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The Quintessential Quintuplets Animator Eiichi Kuboyama Criticizes Anime's Layouts

Eiichi Kuboyama, who served as an key animator on The Quintessential Quintuplets, posted a series of tweets on Wednesday criticizing one of the layouts shown in the anime.

He posted a screenshot from episode 12 and wrote: "An unfortunate layout that's common in anime these days. It reeks of a copypasted storyboard. There are a lot of storyboards that give the impression that the characters are buried... Couldn't they have lowered the backgrounds and the character in the back?"

Kuboyama posted a screenshot of the scene from another angle, showing that the perspective from the first shot had been skewed. The girl was not buried, as the first shot would have implied.

Kuboyama also posted an image with a detailed breakdown of everything the shot did wrong, along with a visualization of how the shot would have looked from the side.

In order to correct the shot, Kuboyama posted an image pushing the background elements down to match the eye level.

Kuboyama mentions: "It's not just this anime. It's a mistake you can observe in almost every anime. These days, you don't need outdated direction techniques like, 'Make the characters wear clogs.' People do it because they picked it up somewhere, not because they thought it up themselves."

The television anime adaptation of Negi Haruba's The Quintessential Quintuplets (Gotōbun no Hanayome) premiered in January. Satoshi Kuwabara (Dagashi Kashi 2, Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal) directed the series at Tezuka Productions (Dagashi Kashi 2, Black Jack). Kuboyama was a key animator on episode 9.

Source: Eiichi Kuboyama's Twitter account via Otakomu