangle collaboration album was really well done, and if I was including stuff other than TV shows in my top five, it would easily make it in this year. Then, I remembered that the doujin anime studio Kyoto Fantasy Troupe announced earlier this year that they had cast Kana Hanazawa and Eri Kitamura as the leads in their fan-adaptation of Team Shanghai Alice's "Secret Sealing Club" concept albums. It struck me that if something like that ends up coming out, it would probably end up being in someone's top five next year, assuming they include non-professional works in their list. Last edited by BodaciousSpacePirate on Sat Dec 31, 2016 1:39 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Valhern
Posts: 916 |
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Dude, I literally was not talking about you, didn't even read your posts, I don't know how to explain it to you, you alone implied that my post was about your argument, it simply wasn't.
Those sequences are completely different in style, there's literally no point of comparison there. I think you might be confusing Mitsuo Iso's and Hiroyuki Okiura's realistic to semi-realistic mecha animation and character acting, which I won't lie, I love it, but it's a completely different style. Those styles do rely heavily on how gravity affects the movements and they're constantly trying to make everything life-like, even if it's not even a real thing, which is awesome. The kind of animation I shared goes in a completely different route. The "weight" is distributed in a different way, since it relies on the timing of "floaty" animation so that weight is landed with more strenght, it's not particularly careful on how bodies actually would react to those situations since it's supposed to be fantasy-like and irrealistic. They do have their different strenghts as well. The first type of animation is particularly clear and solid, it's bent on showing you all the cool details, and very carefully laying out an intricate sequence. Comparitvely, the other ones want to guide the viewer through different perspectives, the timing varies from fast to slow to fast, depending on how they want to impress the viewer, compared to a relatively "even" pace of other scenes. I do see your point though, the first style of animation, while not dead, might have shifted in a slightly different direction, present sometimes only in mecha animation in its more pure form. Last edited by Valhern on Sat Dec 31, 2016 1:40 am; edited 1 time in total |
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zrnzle500
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@Kikaioh I'd say KyoAni's mastery of realistic movement is rather impressive but it's not like more flashy and creative stuff is outside their area of expertise
More generally, here are some that I found searching by popularity over the last year https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/25142 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/25148 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/21810 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/24446 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/26532 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/23510 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/21307 |
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Starbuckets
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To me sequences like this one (https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/10596) or that one (https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/25148) have all the sense of weight and/or impact you seem to believe is lacking recent animation, despite heavily using smears and in Mob's case, not hesitating to deform the character in order to better convey the brutality of the hits he's taking. |
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Vaisaga
Posts: 13227 |
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If it really was just a coincidence, then I apologise. But no one else in this thread has made that argument or an argument that could be misinterpreted that way, so I don't know where you got it from. |
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Kikaioh
Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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Personally speaking as an artist, I don't think it's just a matter of style, at least when it comes to comparing the technical impressiveness of the different animated sequences. The more "real" style is grounded in the physics of the natural world, and as a result it's much more difficult to convincingly pull off. Not only are such sequences bound by gravity, but they're also affected by realness of motion coupled with varying perspectives, which is immensely challenging to render. The sequences you showed could be described as more "experimental" or "abstract", but it's the fact that they're unrestricted and open to the artists imagination that makes them less impressive in comparison, as the artists only need to accurately display a motion (which they certainly can do well in the modern day), but not necessarily convincingly capture any affecting laws of nature. It's like comparing renaissance paintings to abstract art --- while I suppose you can say there's a subjective likability between the two, there's more of a technical impressiveness to rendering works bound by the former's restrictive nature that's not inherently present in the latter (I feel this way about many of the examples you posted, @zrnzle500). Also as you touched on, the sheer attention to fluidity and detail in some of the older works generally isn't as present in modern works by comparison. Here are some examples of modern work that I think effectively capture that realness of motion that I find impressive: https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/17414 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/11799
It's not so much favoring realistic over experimental, it's that I think the former is more technically impressive than the latter. And when I say that animation in current years doesn't seem as ambitious or creative, I'm not talking about the shows themselves or the actual ideas behind certain sequences, but more in the animators trying to work outside of the comfort zone of experimentalism. There's a sort of stale "sameness" to the approach that a lot of the more high-production animated sequences use in modern works --- things like "brief motion, sudden quick movement, slow motion, zig-zagging", that I'm seeing in lots of different attempts at making good animated sequences. I suppose I'm more interested in the actual interaction of characters with their environments in quirky ways, that don't necessarily involve just human motion, but objects and backgrounds in complex/interconnected scenarios, that don't necessarily involve magical spells, explosions, etc. For example, the opening for Metal Fighters Miku has a fairly complex shot with characters landing on a giant statue, switching zoom and perspective, and while the fluidity isn't necessarily impressive, I think it's an ambitious sort of sequence to try and render, that doesn't quite rely on popular animation tropes to guide its progression: https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/13497 There's also a scene in YUA, involving policewomen in hot pursuit, stopping their car using footpower, which I think is interesting conceptually in combining the human interaction with both an object (a vehicle) and the background: https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/13457 |
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Gina Szanboti
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But that's not rotoscoping, at least not in the sense of tracing over filmed images. Even in that link, the skating is clearly drawn with the cg models as guidelines and not traced. Anyway
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Kikaioh
Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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Ah well, technically I consider it rotoscoping, even if it's not necessarily traced. Using CG models to render both the movement and perspective that forms the basis of the hand-drawn animation takes away almost entirely from the greatest challenge of rendering those sequences. And I take it that Yamamoto was simply stating that the animated sequences were fully drawn by hand, and that none of the sequences on display are actually of computer models, which is how I originally interpreted the statement. |
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vonPeterhof
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*For the record, as a Russian who grew up in Kazakhstan I give the show 8/10 for Russian representation and 6/10 for Kazakh(stani) representation - the latter is kinda generous considering how underdeveloped Otabek remained by the end, but him not being literally Borat goes a long way in earning my goodwill  I also saw a bit of my brother (a former competitive figure skater) in some of the characters, but since I know embarrassingly little about figure skating myself I can't judge it accurately as a representation of the sport.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11356 |
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Unfortunately I think that we are, except for some reason praising a series because it speaks to you in the area of gay representation is somehow "not objective," while in every other aspect a series is kudo-worthy for engaging your emotions, no questions asked. This discussion reminds me of the calls for the judge in CA's Prop 8 case to recuse himself because, as a gay man his bias was somehow a given and he could not be trusted to distance himself from the issue and apply the law correctly, while a straight judge was automatically be assumed to be unbiased, despite the basis of the argument against marriage equality being how it would negatively impact heterosexual people. Or more recently Trump trying to get a Mexican-American judge off his court case because of "obvious" bias. |
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Starbuckets
Posts: 87 |
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Here's what I think are examples of excellent background animation coupled with dynamic camera work that do not rely on any of the tropes you mention in your post: https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/24378 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/4797 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/24381 https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/24853 And this one in particular that struck me as completely ridiculous in its quality the first time I saw it : https://sakugabooru.com/post/show/24379. You'd have a really hard time to convince me that this kind of cut of feels commonplace or doesn't distinguish itself from what you're used to in terms of recent animation. Seriously, I really don't see this supposed dearth of inventiveness or originality in the way animators play around with the medium. I also feel there's a contradiction somewhere in there when associating experimentalism with the idea of a comfort zone. If anything, not being afraid to push animation in different, new directions through experimentation is anything but "safe" and in the best of cases give birth to some truly impressive works that will be revisited for the years to come (for eg. Space Dandy). Also, on a loosely related note, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Eupho's animation as "less interesting" or "less impressive", especially when the animation of the instruments is about as demanding as any 2D mecha animation out there. |
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