This episode marks a return of the tone and quality of the first three episodes, and what a welcome return it is. The intervening episodes have been fascinating vivid individualistic excursions into the wild worlds of Kaiba, but I have to confess to being delighted to be back in the ether of that earlier tone, with that touch of line and style of directing that got me hooked at the beginning. I don't think it will be a straight line in this style from here on out judging from what I've seen before, but I have to confess to being partial to what the team here has done with the material. Quite simply, this was a stunning episode that did everything I had wanted from the series - showing off fascinating design ideas in the characters and world through vivid, rich, colorful animation that danced around the screen, combined with brilliant directing tying together the various threads of the narrative into a tightly wound whole.

The team to thank is the venerable duo responsible for episode 3 - storyboarder, director and co-writer (w/Yuasa) Akitoshi Yokoyama and animation director Nobutake Ito. I'd been girding my loins for this episode, and it did not disappoint. Building up slowly, the second half of this episode gradually ratchets up the tension until exploding in one of the most hair-raising, moving, deftly constructed climaxes of the series. I am deeply impressed with how Yokoyama seems to add to his directing powers with each new episode I've seen from him over the last few years. Watching Yokoyama grow with each episode of Kaiba reminds me of watching Tweeny Witches eagerly looking forward to Yasuhiro Aoki's next episode to see how he would continue to extend his directing powers. I hope Yokoyama continues to build on what he's achieved as a director so far, as I think he shows tremendous potential. I know of few people working in anime today with a directing sensibility as finely tuned as his.

Yokoyama again interweaves flashbacks into the narrative, in the process revealing a lot about the relationships between the various characters. He hints at other elements of the back story, deftly treading the fine line between giving too much and too little away. I thought was the first time the various narrative threads had been effectively woven into the fabric of the narrative since episode 2. The presentation of the various flashbacks in the second half made for visuals of tremendous richness and variety, showing Yokoyama again putting a great deal of thought into how to present the material so as to make every moment full of surprises and thereby maintain strong forward momentum and visual interest. Not a shot passes that doesn't show the care of the director either in the form of interesting visuals or great animation. Testifying to his attention to detail, I notice a new significant hidden element almost every time I rewatch this episode.

The drawings of this episode were very strong thanks to the work of the animation director. The designs had the aloof, clean simplicity of the early episodes that Ito is so good at, and the world of this episode was particularly well rendered. It really felt like the characters inhabited this unusual world, rather than the characters simply having been placed over an drawing of an unusual planet. Care was given to creating a feeling of depth, which was clearly important for an underwater world, as the characters literally have to swim through their environment, rather than walk on a flat plane. This came through particularly well in the action sequence preceding the climax, which was easily the most riveting action sequence since the chase at the beginning of the first episode.

I'd venture to say this was the most powerful action sequence in the series because of the brilliant way the action was tied into the tragic progression of the story. Exciting animation + moving story = brilliant animated filmmaking. Even with the sound off watching this climax is quite something, with the rich animation of the ships flying around the screen, and the way what is happening is clearly communicated through the drawings. Beyond being great animated filmmaking, it's great visual storytelling. Through this series Yokoyama has revealed his gift for creating highly moving drama. I'm rarely moved by anime that is supposed to be moving, and find the majority of tear-jerker anime simply manipulative. Yokoyama's work is the rare exception that is powerfully moving, as intended. Yokoyama elegantly brings a sense of closure to the arc of the girl who was introduced in episode 3, which he handled, by capping her final moments with a reference to the pink rubber boots that played a big role in her previous life. His love comes through particularly clearly in the gorgeous visuals that cap the climax, which he obviously put a tremendous amount of work into in terms of the colors and processing. The climax of this episode is unmistakably one of the most striking scenes in the series, or of any anime I've seen in recent years for that matter.

This episode by this core duo was backed up by a bevy of good animators, headlined by Ryotaro Makihara, who is turning out to be one of the pillars of Kaiba's animation. I'm almost tempted to call him Kaiba's main animator due to the frequency of his appearances and the amount of work he has obviously put into his animation. I couldn't be happier to see him doing so much great work under Yuasa. I wonder if he wasn't responsible for a big part of the chase at the end, and by inference also the action scene at the beginning of episode 1. I'm not really sure, though. Other animators of note in this episode include Ikuo Kuwana, of SFA Generations fame, Akira Honma and Akira Amemiya. Chuji Nakajima is apparently known for his action scenes, although I don't know his work at all so I can't speculate what he might have done.

Even apart from the action scenes, this episode's drawings were a delight from start to finish. For some reason I got a vibe of Osamu Tanabe from a number of scenes, especially the scene at the airport. The funny drawings of the bystanders reminded me of his Doredore no Uta. The feeling of the ship as it jumped out of the water at the climax was particularly nice, with great momentum making it exciting to watch and being very organic, like a flying fish jumping out of the water flapping its body around. It almost seemed like an homage to the flying fish in the great scene animated by Yoichi Kotabe in Animal Treasure Island. The editing of the director and the combination of the animation with the CGI also went a long way to providing this scene with real immediacy.

There was some interesting acting where Vanilla goes all heart-eyed, reminding of a similar scene in episode 3, which are the only two places I can recall Vanilla doing that kind of very distinctive exaggerated cartoon acting. Perhaps they were done by the same person, as there is a lot of overlap between this episode and episode 3 - namely Akira Amemiya, Nagisa Nagashima, Shoko Nishigaki, Aiko Wakatsuki, Natsuko Shimizu and Miki Wasada. The latter four have actually been involved throughout the series, I just noticed. Natsuko Shimizu in particular has been in every single episode except for Mihara's episode 4. Ditto for Miki Wasada, minus one episode. These four women must be among the core key animators at Madhouse supporting the animation of Kaiba.

I don't think I'd be able to come up with something to say about each and every episode of a TV series if it didn't feature the unflagging richness and relentless stylistic unpredictability of Masaaki Yuasa's TV shows. Each episode is filled with an abundance of things that make it stand out as a unique creation, rather than just one in a line of identically manufactured products. In that sense it almost reminds me of Group Tac's long-running Tales of Old Japan omnibus of Japanese folktales, where every episode was done in a different and very imaginative style by a different team, with many of the episodes by single individuals. There are more differences than similarities, obviously, notably in terms of the amount of work packed into those solo episodes in the case of Yuasa's shows, but they share something of the same dedication to filling the screen with ideas that are interesting as animation. There's not a moment where we fall back on the crutches of convention. It's almost exhausting to see work that remains so defiantly fresh at every moment.

I watched this episode a while back, but just re-watched it, and I liked it a lot more this time around. I felt that it was a bit jumbled the first time around, with a bit of shakiness in the dramatic line, but this time around I didn't feel bothered by that at all, and felt quite moved by the episode for some reason. The episode wasn't necessarily setting out to be a tearjerker or anything. I suppose it's just that, as before, it manages to evoke these profound veins of resonance in the viewer in the course of the narrative.

This episode is somewhat of a mirror to episode 9 of Kemonozume in the sense that it's another episode about an aged couple traveling around in their twilight years. There were a number of elements that moved me about it. First and foremost is the turn of events that takes this seemly content and satisfied elderly couple enjoying their last few years together, and shatters their illusion of happiness into a million pieces. Kaiba is nothing if not brutal and brutally honest about the human condition and the frailty and flaws of memory. It's a devastating moment that speaks volumes about the unknowable depths of the mind and the thoughts and memories we keep hidden from ourselves and our loved ones to maintain a semblance of happiness. Most devastating was to see the old man continue on his way with his brain-dead wife because her body was still "alive and well".

This series at heart is all about the question of what defines us as human beings - our memories, our bodies? Both? Neither?? To some extent it is our memories, but who we are is without any doubt molded by our bodies. There's a sublime sense of identity confusion created by having the protagonist, who is male but currently occupies a female body, in this episode encounter his onetime lover, a female who currently occupies a male body. Their actions (and hence feelings and thoughts) are driven by the lusts of their bodies. It's a situation that's simple but also ingenious and thought-provoking. It takes a while to wrap your head around the mix of genders and identities, but the confused feelings of the protagonists in the odd circumstances are convincingly portrayed. The amusement park where you can peer into the disembodied memories of the deceased was one of the more chilling and biting moments of the episode. One shot near the end showed a wall of round picture frames on the wall of the old couple's ship, shaped like the memory blobs. It seemed a deft ironic comment on how the old woman came to the planet to peer into other people's memories, but instead wound up losing her own. So as usual, there is a lot to be discovered in each shot of the episode. It's densely packed, meaningful storytelling.

In terms of the staff, one of the main figures behind this episode is another emigree animator, like last episode's Choi Eunyoung, who has been making a name for himself in the last few years in an industry otherwise dominated by natives - Jamie Vickers. Jamie was co-storyboarder and animation director. Tomoya Takahashi was co-storyboarder, director and co-writer (with Yuasa). If the episode felt a little mixed up, perhaps it's because there were so many hands at work. Jamie's drawing style is not as unmistakable as Choi's, but there is definitely a unique sense of timing and drawing at work here that sets this episode apart, particularly so the scenes involving Vanilla. I wonder if he might not have been handled by Jamie. Vanilla is a useful character for getting a sense of each animation director's style. Stylistic differences from one episode to the next seem to show up most clearly in him for some reason. So one of the significant aspects of this series is that it represents one of the most visible recent instances of foreigners taking a lead role as creators within a totally Japanese production. Studio 4C, of course, led the way with Tekkon Kinkreet, and I noticed that Jamie provided animation in the opening segment of Genius Party by Atsuko Fukushima, so it's interesting to see the two most creatively fecund studios in Japan sharing many of the same talented faces, both foreign and local.

This episode featured a number of veteran animators, most notably Takuo Noda, who will be 70 next year and has a huge list of work to his credit dating back to 1967 when he first started out at Toei Doga. Among his more well known jobs was animation director of Genma Taisen. He continues working hard as a regular Madhouse animator, having recently animated the nice scene in Mamoru Hosoda's Tokikake where Makoto talks to the old woman. We also find Nobumasa Arakawa, another veteran who has been active for decades and continues to work on the front line. He was one of the main animators behind Future Boy Conan, and if I recall correctly, he animated one of my favorite bits in Tokikake, where Makoto leaps from the riverbank. In addition, we again find litmus animator Koichi Arai and Takayuki Hamada, both in the top spots. There was some very nice movement around where the old lady's memory is sucked out, so I'd suspect one of these guys, possibly Arai.

The designs of this episode really stood out with their extreme shapes sticking out every which way, and I assume them to have been created by Nobutake Ito. Every episode provides crazy new designs for not just the characters but also the features of the planet. The soft organic shapes of the buildings make for rich background images that are always a pleasure to gaze at. I have to re-emphasize the backgrounds, as the backgrounds of this series are such a pleasure to look at and really help define the show's unique visual atmosphere. I also like the way smoke and clouds are animated throughout the series, using these elegant round globular forms. I can remember seeing similarly shaped effects as far back as Cat Soup.

I've been working my way through Spaceship Sagittarius over the last few weeks, and recently I ran across an episode that stood out as being very different in quality, episode 18. I thought maybe it was my imagination, but it was really quite different, with an almost Miyazaki style to the pacing and framing. I wondered briefly if maybe Miyazaki might not have done it under a pen name, but quickly ruled that out. Looking into the credits revealed it was storyboarded by Keiji Hayakawa. The rest of the episodes were storyboarded in a not particularly remarkable fashion by folks like Kazuyoshi Yokota and Takayoshi Suzuki, who were both heavily involved in Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theater shows. Another episode storyboarded by Hayakawa, 21, proved to be equally distinguished, confirming it was Hayakawa's work that stood out. (he also handled 10, 15, 31, 33, 34, 47, 58)

I remembered seeing Hayakawa before in a Miyazaki work, but I couldn't remember which, maybe Sherlock Hound. Looking into it, I found out that he was indeed one of the main people behind Hound, but only the portion done by Studio Gallop after Miyazaki left. He was actually involved in Conan as co-storyboarder/co-director of almost every episode, which is unusual since Miyazaki usually does the storyboard himself. Under the difficult circumstances of directing an entire TV show for the first time, Hayakawa is the guy Miyazaki turned to to help him complete each episode. That is clearly a major part of where his Miyazaki-influenced storyboarding style came from. Up until Conan Hayakawa had mostly only worked as an assistant director. He had started out at Toei as an assistant director on Himitsu no Akko-chan in 1969 and trained there in that capacity for the next few years on shows like Sarutobi no Ecchan and Gegege no Kitaro before leaving to do the same on Samurai Giants (1973), Heidi (1974) and Sinbad's Adventures (1975). This was a guy who had started out with a clear goal - directing. He storyboarded ep 36 of Heidi, which is certainly one of his earliest if not his first storyboards. So he had a solid foundation in the Toei school of directing even before coming to Conan.

What happened to him after that? I couldn't remember ever seeing his name afterwards, even though he seemed to have a pretty good directing sense. Looking into it, he was quite active, and still is. He debuted as a series director with Attack to Tomorrow in 1977, and went on to direct Jolie for Visual 80 in 1981 before moving to Studio Gallop with a bunch of ex-Telecom animators like Shojuro Yamauchi and Tsukasa Tannai in 1983, where he directed a number of shows including Chikkun Takkun (1984), Spoon Obasan (1988) and the longest-running non-ShinEi Fujiko Fujio anime, Kiteretsu Daihyakka (1988). He was also director of an old OVA I liked a lot back in the day - Prefectural Earth Defense Force (1986). Nowadays it looks like he focuses on storyboarding & directing episodes, having done episodes for Digimon Adventure (1999 / 10, 15, 20, 27), Hajime no Ippo (2001 / 35), Kyo Kara Majo (2004 / 15, 22, 27, 33, 38) and Kiba (2006 / 19, 28, 35, 42).

This is a classic case of a storyboard 'stand-out' of the kind I've talked about in the past. It shows how the storyboard is the critical element of directing. Each of Hayakawa's episodes was directed by someone else, but the blueprint is there. It all starts with the storyboard, and the film is basically all in the storyboard. The surface details of the final product will vary dramatically depending on what happens afterwards, but you can always see the storyboarder underneath.

I'm falling way behind on Kaiba, so without further ado, I've now seen the fifth episode twice, and what a great episode it was. This episode is packed to the brim with punch and verve. For all its roughshod stylings, the episode is so vibrant and full of life that it makes you forget how different it looks from what came before. That's what Kemonozume was so great for - for shifting between all these different styles, but doing such a good job of it that it felt altogether natural. I started out expecting a different tack, a more evenly styled one, but with this episode I'm finally starting to get into the rhythm of the series, and to accept that it works quite well.

This was obviously the freest and most spontaneous feeling episode of the bunch in terms of the drawings - which isn't hard, because what came before was quite different, with a far more unified and clean look to the drawings. But I found the drawings and animation a sheer delight, and the episode won me over within seconds and maintained that tension through to the very end. I actually thought this episode felt closest in spirit to Yuasa's sensibility in terms of throwing off reams of interesting, colorful ideas in a torrent of off-the-cuff drawings.

The person to thank is Choi Eunyoung, the emigree animator who handled episode 6 of Kemonozume. In that episode of Kemonozume I felt Choi had done a great job of 'getting' what Yuasa was trying to do with that show, the direction he was trying to go with the drawings, with all those extraneous lines, and had done a better job than any of the other animation directors bringing that unique approach to life. Well, I think this time she's done an even better job. The drawings here are quite different from the previous episodes, but at the same time they strike me as being closer to Yuasa's spirit than any of the previous episodes, which made this feel like the most authentically 'Yuasa' episode yet.

Choi strikes me as the person who best brings alive the look and feel of Yuasa's conceptual drawings, which is something that you don't see very often, as in recent years the drawing side of things has been handled by other people. Choi's unique drawing style comes through very clearly in the early part of the episode, where she revels in creating the many oddly shaped characters who populate the city, and yet it feels like a perfect match with Yuasa's drawings. She has the talent to be able to create a balance that brings out the best of the underlying material, through her voice as it were.

Choi was, as per habit, co-writer (with Yuasa), storyboarder, director and animation director of the episode, and she handled a good chunk of the animation herself as well. This episode was in every sense her baby, although she didn't do everything herself. (there were five other animators) And what a beautiful baby. Every element of the episode was terrifically fun and convincingly handled. The directing was satisfying at every moment, briskly conveying this interesting side-story with its whacked out characters. The timing and angles of the shots were consistently excellent, far better than I would have expected, deftly balancing fun & free drawings with the typical seriousness of the story and underlying message.

The colors were very striking and had great impact in the early parts of the episode in particular, where snapshots of the city's strange scribbly denizens flash before our eyes in image after strikingly colored image, immediately establishing a unique atmosphere for this episode and its planet. I'm guessing this section was all drawn by Choi. The music was a perfect match, too, creating a sort of carnivaleque atmosphere that well suited the sinister and cynical mood of a planet where the value of life has been completely debased, and people discard their bodies at the drop of a hat when they become yesteryear's fashion. Overall, I can't say enough good about this episode.

A big part of the fun and unique atmosphere of this episode came from the madcap show put on by Shigeru Nagashima (a.k.a. "Cho"), who did an amazing job of bringing alive the character of Patch. Kenji Naikai similarly did a brilliant job bringing alive the insane antics of Ohba in episode 10 of Kemonozume. Yuasa is good at casting these great voice actors in these fun roles where they can go crazy and let loose, applying all their years of experience to the task, engaging in all these entertaining vocal acrobatics and improvisations. For some reason I couldn't get Kenichi Endo out of my head while watching this episode, thinking how great he would be if let loose on this kind of voice-acting role.

There were only a few animators other than Choi, but they included Ryotaro Makihara and Koichi Arai, two of my very favorite animators, who are turning up quite frequently. I'm not sure what Arai may have done, but that great close-up shot where Patch goes on a mad, saliva-spitting rant directly into the camera strikes me as looking like Makihara's work. Makihara exhibited a similarly overt Ohira influence in the chase scene he did for the Coo film, although that influence wasn't as obvious in his work on Doraemon. Here it's like he revels in the opportunity to finally be able to draw how he wants, creating this fantastically dense and thrilling shot. That other Madhouse emigree, Jamie Vickers, was also there, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he did in his own episode, which comes up next.

The Tadanari Okamoto films I uploaded to Crunchyroll have been deleted. The good news is that this was done because they have apparently been licensed. If that is indeed the case, and we're going to be seeing an Okamoto R1 DVD in the very near future, then I couldn't be happier. I'm a little skeptical, so I hope it doesn't take too long to hear some kind of announcement related to this.

In other news, several films about which I'd heard rumors quite a long time ago seem to finally be moving ahead: Tadashi Hiramatsu's debut feature Ghost Rhapsody and Hiroyuki Okiura's long-awaited next feature. The Hiramatsu film isn't confirmed yet, though it's probably go from the look of things (thanks Manuloz). But the Okiura film is, because Production IG is soliciting staff for the new film on their web site. It's been a long time coming (it's been more than 3 years since we first heard about Ghost Rhapsody, and 10 since Jin-Roh), but both should be worth looking forward to.

An omnibus called Visions of Frank was released last year. It consists of nine animated shorts by nine different Japanese artists inspired by the work of Jim Woodring's comic Frank. Each of the films in the set has a very different style, and I hadn't heard of many of the artists, so it was interesting viewing. The one that stuck with me since I first saw it a few months ago was the one entitled Hi-Rise Hopper, with its vivid full animation, unusual for a Japanese production, and wild amorphous transformations in the Akira blob tradition. Besides being a blast to watch, I felt it did the most justice to the characters and atmosphere of the comic. I was inspired to re-watch it today after reading a great article on Frank (thanks Alan), and got curious to figure out who exactly was behind this piece, as the only credit I could find was "Tamapro/Drop", which meant nothing to me. After a bit of digging, I found the answer, and learned a few other things along the way.

The film was storyboarded and directed by one Saburo Hashimoto with art directing and colors by freelance graphic designer Mizuki Totori, and it dates from 2003. As far as I can gather, Saburo Hashimoto belongs to a small but venerable subcontracting studio called Tama Production, which is where the animation was produced. It made sense to discover that Tama Pro has been involved in a lot of western subcontracting, as that partly accounts for the unusual feeling of the animation. The film represents a curious intersection of Western and Japanese vectors in terms of style, ideas and production, which all converged to brilliant effect here. Studios like this that bridge the Western and the Japanese have always fascinated me. Other examples include Sanrio Films, Telecom, Answer Studio and Topcraft. The results can often be quite interesting when their knowhow acquired through years of working on foreign productions are applied to their own in-house productions, as was the case with Flag more recently.

Tama Production is one of Japan's most venerable animation-only subcontractors, having been around since 1965 and having worked on innumerable shows for all of the major studios. They're still quite active and currently employ 30 people, according to their home page. Tama Pro is more than anything remembered for their close association with Tatsunoko Productions, as they regularly handled the animation for entire episodes of Tatsunoko's shows in wholesale style, and their animators consequently developed a pronounced Tatsunoko influence and understanding of how to render the characters.

The studio was founded by an animator named Eiji Tanaka, who started out at Mushi Pro working on Tetsuwan Atom in 1963. He didn't remain long before leaving to found his own studio, which would go on to work as a subcontractor for not only Tatsunoko but also many other large studios, from Tokyo Movie to Toei Doga to Mushi Pro to Madhouse. Eiji Tanaka himself was quite active as an animator on the front line while also training his studio's animators himself. He had a long career before passing away recently, having been an animator in many shows including Tatsunoko's Speed Racer (1967), Kurenai Sanshiro (1969) (chief animator) and Gatchaman (1972) before moving on to working as an animation director on a slew of shows including, most famously, the first few shows in Tatsunoko's Time Bokan series (1975-). He also managed to do some work as a character designer, having designed Astroganger (1972), Chargeman Ken (1973), Don Chuck (1975) and Little Prince (1978).

The two earliest and most prominent animators to have trained directly under the tutelage of Eiji Tanaka were Takashi Saijo and Jushi Mizumura, who have been involved in almost all of the studio's projects over the years and remain active today. They regularly alternate between working as animation directors and animators. In Tanaka's absence, they are clearly the leading lights at the studio. Other animators who can be seen in the studio's recent work include Akira Watanabe, Hiroaki Kawaguchi, Yoshiaki Matsuda, Naoki Takahashi and Kuniko Yano. Recent episodes they've handled include Black Lagoon #7, Death Note #9 and Otogizoshi #2. I haven't found any credits for the animation of Hi-Rise Hopper, but it seems probable that some combination of these names may have been responsible. I'd particularly like to find out who animated that mind-blowing transformation shot.

Tatsunoko stood out from their peers back in the day for what was known as their "butter stench", as they say in Japan, i.e. their American comic-book stylings. Tama Pro was therefore already steeped in a more or less Western-ish mood when they began taking on subcontracting work for Disney TV and video productions in the 1990s. Whether it's true or not I don't know, but they were apparently known as the only subcontracting studio in Japan up to the task of working in the Disney style, which suggests the unique position they occupied. It's clear that this experience underpins the animation that we can see in Hi-Rise Hopper, which is one of the few entirely Japanese-produced films I've seen whose animation successfully emulates the look and feel of conventional Western 'traditional animation'.

Although I'm not too familiar with the original comic, based on what little I've read about it the virtuosic display of horrific bodily transformation in Hi-Rise Hopper struck me as being exactly what was called for, going back to the cartoon style of animation that is the inspiration for the characters of the comic, where emotions transform directly into stretched bodies, bulging eyes and other extreme deformations. It takes Woodring's whole sophisticated re-interpretation of the classical Western cartoon aesthetic and plugs it right back into an animation mode of expression, completing the loop. The wild card is that it should have come not from some Western studio, but from Japanese animators trained working on Japanese-produced shows that emulated American styled comics using Japanese limited animation knowhow, rather than the sort of traditional full animation tradition that gave birth to the cartoon aesthetic that inspired Frank. Ultimately, they're all connected in the grand scheme of things, and the march of progress continues to this day, with those Japanese animators now emulating Western animation and vice-versa. It's so convoluted a situation that it almost makes perfect sense, like some beautiful ironic comment on the evolution of animation.

Around 2004 a studio called Drop was opened on the third floor of the building in Higashi Kurume that houses Tama Pro, which occupies the first two floors. This new studio was founded by producer Takeshi Hagiwara, who up until that point had been working for Tama Pro. A number of clips from the projects they've undertaken since 2004 can be seen on their home page, including Hi-Rise Hopper. Tama Pro is credited with the animation elements of a number of Drop's other films as well, which seems to suggest that Drop is a production/planning off-shoot of Tama Pro. I that's the case, the naming would make sense - Drop is the English word for Tama. ('drop' as in 'candy drop') Mizuki Totori, who designed the art and colors of Hi-Rise Hopper, more recently singlehandedly created a new short for Drop entitled Drop-kun, which seems to be a sort of mascot character for the studio. Drop-kun was one of the Jury Recommended Works of the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival.

This series continues to surprise. Although I learned about it prior to watching the episode, the surprise this time around was to learn that Michio Mihara was back in the driver's seat with another solo episode. That's something I really wasn't expecting, even though Mihara did the same thing in episode 12 of Kemonozume. I didn't think Yuasa was going to be going in quite the same direction as his previous show in terms of delegating tasks in such way as to allow for wide variety of visual and directing styles between episodes, but the last two episodes have made me re-think my appraisal of the show's direction and character.

In an age of tight schedules and thinly stretched talent, the open displays of personality, devotion to craft and concentration of effort on display in this episode and in Mihara's previous solo episodes are certainly a refreshing aberration. Mihara is a unique animator who clearly has his own vision of what makes animation interesting. His work has an endearing earnestness about it, with these challenges he seems to pose himself time and again to keep on developing. The look and feel of his work is distinct from any other industry animator out there, with its rough-edged lines, grotesque caricature and weighty movement that brings out the physical tics that make a character unique. I think he sets a good example for other animators in terms of the way he thinks out of the box of typical stratified production roles and typical industry ideas and styles.

I've noticed an endemic ignorance about foreign animation among many animators and fans in Japan from interviews I've read here and there, with many people quite unaware of many foreign classics, but Mihara gives the appearance through his work of remaining open to ideas and approaches to art and animation from spheres far and wide. I find often that it's animators who absorb unusual influences who come up with the most interesting new ideas. Although Mihara hasn't done much other than animating prior to now, he's got a budding personal voice that seems to be struggling to emerge from the surface of his animation, having even gone so far as to produce a couple of quirky shorts on the side.

His recent shorts seem similar in spirit to what he's done in this episode, like two faces of the same coin. There seems to be a clear continuum of development from that early first attempt at a solo episode in Paranoia Agent to his first successful attempt in Kemonozume to those shorts and now to this solo-in-extremis episode of Kaiba. I'm reminded of old Toei animator Sadao Tsukioka, who traveled much the same path some forty years ago, drawing entire episodes of Wolf Boy Ken by himself only to get hooked on it and strike out on his own to create everything himself as an indie animator.

Much of Kemonozume had an indie animation feel to it. Mihara has achieved a similar hybrid/conundrum in terms of the production style here, having essentially made an animated film entirely on his own within a studio-produced series - an industry indie. He's upped the ante from his last solo effort, Kemonozume #12, in which he drew all of the key animation and most of the inbetweens. This time he did everything himself. He wrote, storyboarded, directed and drew all of the key animation and inbetweens - a total of 5170 animation drawings - by himself, over the span of 9 months. Mihara himself has jokingly wondered if it might get him into the Guinness Book of World Records. It's certainly an industry first as far as I know, and brings new meaning to the idea of the solo episode.

The feat itself makes the episode interesting, but you don't need to make concessions based on backstage knowledge to appreciate the episode. The results are solid and the episode stands on its own quite well. Mihara's innate talent for expressing character through facial or body tics is well showcased through this episode's simple characters, who act out their personalities in fun, nuanced movement. Not only does he draw it all himself - it doesn't sit still for a moment, and all of the motion is consistently full of his characteristic swagger and bounce, drawn with what almost seems like instinct in a few spare drawings. He doesn't waste the opportunity by chickening out, but faces it full bore and fills the episode with animation. The drawings themselves have that unmistakable Mihara look, although it's more subtle than his work on Kemonozume, so it doesn't risk wrecking the continuity of the characters. I find that's more important this time around. I don't know what procedure they've adopted in terms of finishing and cleanup, but the texture of Mihara's lines remains visible in the final product as it did in Kemonozume.

Beneath the surface of the drawings, the story continues in the vein of the previous episode, with another simple but moving story that gets across some universal truths about love, loss and memory. We move to a small backwater planet, where the protagonist stumbles across a diminutive grandmother living alone with her two grandsons in the middle of nowhere, and discovers a memory she's been suppressing all these years. I appreciated the episode for its exploration of issues related to growing old, notably the way denial becomes our defense mechanism in the face of the unbearable experience of losing your lifelong partner. It's a universal issue to which most of us will be able to relate to some degree. Episode 9 of Kemonozume was similarly an episode that painted the picture of an elderly couple, each with their burden of the debilities of old age. I appreciate that Yuasa continues to explore such unglamorous issues throughout his work.

The plot mechanism of being able to literally crawl into other peoples' memories makes for novel ways of presenting the material each episode, and Mihara does that well here. I'm pretty sure this is his first time storyboarding/directing an entire episode (he did bits of that ETC episode in Paranoia Agent), but I think he's done a pretty good job for a first effort. There's some interesting presentation during the inner psyche scene where the old lady explores the memories of her past. Yuasa himself started out working exclusively as an animator for a few years before Mitsuru Hongo suggested he give storyboarding a try. That escalated to writing and designing, and the rest is history. You've got to start somewhere. I wonder if this means we'll be seeing more storyboarding from Mihara in the days to come.

Viewing this episode in terms of the numbers - one man, 9 months, 5170 drawings - helped remind me of the vast amount of labor that is represented by each minute of animation that we consume and discard so casually. It renews my respect for anybody who, working in as challenging and financially unrewarding a line of work as animation, is willing to not just churn out the work but to go the extra mile of pushing the limits of their skills to pursue new animated possibilities they have yet to explore. That inevitably translates into long hours of tedious labor to which we on the other side remain oblivious. Maybe I'm overdoing it, but there's no getting around the fact that, in animation, we don't see the sweat and tears that had to go into the final product to stir our emotions, which is why I find it important to recognize the people behind the work. The people who have that special devotion like Mihara are the ones who create the special work.

Overall, Kaiba is turning out differently than I had imagined. After viewing the first two episodes, I was given to the impression that they were going to be sticking to a core team of craftsmen staff for the rest of the show rather than going the way of Kemonozume with a different small team handling each episode much the way they wanted. I thought they were going to be trying to maintain something of the same tone and quality of the first two episodes. But in fact, the production style seems to be veering closer to the Kemonozume model, as several upcoming episodes similarly seem to be one-person affairs in some form or another.

Episodes 3 and 4 were excellently made in their own way, but at the same time they seem quite different from the first two episodes. I liked the way in the first two episodes the various threads and main movers of the story were effortlessly juggled into the fabric of the narrative, hinting at things to come (you'll notice things already if you rewatch episode one now), while simultaneously providing many new and interesting visual and conceptual ideas around every corner, and fleshing out the workings of the world in which Kaiba found himself. The series was kicked into high gear by communicating many things on many levels right from the start. Yuasa is a great director because he has the rare ability to do this. I was surprised to see those threads abruptly dropped afterwards, with this exclusive focus on guest characters. The atmosphere of the show felt somewhat changed, with the rather different directing styles of the directors helming eps 3 & 4, which I found unfortunate, as it threw a wrench into that great forward momentum. Still, each episode continues to be filled with a tremendous amount of interesting stuff going on at every level, from directing to story to animation, so I think it's silly to complain. My initial expectations based on the first two episodes were probably a little too rigid. As I've said before, expectations are there to be betrayed. I'm looking forward to seeing where the story continues to go from here.

This episode surprised me a little bit at first, but won me over in the end. This is an exceptionally well crafted episode that stands up to repeated viewing thanks to the tight directing of exactly the person I spoke of in my previous post - Akitoshi Yokoyama, who is this time credited as co-writer (w/Yuasa), storyboarder and director of the episode. Character designer Nobutake Ito returns as the animation director. Hence, we have another tag-team from that duo who have created a string of the best episodes in recent memory, including Champloo 21 to Denno Coil 3.

This episode is clearly Yokoyama's baby, and watching the episode you can sense the amount of work he must have put into getting the balance of each shot and scene just right to achieve the overall dramatic effect he was striving for. A tremendous amount of information is covered and conveyed in the episode without any surfeit of dialogue, and without the episode feeling overburdened. It seemed to me that Yokoyama was here doing something similar to what Yuasa had done in Mind Game in the frequent flashbacks that litter the film and fill out the background stories of each of the characters. Yokoyama has clearly thought up an extensive background story for the characters of this episode, and he conveys that story elliptically through a series of flashbacks that nevertheless leave room for the imagination, requiring you to do a little work to figure out how things fit together. I watched the episode twice, and I found the episode more moving on the second viewing, when I felt like I was beginning to understand the characters. I remember experiencing something similar with Mind Game, as with repeated viewings the stories of the characters begin to gel in your mind.

On my first viewing I felt that the episode was a little too sharply episodic, and lacked something of the sense of the wonder of the first episode. At the same time, with this episode I finally felt like I understood the basic structure of the series: a shishkabob. Each episode a piece of meat further along the stick, a new body for the protagonist, a new background story further illuminating the nature of the curious world of Kaiba. I felt that the second episode rounded that episodic nature in a way that seemed more successful in the big picture by keeping the forward momentum strong, and by deliberately keeping the focus a little hazy, keeping you off-balance as to where the gravitational center of things stood.

That said, the quality of the episode is unimpeachable and Yokoyama makes it work. This episode sensitively explores the deeply human themes that underpin this series - the nature of the self, of what it is that makes us us - our bodies, or our memories? And it does so through a very simple, accessible mini-drama about a poor family. If I find myself so attracted to Yuasa's work, it's not just because of his incredible talent as an imaginative animator, designer and director - it's that whatever he is doing, and however different it might look from what came before, you know that he is exploring serious issues that matter to all of us humans. And he does it in a way that always resonates deeply with me, making me think about life and not take it for granted. Yuasa never puts his heart on his sleeve, and that's why I respect him. It's also precisely what makes his work is so convincing.

The subtlety with which Yokoyama interweaves the layers of meaning throughout the episode is quite impressive, as many a fleeting shot offers much more meaning than might be immediately apparent. The last shot, for example, is quite a cinematic stroke, using the vehicle of the series - the modularity of memory within the empty receptacle of the body - to create a painfully ironic visual double-meaning, with what looks like the girl, who is in fact Kaiba, seeming to cry for the tragic fate of her mother, when it's actually Kaiba crying for both. The various characters each cry at a moment in the episode, and each time it carries a subtly different but important weight of meaning. Innocuous moments in this series pack an immense wallop when the implied banality of their cruelty is considered - the ease with which a person's existence is release into the ether and forever lost. And then there's the bitingly ironic visual simile of the girl's bubbles, symbols of innocence. This is intelligent, densely layered work.

On the animator front, we saw a few interesting faces involved - first and foremost Soichiro Matsuda, one of my favorite new faces in recent years, a great new animator to whom Yuasa has come back often after seeing the work he did on the barroom battle in Kemonozume ep 1. He did a lot of good work on Kenji Nakamura's Mononoke. Also present were young Gainax rising star Akira Amemiya and good old Takaaki Wada, whom I haven't seen in a while. (he's been active - I just haven't been watching the right things) The backgrounds throughout the series have been really fantastic, a number of which I would even want to put a frame around and put on my wall they're so gorgeous. (failing that, one is now my desktop) I didn't think it would be possible to achieve the look of the backgrounds of Cat Soup in a larger-scale format such as this, but they've done a remarkable job.

Just some notes about the latest in the seemingly now permanent stream of Naruto movies. The fourth film was directed by Hajime Kamegaki, and comes across as more lightweight and slapdash than the dramatically more solid-feeling second film by Tensai Okamura, not that this necessarily matters in the context. The drawings felt a little more uneven, too, with less effort put into smoothing things over than the earlier films. As usual, they clearly put less effort into the drawings in the first half hour, and released all their energy in the final half.

I didn't recognize as many animators this time around, though Shinji Hashimoto was there again, and his shots were as usual easily identified. I wonder how he came to be a regular in the movies. I was surprised to see old Topcraft animator Tsuguyuki Kubo here as an animation director. He remains very active after 40-some years. Ex-Topcraft animator Tadakatsu Yoshida was there too. Masahiro Sato and Hidetsugu Ito from Stranger were here as animators and animation directors. There were definitely spots here and there that had a unique touch to the timing or drawing, but I couldn't really identify much. It felt like rather than big patches by one person there would be these little scattered shots by lots of people. For example, a random lone shot of Rock Lee running out of the smoke towards the camera and hitting three guys was quite nice. The extended action scene that occupied the central part of the film felt like the highlight, although a lot of different people seem to have had a hand in it, and I didn't recognize any of the styles at work. It feels like a lot of the new, young faces from the TV series may have gotten to handle the actions scenes in this film. I also wonder what the significance is of the way they divide the key animation credits into six or seven large chunks.

My main catch from this film was Hiroshi Masuda, who was the FX animation director. The fire effects in the film were throughout wonderfully rendered and immediately announce him as a great new FX specialist alongside Takashi Hashimoto, Hideki Kakita, Shuichi Kaneko and the like. The explosions struck me as having the same style as Hashimoto's explosions in Baron Omatsuri. He also worked as FX animation director on Shin-Ei's latest Doraemon film that was released just a while back, so I look forward to seeing that. It's interesting to see how new approaches to allocating the work of handling the drawings continue to be devised in Japan to improve the overall quality of films. This sort of character/FX allocation of work in the western style didn't exist until a few years back, with the notable exception/anomaly of Sanrio Films' Sirius and Florence, where Mikiharu Akabori was the FX animation director to character AD Shigeru Yamamoto.

Okay, so it looks like I'll be blogging Kaiba. Few things I watch these days inspire me with the desire to say anything. It's refreshing to be filled with words for once by the great work being done here.

This episode did just what I was hoping: It maintained the quality of drawing of the first episode and sustained the momentum of the story and the very unique dramatic tone established by the first episode. I have this habit of checking the credits before I watch an episode, after doing which in this case I was pretty optimistic going in that such would be the case. The episode is directed/co-written (w/Yuasa) by the eminently reliable Akitoshi Yokoyama, who handled episode 5 of Kemonozume and episodes 3 and 11 of Denno Coil, each of which are among the most solid episodes of their respective series. He's also an animator, having helped animate Kenji Nakamura's episode 10 of Kemonozume, among other things. He's one of the most reliable figures I know at the moment. Whatever he touches, it works big time. Thanks to him, this episode covered a wide range of interesting happenings while maintaining great forward drive and dramatic tension from scene to scene. On top of that, we have Ryotaro Makihara and Takayuki Hamada as animators again, along with, guess who, Koichi Arai, the litmus test animator I mentioned in the last post. Thanks to these great animators, this episode, like the first, is filled with wonderfully movemented acting by the characters. So far, so great.

The drawing side of things is sustained by a very reliable figure: Akira Honma. I was afraid the quality might dip very quickly once Nobutake Ito left the podium as animation director, considering how unusual these characters are. Ito remains as supervisor here, but Akira Honma does a great job of adapting to these very unique designs. I didn't sense any discrepancy. Although apparently a relatively young face, he's been an invaluable in-house resource throughout all of the most interesting Madhouse shows of the last few years - Kemonozume and Denno Coil - showing the malleability of a great animator craftsman. If we could maintain this same level of quality through to the very end, by continuing to go with the sort of talented craftsmen animators and directors we see here, then I think this series would attain a pretty high level of perfection. I doubt it's possible to avoid some unevenness considering the constraints of TV production, but the team they have assembled so far is very reassuring.

If I'm hoping that the quality of the animation and directing are maintained, it's because I'm getting a very good feeling from the story so far, which works on any number of different levels, and I wouldn't want anything to distract from that. While on the surface the show explores the landscape of a fascinating alien world full of unexpected shapes, colors and relationships, making every moment of the show a delightful process of discovery full of new stimuli for the audience, it simultaneously, subtly gets across a number of poignant messages about the human predicament, and that's what's making me very enthusiastic about it - it's got a real sense of depth. The show has a deceptively soft and cute look to the characters and colors that is betrayed by jarringly adult and powerful moments that keep you off-balance and give the show its unique tone and dramatic strength.

I was an oversensitive and depression-prone kid, and one of the things I remember pondering morosely in my moments of angst-induced existential dread was all the people in the world who had come before me - the thought that I had been preceded by billions upon billions of people, all of whom were now dead, memory of their existence completely eradicated. I doubt it's a thought that crosses most people's minds, out of the need to stay sane, but it's a fact of our existence. The scene where we realize the meaning of the yellow clouds reminded me of all that. It's a powerful moment where many of the developing themes in the series seem to converge. And it does all this without being either heavy-handed or alienating, wordy or pretentious. It's all done seamlessly via the unfolding drama, which is the stuff of great storytelling. Without even having to think about it, the story invokes elemental issues deeply rooted in our existence, quite unobtrusively, which in my mind confirms that Yuasa continues to grow and improve as a storyteller. The one thing that bothered me, for that reason, was that they had to wordily explain the concept before the opening in this episode. I thought that was unnecessary. The storytelling here is doing an amazing job of bringing this situation, these characters alive, gradually letting us in on how it all fits together, without having to explain anything. But it certainly is a very peculiar situation that would throw new viewers for a loop if they just tuned in, so I can sort of understand. The story has been developing brilliantly so far, without revealing too much too quickly and without it feeling like they're annoyingly holding back on you, with lots of really cool and weird characters, each with a clearly defined personality. I hope it maintains this pace.

Last time I noted a palpable Shin-Ei feeling to the first episode via the animators. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I noticed in this episode that one of the voice actors is Wasabi Mizuta, no less - the voice-actor who recently replaced Nobuyo Oyama as Doraemon. In yet another connection, this new character named Butter is obviously an homage to Bakabon Oyaji from the old A Pro show Tensai Bakabon. I'm loving all of these connections.