Japan has a lot of good talent working in animation. Most people just don't know it, because without knowing what you're looking for, it's hard to locate the good work amongst the flood of productions released every year. In Japan, as anywhere, the nature of this talent is multifaceted. The focus of this blog, of course, has been mostly on talented animators, though I've also quite often talked about directors, artists, etc. who caught my eye. (I talk about basically anyone who I feel is doing standout work.) But talent is speckled around in every facet of production in anime. From one project to the next, you might find some talented people doing good work in one or another aspect of the production, while you might not be particularly satisfied with the whole. Ideally, the talent will come together to realize a project in which every aspect of the production is top-notch, creating a perfect whole.

Genius Party, a two-part omnibus of animated shorts from Japan's Studio 4C, strikes me as being an effort to bring together some of the best representatives of talent in Japanese animation under one roof to show off the multifaceted nature, and the unique range of predilections, of animated talent in Japan. Although my own personal assessment of each particular film varies, as I feel that some are more successful than others, I think the set achieves the goal of showcasing, to whatever extent is possible within the span of a two-plus-hour omnibus, a fairly broad swath of the variety of talent that exists in commercial Japanese animation. It's mainly for this reason that I think the set is not only successful, but important - because it represents an effort to bring attention to the existence of this multifaceted array of talent, and to get it to work together in a way that truly does it justice and allows it to achieve its true potential, rather than allowing the talent out there to be diffused over the vast galaxy of industry productions. I think that it's important to recognize talent in this way by singling out what makes it special, and to me that is one of the functions of this project.

There are various approaches as to how to go about doing this, but Genius Party is the most prominent such project in many years. Its most obvious predecessor is A.P.P.P.'s 1987 omnibus Robot Carnival, which came along at the tail end of a decade in which the anime industry rewired itself into a more creator-centric mindset, with the name value of talented creators like Hayao Miyazaki and Osamu Dezaki becoming the driving force behind projects. Genius Party seems to pick up that torch, spotlighting the new generation of talented creators, but allowing them complete freedom this time around, rather than being bound to any particular theme or style.

There is an even more direct and intentional way in which the two films are connected: Atsuko Fukushima, who animated the opening sequence of Genius Party, animated the opening and ending sequences of Robot Carnival. The same year as Robot Carnival, Madhouse released a three-part omnibus entitled Manie Manie: Labyrinth Tales. A few years later, Studio 4C similarly released a three-part omnibus entitled Memories. Each of these omnibuses features some of the best work by many of the creators involved. Of course, there are innumerable examples of the omnibus form outside of Japan, and the approach to the anthology can vary dramatically in both intent and style of execution.

I think this focus on highlighting creators and allowing them to do work in the mode best suited to their talents has long been one of Studio 4C's defining traits, and fortes. It's this mindset that resulted in the creation of my own favorite animated movie, Mind Game, in which a talented animator who had never worked for the studio before, and had never directed a film before, was given the opportunity to direct his first film based on the merit of his past work, and based on the gamble that his particular talents would be a match for the material in question, and the results were spectacular.

Studio 4C has left behind any number of other projects of different lengths and styles that are clearly endowed of that mindset. So Studio 4C seems ideally suited to finally bring to the world a new omnibus that really represents the best of the best of Japanese talent to the world, because that seems to have been their driving purpose in many ways from the beginning. In that sense, Studio 4C acts more like a nexus of talent for this project, rather than this being a showcase of a particular studio's talent. Although of course, a good proportion of the staff involved, including several of the directors, are 4C staff. I would certainly have come up with a different selection of directors if I were putting together such a set, but it's a representative selection in its own way. (open question to readers - who would you have liked to have seen make a short here who wasn't invited?)

Another thing that this project seems to drive home to the viewer is that, in animation, talent comes in many forms. It can be in the animation, the directing, the art, the CGI - you name it. Genius Party is interesting because it gathers together talent in various fields, and gets them each to make a film. As a result, each of the films have different approaches that arise from the particular nature of their talent. For example, flamboyantly individualistic animator Shinya Ohira's film is all about the exhilaration of animated movement, whereas art director Shinji Kimura's film is more about the fantastic mood created by his evocative art, and director Shinichiro Watanabe's film is more about creating a pregnant atmosphere and eliciting an emotional response from the viewer.

Studio 4C goes into considerable detail about the production of each short in the extras on the DVD set and in accompanying publications. The coverage is by no means limited to the directors. Every aspect of each production is covered, revealing how the production environment of each film was dramatically different due to the working style of the creators and their material. Besides shedding some welcome light on the working methods of some of Japan's best talent, more fundamentally, the broad-ranging nature of the coverage illuminates the unique nature of each creator, and the considerable expressive freedom afforded by the medium of animation.

I get the impression that this is where the word genius in the title fits in. I think what they meant by 'genius party' was really 'talent celebration' - as in, a celebration of the many forms of talent in Japanese animation. It was an unfortunate choice of words, as the wording makes you think they're calling the directors of the shorts geniuses, and nothing is more laughable than self-proclaimed genius. But actually, in many of the interviews with the directors, they go out of their way to make the caveat that they by no means consider themselves geniuses. I think most of the directors here are extremely talented - some of them even what I might quality as downright effing brilliant - and they each have a genius for what they do, and in that sense the word fits. If you go back to the root meaning of the term genius, it's more of a general term for the innate skills that each of us has. The Webster definition puts it thus:

The peculiar structure of mind with which each individual is endowed by nature; that disposition or aptitude of mind which is peculiar to each man, and which qualifies him for certain kinds of action or special success in any pursuit; special taste, inclination, or disposition; as, a genius for history, for poetry, or painting.

I look at Genius Party in the light of this definition: as a celebration of the unique talent lying dormant within each of us, rather than an elitist attempt to demarcate a set of directors as geniuses.

And genius in animation isn't necessarily about being flamboyantly individualistic. That's a narrow definition of the concept. Some of the films in the set are stylized or animated in a way quite different from most anime, while some have a more conventional anime aesthetic. It's more about doing something well in a way that only you can do it - which is one of the few running threads throughout the 12 wildly divergent short films that happen to sit side by side under the banner of Genius Party.

One of the things I feel from this set is a sense of community. Animation in Japan has something unique at the present time: a group of artists who are flourishing and developing in a way that seems uniquely informed by their own history, as opposed to global trends. Many of these artists have worked together on the same projects in the past, and there has undoubtedly been a lot of mutual influencing over the years. It feels like a self-contained artistic culture. This set comes across as a snapshot of this very particular community of human creation, at its best. There is a certain base aesthetic that can be said to underlie most of the films, but I think the impression that most general audiences would come away with is the sheer variety of the set. Every film is very different, attesting to the way the Japanese animation industry has nurtured some truly individualistic creators over the last few decades in the shadow of the vast majority of anime production. That's something to be celebrated, and that's exactly what this set does.

I think the thing that sets this omnibus apart is not some kind of superficial stylistic difference, or that the content is more cutting edge or something. Several of the pieces were in a style I wouldn't normally associate with Studio 4C. It's the underlying conception driving the project - to give industry animators a rare chance to create what they want for once - that seems to give Genius Party its character. Such a stance is an inversion of the conventional procedure in commercial animation, where 'in the beginning is the project', and after is the staff, which has to adapt itself to the project at hand. I'm not saying it's a bad method - real pros should undoubtedly be able to pride themselves on being able to handle different commissions. But it's important to have an outlet from the conventions on occasion to allow talent to really express themselves. Genius Party, then, is unique because it's basically putting commercial animators in an indie framework, and seeing what they can do. The results are interesting in this sense, showing that some animators, even in a framework of total freedom, remain tied to the conventions of commercial Japanese animation or their own style that they have developed over the years, while others explore a new direction for them and create something they would never have the opportunity to create in a commercial environment.

Without further ado, here is a rundown of my impressions on each piece.

Genius Party ~ Atsuko Fukushima

Kicking off the party is an eponymous opener by Atsuko Fukushima, one of the animator legends of the last two decades or so in Japan. Fukushima has been anything but prolific since creating the masterful animation in Labyrinth Labyrinthos, which opened Manie Manie: Labyrinth Tales, and the opening and closing segments of Robot Carnival in the late 80s. One of the rare more recent pieces in which her style comes through is Jack and the Beanstalk. It's wonderful to finally see another piece from her in her own unique style - especially here, as her prior work sort of embodies the whole spirit of the endeavor, with its fertile imagination backed up by solid animation skills, and the set would have been incomplete without her presence.

Her short piece succinctly evokes the themes of the project: imagination, creativity, and inspiration. Visually, the piece is one of the most satisfying in the set. The images are lush and highly worked, the movement throughout rich and exciting. The drawings achieves a very handmade look due the considerable effort that was put into transferring the feeling of the pencil-drawn keys into the final product. The combination of CGI with hand-drawn animation is seamless and achieves a beautiful effect. The interaction of the creatures is lovingly portrayed in the little details of their behavior, convincing you of the veracity of mysterious natural laws at work.

But more importantly, the piece is formally elegant and works on several levels. What at first sight looks like a nature program about the mating rituals of some strange creatures on an imaginary alien planet, gradually transforms into a beautiful metaphor about creation and inspiration, and the miracle of the human brain, with its array of neurons activating one another. All of that is achieved without the message being forced down your throat in a preachy way. Thus it serves as a perfect opener for the set. It's great to see that she hasn't lost her touch after all these years. I just wish she would get back into production full-time. She's without a doubt one of the best talents Japanese animation's got, and we could use more good work like this. There are a lot of talented people in animation in Japan, but too few with her combination of fecund imagination and animation savvy.

Like Tatsuyuki Tanaka, Fukushima originally wanted to animate her piece entirely herself. Both are great animators, so I would have liked to see that happen. But as it happens, they didn't have time, so they had to get other animators to animate their films, although both did some of the animation, and Tanaka served as the sakkan (animation director) for his own film. Fukushima was aided by several excellent animators, and it shows up in the results, whereas Tanaka's piece comes across as slightly weaker on the animation front, which is quite disappointing, as he himself is a superb animator. Here's a full list of the animators in Fukushima's piece: Yumi Chiba, Takase Nishimura, Tokuyuki Matsutake, Shojiro Nishimi, Hideki Hamasu, Jamie Vickers, Atsuko Fukushima.

Shanghai Dragon ~ Shoji Kawamori

This piece perhaps best captures the mixed feelings I have for the particular combination of films in Genius Party. I respect Kawamori's particular talent, and I enjoy his work for what it is. He has a unique voice, and he is indisputably one of the major figures in anime history since the 80s. He represents much of what anime stands for. This piece is well enough made and entertaining. I think that the inclusion of more conventionally styled films like Kawamori's Shanghai Dragon and Shinichiro Watanabe's Baby Blue is consistent with the objective of Genius Party (at least as I interpret it), namely to spotlight the various forms of talent in the Japanese animation industry, insofar as those directors are among the most talented directors working in the industry, and they have an individual voice and vision. It's just that, in style and concept, their work is comparatively conventional compared with most of the other films in the set.

Is that jarring contrast an asset or a liability? That will depend on each viewer. But personally, while watching it, all I could feel was that it was out of place, and that it was kind of embarrassing to watch. I screened the whole set with a non-anime-watching person to get a neutral third-party opinion, and this film was the only one in the entire set that this person found really irritating. My impression is that most of the other films in the set spoke on the authority of their creators' unique vision - be it Shinji Kimura's unique art, or Shinya Ohira's thrilling animation - and thus their works are exciting and interesting in their own right, whereas to a person judging the film entirely on its own merits, this one migth feel a little too plain jane anime, with a directing style and story that aren't especially unusual in their own right.

The piece wasn't 'pure' Shoji Kawamori, anyway. Kawamori wrote the script and was the director, of course, but Toshiyuki Kubooka did the storyboard and 'enshutsu' or actual processing/line directing, so the details of the directing are of someone else's hand. Shingo Suzuki was character designer/animation director. The key animation was by the small team of Hiroshi Okubo, Jiro Kanai, Shingo Suzuki and Tomoyuki Niho. Okubo also did mecha design together with Kawamori, and Niho did object design. I know Okubo did the chase over the rooftops in the 3-wheeler, and presumably Shingo Suzuki handled the character scenes and Niho did the dragon, as Niho designed the dragon.

It's a shame that the publisher of the Genius Party Beyond mook, Geibun Mook, didn't do the one for Genius Party, because Geibun Genius Party mook is far better arranged and laid out and contains a lot more interesting materials and notes and things than the mook for Genius Party. If they had, I might know a bit more about who did what for Shanghai Dragon and the other films in the first volley (i.e. Genius Party as opposed to Genius Party Beyond) with good animation for which I'd love to have a detailed breakdown (mostly Happy Machine). The Geibun mook contains lots of genga and other raw materials, with good descriptions. Heck, even the printing of the first mook is shoddy - mine's coming apart at the seams already, and I treat my books pretty carefully.

The Deathtic Four ~ Shinji Kimura

From the beginning Genius Party sounded like it would be an interesting project because they had invited such a disparate array of people onto the project - including an art director, a manga-ka, and foreign animators. I appreciate the willingness to approach individuals in different fields to create a piece of animation, because I like seeing creations by people who haven't been inculcated into the conventions of industry practice. There's a certain freshness in their work, even if it's pretty rough around the edges and not entirely successful. That's the feeling I got from the film that was made by a screenwriter for one of Studio 4C's previous omnibus productions, Amazing Nuts.

Well, it's somewhat the same feeling I get here. It's a very fun and interesting piece, but I wouldn't call it the most successful or convincing. Shinji Kimura is a fantastic art director with amazing breadth, running the gamut from the realistic baroque detail of Steam Boy to the wild, byzantine coloring of Tekkonkinkreet. The Deathtic Four has him directing his first film, and creating it from the ground up for that matter. His characters and the design of the world are quite appealing. The most successful part of the film strikes me as being the shots where we fly over and through the CGI maps of his art over the city. There is a very nice atmosphere in those shots. It feels like a silly-creepy gothic horror version of the city in Tekkonkinkreet.

What I didn't find as convincing was the CGI movement, or the style of the dialogue. For some mysterious reason he made the characters speak Swedish with Japanese subtitles. It doesn't feel necessary, and it's distracting having to read the text the whole time. I would have preferred to see a piece that showed off his skills as an artist, rather than a CGI film, as CGI isn't his area of 'genius', it's art, and I felt that the CGI distracts from his art more than it contributes here.

That said, I think it's a fit within the set, and it's an enjoyable enough piece with a style all its own, which is what I wanted to see, regardless of whether it works completely. There was a little bit of animation in the film, and that was done by Tomonori Murata and Takayuki Hamada. Besides his major contribution to Masaaki Yuasa's Happy Machine, Hamada seems to have lent a helping hand here and there in various other films in the set.

Door Chime ~ Yoji Fukuyama

Yoji Fukuyama is unmistakably a creator with a 'genius' for his particular niche - namely, manga with an exactingly rendered caricatural style somewhat similar in sensibility to early Katsuhiro Otomo. (Otomo seems to have been influenced by Fukuyama.) His droll sense of humor and predilection for 'dajare' (bad puns) can get old, I find, but his drawings are always a real pleasure to look at, and his humor is very well suited to the one-panel comics he publishes in newspapers, in which he skewers Japanese politics and culture.

For that reason, I can see why he was invited, and I think it was a very interesting choice to invite him. It's not rare to see manga adapted into anime, obviously, but Fukuyama's particular style is quite far from what you typically see adapted into anime - and far more interesting in many ways. And of course, although manga are adapted fairly often into anime, having the creator given carte blanche over every aspect of the production, as Fukuyama was here, is far rarer. He has a style of rendering faces that, if adapted carefully by a team of artists of real talent, could result in some very interesting character animation of a kind we've never seen before in anime. So I was excited when I heard that Fukuyama had been invited.

The film that was produced unfortunately does not do what I would have hoped they would try to do given the opportunity of having such a great manga-ka onboard. Rather than focusing on his drawings and creating a film that adapted those drawings into an animated mode of expression, the locus of interest in the film that was made is the mildly interesting story of an anonymous young male character who finds himself dogged by a doppelganger in modern-day Japan. Fukuyama, who of course had never been involved in animation before, was given the opportunity to draw the storyboard. Takahiro Tanaka helped him fill out the storyboard with the requisite timing, special effects markings and so on, and designed the characters for animation and acted as sakkan. The problem is that the pacing is somewhat slow, the visuals bland, and the story not affecting or interesting enough to really pull it off and make it work. I wonder what other approach could have been adopted to result in a more successful adaptation of Fukuyama's unique style into animation.

Limit Cycle ~ Hideki Futamura

The person who came up with what I think is the most interesting interpretation of the concept of the project, and on top of that managed to make by far the most genuinely surprising film in the entire set, is Hideki Futamura. It's kind of shocking, considering the rare opportunity each of these creators were given - to create literally anything they wanted "without any restrictions" (the catchphrase of the project was "seiyaku zero", which means zero restrictions) - that Limit Cycle was the only film in the set that really went outside of the bounds of conventional anime expression, with a visual ethos verging on the abstract and consisting mostly of CGI and processed footage, rather than conventional animation, and a narrative style verging on pure visual poetry. I understand that it makes perfect sense for most the creators here to have done work in the style for which they've become known, and in which they are the undisputed masters. I would have been disappointed if Shinya Ohira and Masaaki Yuasa hadn't made films in their patented style, and their films are films only they could have made. But it just strikes me as food for thought that, given literally zero limitations, this is the set of films that resulted. Obviously, this is a commercial endeavor, and it would merely have alienated audiences to create films that ignored the audience altogether. In that sense, I greatly admire Futamura's film, because it treads the fine line between experimentation and entertainment in a way that few of the other films do.

The mystery to me about Limit Cycle is not what it's about - it's why the film is so damn fascinating despite me not knowing what it's about. I've watched it three times, and I've enjoyed it just as much every time. I think this is the film with the most rewatch value in the set. I can envision myself revisiting it over the coming months to bask in the lush cascade of glowing images, and probably discover something new that I hadn't seen on a previous viewing. It's easy enough to layer random images on top of one another, but Futamura's film seems to have a method to the madness, hidden somewhere in the chaos, like good poetry, or like a model of a complex molecule.

Limit Cycle has no dialogue, and no obvious narrative. At first sight it appears to be simply a visual poem with random quotes narrated quietly over a rich medley of glowing visuals, and random numbers projected across the screen. In fact, the quotes are from 17th century French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal's Pensées, and the numbers indicate the passage in the Pensées. There is no one-to-one correlation between text and visuals. Occasionally you will notice a clear correlation between a spoken word and something that has just happened on the screen, but for the most part the nature of the nominal protagonist's journey is left intentionally murky and nonliteral. Mostly the viewer has to surrender to the images and extrapolate as best they can what is happening to the protagonist, who appears to embark on a metaphysical journey through time and space.

Pascal, of course, is one of the true 'geniuses' of western history. I like how Futamura undermines the assumption that the films are supposed to be directed by creators of genius, by instead making a film where the genius is the subject of the film. Futamura is one of the ones who, in the mook interview, goes out of his way to say that he doesn't look at himself as a genius, contrary to what the title of the project might imply.

If you've ever tried to educate yourself a little about advanced sciences like chaos theory or quantum mechanics, maybe you'll have had the same experience I have of feeling that you've run headlong into a wall of impenetrably dense verbiage vaguely reminiscent of old philosophical or religious texts. Something of that ilk seems to have been the epiphany that led Hideki Futamura to meld Pascal's religious treatise with cybernetics and the mathematical concept of the limit cycle. (viz. Wiki entry) The concepts mesh surprisingly well, creating a philosophical echo chamber where scientific and religious, past and future bleed into and amplify one another.

Futamura Hideki has had a decent-sized career, during most of which he was active as a conventional 2D animator. Among his more notable work would be animation director of Second Renaissance. It's in the last few years that he seems to have veered in a different and very interesting direction, blending lush digital effects with hand-drawn animation. The first time I saw this new tack of his was in the two clips he did for Studio 4C's Fluximation music videos. In these and Limit Cycle I find that Futamura shows himself to be good with non-narrative work, at creating a flow of abstract digital images that holds the viewer's interest. The rather lengthy film doesn't grow tiring, remaining engaging at all moments, with a clear sense of development and progress, although the exact nature of that development may not be clear. The music by Fennesz is the perfect aural analogue for the images, with its dense buzz of electronic sounds and harmonic shards. The bewildered-looking James Dean-like protagonist serves as a good surrogate for viewers to latch on to. Without him, it might indeed be a bit of a daunting piece. And even the narration by actor Hiroshi Mikami (Swallowtail) is spot-on and a perfect choice for the film. I find that every aspect of his film works and benefits the whole.

Happy Machine ~ Masaaki Yuasa

There are two standout films in Genius Party for me. I don't think it will surprise many readers to learn that those two films are Happy Machine and Wanwa. Neither film afforded me the surprise of Futamura's piece, because I fully expected them to be incredible, and they were. They afforded instead the intense pleasure of being able to see among the most perfect creations yet by two of the very best creators working in animation in Japan today.

Both pieces have a very different and equally inimitable style. Yuasa's minimalistic Happy Machine is the yin to the yang of Shinya Ohira's hyperkinetic Wanwa. But both share the trait that they are filled head to toe with incredible animation that at every moment is the voice by which both films communicate, albeit in their very different ways. These creators represent to me the pinnacle of the rare 'genius' of being able create animated films that are able to communicate a clear story and thrill and move viewers purely by dint of the visuals.

Although Masaaki Yuasa was already known for his incredible talent as an animator and an imaginative concept artist, since directing Mind Game he has gone on to direct two TV series that each revealed a new side of his multifaceted talent. They revealed that he has the ability to create unpredictable, edgy, moving stories and imaginative, never-before-seen worlds populated by lots of interesting characters. I've come to admire how Yuasa always challenges himself to take a new approach with each new project. With Happy Machine he's again created a film unlike anything he's done before, not to mention unlike anything else out there.

Happy Machine is a spare film whose light touch conceals a somber core. On the surface it plays out a fantasy full of odd creatures, while underneath boils a psychologically complex rumination on the theme of the human need for companionship. The film is highly formal in its shape and in the deliberate spareness of its presentation. At every moment our attention is focused on only one object on the screen, with very little in the background to distract us. The theme is also focused, leaving the viewer with a clear but complex and potent emotional aftertaste of a kind that raises Yuasa's work above mere visual playfulness. The scene where the protagonist realizes that his latest animal companion has just left him and is floating away towards certain death, prompting the protagonist to overcome all logic and physical laws and put on wings and fly towards him, is almost overwhelming in its emotional power.

At the most basic level, the film is the ultimate in wordless storytelling, with a considerable amount of goings on conveyed exclusively through the animation, background, music and sound effects. It's striking how Yuasa is able to create a story that comes across as having so many layers of meaning out of something so deliberately pared down in every way. But moving the film is - it's by far the most moving film in the set, and really gets you thinking. It's not that the story is hard to figure out. Quite the opposite. The story is the epitome of clarity, and every little element has a profound significance that you grasp immediately. Rather, I find that Happy Machine gets you thinking about the most basic and important things in life, though I can't figure out why that is.

I find Yuasa's work amazing because he can evoke so many different complex emotions without even seeming to try, and in such a short span. And on top of that, he does so by way of a seamless unity of imaginative designs, ingenious concepts and rich animation. He creates a momentum of visual storytelling that at every moment is alternately and/or simultaneously beautiful, wildly imaginative, deeply felt, terrifying, moving, funny, and unpredictable. It's a cliched expression, but this film really feels like a small diamond, for the way there isn't anything extraneous, and it achieves so much in such a small package.

The animation of Happy Machine was done by only four people, headlined by the talented ex-Telecom animator Takayuki Hamada: Takayuki Hamada, Takamasa Ishikawa, Yasuyuki Shimizu, Nobutake Ito. I don't know much about Takamasa Ishikawa, although he was in Tekkonkinkreet, but Ito and Shimizu need no introduction - they were regulars in Yuasa's two TV series. There were so many animation drawings for some shots in the scene with the fire creature, for example, that a single shot had to be divided up for storage in two separate cardboard boxes. This is a classic example of a small, talented team of animators providing a film with a uniform high level of quality.

Baby Blue ~ Shinichiro Watanabe

Shinichiro Watanabe has done a lot of great work in anime over the last decade or so - as a music producer. He also happens to have directed a considerable amount of anime, usually supported by very talented staff. I think he did a bang-up job choosing the music for the films in Genius Party.

Watanabe's film was a fairly enjoyable, if somewhat cliche, youth drama, capped by a touching sequence at the climax that plays out in strobe effect over a Chopin Etude. Watanabe is particularly good with moments like this. I would have been prepared to enjoy this short were it stand-alone, but to be brief, it felt unnecessary. It's not what I was looking for in this set. I think Watanabe chose to create a film in this style because he knew that many of the other films would be vivid, fantastically-inclined films, and wanted to do something different, in a more atmospheric, realistic style, perhaps to give the audience a breather. Personally, I didn't feel that a breather was needed or called for.

More importantly, perhaps, I felt that the characters were dead and boring to look at. Eiji Yasuhiko was the character designer and animation director, and I think the characters in the film are its main liability. They look amateurish and bland, and there wasn't a moment where I felt that the characters had a facial expression or an instance of body language that communicated a living, breathing character I could believe in, which would have helped if I was supposed to empathize with their emotions and plight. I think that is what would have been called for to make a minimalistic, low-key story like this work, entirely focused as it is on two characters.

The brief moments of absurd humor that intersperse the film came across as lame-brained, forced attempts at levity. The casting of two famous actors in the role of the two characters struck me as nothing more than opportunistic, because I didn't find their performances apt or nuanced, merely flat-toned and seemingly deliberately drab. I love atmospheric films. This one did have its moments, but unfortunately, atmosphere alone does not necessarily make a great film. I guess mainly it bothers me that space was taken up by a film like this when there are any number of other creators with a more unusual and interesting style who could have made a more compelling film.

Gala ~ Mahiro Maeda

Mahiro Maeda is one of the most talented people in anime, and I have tremendous respect for him as a creator, so I was happy to see a film from him in the set. At first sight, the film seems more conventionally styled than the most interesting films in the set, and so I was a little hesitant going in, but once I sat down and watched it, and listened to Maeda's words about his film, I was very happy with the result. If you can make a film as satisfying and layered as Maeda has, then I find that lack of a particularly idiosyncratic visual concept isn't necessarily a death blow.

Gala is interesting and satisfying for all the right reasons. Maeda strikes me as an intellectual filmmaker in the good sense. He's intellectual not in the sense of making highbrow art films only he can understand, but in the sense of having a healthy curiosity about everything out there in the world, and effectively applying what he's learned to create films that are worldly and informed and come across as very respectful of the viewer's intelligence.

Maeda's brilliance as an 'animated filmmaker' comes through well in the very cinematic Gala, which speaks not in the language of dialogue, but through the pacing and the actions of its characters. He maintains a seamless arc of building tension right through to the exhilarating climax. The very satisfying conclusion makes you see everything that came before in a new light without coming across as a cheap trick.

Maeda's intelligence comes through in the way he is able to take old Japanese gods and other motifs and put them into this new context of the various bacteria and other small microorganisms that inhabit the soil. He pulls off an interpretation of the animist gods of old Japan that is new and interesting, and that makes sense logically (the old Shinto beliefs seem prescient of modern discoveries about the microorganisms and bacteria that inhabit the soil) and conveys a spiritual reverence for the miracle of life. It's a blend of concepts and ideas from far-flung corners that make a wonderful metaphor for the ether of life that surrounds us. Maeda's genius is to do all this and wrap it up in a very entertaining package.

Another major element in the film is the music. After having already drawn the storyboard, Maeda ran across composer Akira Ifukube's symphonic poem Rhythmica Ostinata for piano and orchestra, which struck him as just what he needed. The piece was rearranged a bit to fit, but in the final product lends the film a unique sound world that immediately sets the film apart, as well as a providing a strong driving beat during the frenetic climax. The film also achieves a nice match between image and music, which was one of the challenges that Maeda set himself for Gala. The instruments in Japanese composer Ifukube's piece are all western, but the instruments shown on the screen all Eastern. Maeda did this deliberately, and draws interesting parallels between the two by showing, for example, a koto being played when the piano is heard playing in the music, since the piano is, after all, just a big harp. I really like how Maeda layers interesting concepts and ideas into every aspect of the production.

The importance of music to Maeda can be glimpsed in the fact that during his school days, Maeda participated in the famous Geinoh Yamashirogumi folk music collective. He designed all the instruments himself based on traditional instruments from around the world. This gives another glimpse into his multifaceted talent. I've had the opportunity to glimpse quite a lot of his designs and image boards for various series over the years, and I'm continuously impressed by the richness of his imagination.

Moondrive ~ Kazuto Nakazawa

This film serves as a good contrast with Gala - it's all style and no substance. And I mean that as a compliment. This film oozes style, and it's great fun to watch. Nakazawa has a unique talent as an animator and an illustrator, and that comes through perfectly here. I would have liked to see more films like this in the set, by creators with an interesting visual or animation style.

Nakazawa drew all the key animation himself. As that suggests, this is an animator's film first and foremost. What story there is is merely a coathanger for Nakazawa's silly gags, snazzy animation and intricate drawings. This is perhaps emphasized by the way that Nakazawa doesn't bother to hide the borders for each background painting, and he leaves in the borders on the layout sheets he drew the backgrounds on (you even see written instructions on some of them). Nakazawa seems like quite a character, and this was apparently a late-game decision he made after having first done so by mistake. He though the results looked cool, so he left it in. His wierd gag sense comes through in this and in the playfulness of the backgrounds, which are packed with little details that make them fun to pore over.

The film is essentially a road movie showing the band of inept bandits travelling from one location to another in search of a treasure map. One of the unifying techniques he adopts for some reason is to use a flat stage layout for most of the shots, and to have the characters arrayed accordingly. The screen is still most of the time, plastered with the detailed backgrounds that fully occupy your attention and maintain interest, while the animation bursts out here and there in quick flashes. Another thing is that the exterior of the buildings are always done in this crazy, fantasyland style, while the interior of the buildings have a more realistic old musty look. He maintains a sense of unity through the odd little rules like this.

Wanwa ~ Shinya Ohira

What we have with Wanwa is also, in its own very different way, an animator's film. This film is a paean to everything that animation stands for, an explosion of animated energy like none I've ever seen before. It's by far the most awe-inspiring achievement of the entire set, both technically and artistically. There are good films in this set, and there are even some great films, but if you only see one film from this set, this is the one. This is animated filmmaking that makes me want to shout my love of animation from the rooftops. I hesitate to call anyone a genius, but if anyone fits the bill, it's Ohira.

This is one of the few films in the set that is more of an 'experience' than it is simply a film. That's due largely to the unremitting intensity, volume and quality of the animation, which blasts by at a hundred miles an hour almost non-stop throughout the film. Single shots of this film reportedly contain several thousand animation drawings - the amount of animation in an average TV episode. The film is a fascinating contradiction in that it's a simple story for children, about a little boy who one day wanders off, led by his puppy, into a fantasy land inhabited by the red and blue demons of his imagination, yet at its peak it achieves such a density of expression that it comes across less like a children's film and more like a Jackson Pollock painting come to life.

Which is not to say that the film is nothing but animated energy. All of that animated energy is channeled into a film with a very big heart, and Ohira achieves what is very hard to do, namely creating a film that feels borne of real, unfeigned innocence. It doesn't feel like an adult making a film pandering to children, so much as a film made by an adult who retains something of the unbridled imagination and freedom of a child as a creator. The images are modeled after his son's drawings, and the story development has the random-walk aspect of a child's fantasies. The only other film I've seen that achieved such an unfeigned, honest childlike tone was Kitty's Graffiti of 1957 by the late great Yasuji Mori. The film is conceptually united around the theme of a child's unbridled imagination in every sense.

Wanwa is a special achievement because it doesn't feel like a mere 2D animated film. It is combined with CGI in some places, of course, but that's not what I mean. It's more that by sheer will power, Ohira somehow manages to create animation that seems to explode the bounds of 2D animation, while at the same time remaining quintissentially hand-drawn, with its constant shapeshifting. Ohira also created many of the film's backgrounds by using yarn, crayons and other materials that his young son used to make his own art, and for some of the closeups of the boy he went through a laborious process to achieve a style that looked as if it had been colored by crayons. Ohira thus truly made a film in which every single aspect of the production seems to be imbued of a child's touch. All of the images in the film are magnificent compositions in their own right, like a living and breathing painting, with every scene designed with its own uniquely dazzling color scheme.

The animator list of Wanwa reads like a list of my favorite animators: Shinji Hashimoto, Kenichi Konishi, Masaaki Yuasa, Ko Yoshinari, Hisashi Mori, Shinsaku Kozuma, Osamu Tanabe, Atsuko Fukushima and Shuya Ohira. Every one is a top-notch animator of the highest order. If you've never heard of the last one, it's Ohira's son. His drawings are featured in the film somewhere. He even lent his voice to Gala and Tojin Kit. Hashimoto did the part around the appearance of the red oni in the candy shop, Yoshinari did the part around the appearance of the blue oni later on, and Fukushima just helped out a little with the shots with the father near the end. Hashimoto, Tanabe and Yuasa, of course, are regulars with Ohira, but it was Ohira's first time working with Yoshinari. Yoshinari's shots were among the densest turned in, and greatly impressed Ohira, which is saying a lot. This small but superb selection of animators goes a long way to explaining why the animation in the film was so amazing. Each one of these animators is a highly talented, individualistic, maniacal animator in his or her own right.

Good news: In the interview in the mook, Ohira says he's interested in creating another film for children, this time a full-length feature. I'll be able to sleep soundly at night in the knowledge that another Ohira film may be forthcoming, and finally a full-length feature at that. Knowing his working pace, that may be many years down the line, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I want him to spend as much time as he needs to create something that the world has never seen before. His films are a treasure, and he keeps evolving and getting better.

Tojin Kit ~ Tatsuyuki Tanaka

Tojin Kit is interesting to me because, intentionally or not, it raises some interesting questions about the process of creation in animation. It seems to embody a contradiction inherent in animation: Animation is necessarily a pure product of the artist's imagination, but the amount of work implied requires diffusion of duties, which seems to inherently place a limit on the control any single artist can have on the result. Tatsuyuki Tanaka's long odyssey with Tojin Kit, the legendary short that he's supposed to have been toiling away at singlehandedly for so many years trying to complete (although it turns out that wasn't really the case), seems to represent the sisyphean struggle that results when you try to rail against that imposed limit. (which of course is vaguely reminiscent of Norstein's latest decades-long effort, although obviously their work methods, philosophy and style are very different)

An artist with a style and vision as seemingly self-consistent as Tanaka's has been over the last decade or so of his activity as an illustrator and occasional creator of animated shorts doesn't just happen across his style. It's the result of a clear set of underlying goals and concepts he is exploring. I don't normally like artists who are limited to a certain style or look, because more often than not it's just indicative of a lack of curiosity and flexibility, or worse, of superficiality. But I don't feel that way with Tanaka. I get the feeling that his work isn't just about style; there's a underlying structure there. Structure is what separates good contemporary classical music from random noise.

In a way very different from Happy Machine and Wanwa, Tojin Kit is also a film that could only exist in animation. It's an animated film first and foremost. The lavishly intricate sepia backgrounds that make Tanaka's work so distinctive, with their characteristic reek of decay and dark humor, are the ultimate products of the imagination, despite their extreme level of detail. Backgrounds in animation are quite often based on material gathered by scouting actual locations in the real world. In extreme cases, and surprisingly often (due presumably to the tight schedules in anime) backgrounds are faithful reproductions of photographs. In other cases, backgrounds are products of the imagination, but helped along by lots of reference material. Tanaka's art is different. Tanaka's only reference material, he asserts, is his memory multiplied by imagination. One of the structural elements underpinning Tojin Kit is that the decorations are assembled strictly from his memories of the little details of the tenements in which he grew up as a kid. The backgrounds are assembled, to be precise, from his memory of the little details that people would generally overlook, out of habit, or out of human instinct - the way we overlook a shattered corner of pavement, the unfinished underside of the sink over which we arrange ourselves in the mirror every day. This is what seems to give his backgrounds their particular character - they're confusing in that they seem familiar, yet obviously are products of the imagination. At first it just seems like he just likes drawing decay, but there's a pattern there, and it's conceptually interesting.

Tanaka has no illusions in his assessment of the results of his film. As was expected of the digital revolution, it has provided individual artists with the ability to control more of the tasks, resulting in animated films in which the various tasks were handled by the same person. Tojin Kit represents the problems that can result from getting what you wished for. In Tanaka's case, the ability to handle the backgrounds for his own films meant that, in addition to being able to spend more time on the animation, he spends more time drawing the backgrounds in order to achieve exactly the effect he is aiming for, being very much the perfectionist. This has the ironic consequence of slowing his productivity to such an extent that he's forced, at the last minute, to enlist other staff to help him complete the animation and backgrounds, which goes against what he was trying to achieve. Of course, given much more time, he could probably have made the entire film himself, and it would have had more unity than it does. His work is so distinctive and precisely imagined that work by another hand, even good work, stands out, which is what I find happened with the animation of this film.

One of the reasons I feel this deficiency hurt the film is partially that one of the themes of the film is to create the feeling of a living and breathing illustration. To that end, the backgrounds are not supposed to be 'backgrounds'. They're supposed to be an extension of the animation. I know I'm being nitpicky when I say this, but it's only because I admire the work so much and would have liked the film to succeed to the greatest possible extent. Needless to say, much work was put into the animation the film has some of the most best animation in the set. The animators who aided him are no hacks - Koichi Arai, Takaaki Yamashita, Takaaki Wada, Yasuhiro Aoki, to name but the most obvious. The film lacks any music, and making a film in which the lack of music is as successful as this one at creating rather than detracting from the atmosphere is no mean feat. The film achieves exactly the unique atmosphere it sets out to achieve, and Tanaka's smart, precise directing, superb layout skills and the mysterious and evocative story unmistakably make this one of the main reasons to watch Genius Party. At least Tanaka the perfectionist will be relieved to know that he isn't allowed to rest yet in his goal of achieving perfection. He needs to keep trying, and make even more amazing films that only he can make.

Dimension Bomb ~ Koji Morimoto

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to the collaborative art of animation - provide animators lots of freedom to create, or use the animators to realize the vision of the director. Tatsuyuki Tanaka obviously falls at one end of the scale. Despite Koji Morimoto seeming to logically fall at the same end of the scale, since he's such a unique artist, I find that he actually falls on the opposite end of the scale, the good team worker end. His very particular vision is paramount in his films, of course, but I like how he always enlists great animators to realize his worlds, and he provides them with freedom for a degree of interpretation that undoubtedly makes it a more rewarding effort for them, but more importantly, enriches the results. It can be hard to make a film with an excessively unified tone and look that doesn't feel brittle as opposed to strong.

I don't know quite where else to start with this film, which is enigmatic even by Morimoto's standards, which is why I start with that. I find that perhaps this gives a clue to the essence of this film - that he wants his collaborators to have a degree of interpretive freedom, and the audience too. There is probably a very simple love story hidden beneath the chaotic but extremely beautiful storm of images that comprise this film, but it was shattered in time and space by the dimension bomb of Morimoto's wonderfully mad mind, and the audience has to reconstruct it as best they can. That's my interpretation. Morimoto is the main creative force behind Studio 4C, and in this way perhaps his film best encapsulates what this set should have been about - the explosive atomic power of the imagination unleashed through animation.

I find that I don't really want to try to parse every little detail into sense. The film is perfectly constructed in its ambiguity as it is, although honestly I found it slightly frustrating on my first viewing. I thought maybe it was striving a little too hard for incomprehensibilty. But in retrospect, I think we need more films in animation that aren't linear, that aren't easily comprehensible, films that make the audience work a little. Or rather, films that are an experience the way this film and Wanwa are. Films like that are often more rewarding, just as it can be more rewarding for animators to have a little freedom of interpretation.

Rather than trying in vain to figure out the story, I prefer to simply revel in the richness and intensity of Morimoto's imagination. He's got that knack animators-turned-directors have for thinking visually, in a language of gorgeous, imaginative, never-before-seen designs and narrative forms. I don't think it would be possible to succeed in creating such images without the help of equally talented animators, and as it happens, Yasuhiro Aoki played a major role in animation of Dimension Bomb. There were plenty of others, including Takayuki Hamada, Shojiro Nishimi and Jamie Vickers, but apparently Aoki played a particularly important role. Aoki did a lot of the animation in Morimoto's Fluximation music video, so he's obviously a figure Morimoto feels he can trust to come up with interesting ideas to fill in the deliberate ellipsis in his storyboard.

Morimoto is a real creator of his age, though, in that this film is not merely a showcase of traditional animation. CGI plays an important part, and not just functional - he uses it as an expressive tool. His powerful images are equal parts CGI, background painting and animation. He's one of the best directors in Japan at coming up with aesthetically interesting rather than merely functional uses of CGI. The driving techno music is really well used, too. It doesn't just go full-bore throughout. The music ebbs and flows in sync with the hills and valleys of the dramatic pacing. Another thing I found very appealing in his film was the combination of meticulously rendered realistic backgrounds with the strange imagery. The film contains any number of memorable images, such as the body floating across various random everyday scenes, and the character transformed into pure energy. The juxtaposition of these images with the shots of the boy and girl interacting, which emanate a believable youthful sexual tension, makes for a satisfying balance.

Anyway, I think that'll do. Turned out a lot longer than I expected it to. And I was trying to keep things brief.

Why do Gobelins films move so fast? It's an overgeneralization, but I often find the actions seem too fast to me. I love their work, and the action in itself is usually amazingly lush and excitingly choreographed, but the zippy speed is the one thing that nags at me when I watch it. I guess it's not just Gobelins work, either. I remember thinking the same thing of the actions in late 2D Disney movies. I find myself thinking a lot of the animation would be much more effective if it moved 3/4 as fast. Norio Matsumoto's acton scenes seem to move half as fast (in terms of the timing) and be ten times as effective as action. Just a random thought that hit me watching their Annecy clips of recent years.

Fantastic news on the Tadanari Okamoto DVD box front - it's coming out (like, actually coming out, for real this time) on June 24, and you can pre-order it from Amazon.jp here. I just did. I can't wait. It will have not only all of the films included on the old 2-LD Pioneer Animation Animation set, but also every one of the many films that weren't, including the engravings-based A Restaurant of Many Orders, as well as rare commercial and early films. As a big fan, I thought I had seen most of Okamoto's films already, but looking over his list of films, I realize that there are over 10 films between 10 and 20 minutes in length that I still haven't seen - to say nothing of a bunch of the shorter ones. And this incredible deal is available to you for the amazing price of only 7382 yen!! It's really too bad they didn't include English subs (I'm assuming they didn't), as I would like for the English-speaking animation community to finally get the chance to appreciate Tadanari Okamoto's body of work in a complete form, rather than just unsubbed snippets, which can't possibly convey what the fuss is all about. (although it's hard to say whether the fuss would be 100% conveyed by subs anyway) Someone should definitely fansub at least the documentary that will be included on the set, which is a reprint from the old LD set. It's a great little documentary, and it's a perfect introduction to this great animator's work method and personality, narrated and explained as it is by the man himself, often on camera showing his work methods.

My favorite film from last year was Tropical Manila, a film shot in the Philippines on a shoestring budget by wild first-time South Korean director Lee Sang-woo. It depicts the squalid life of a Korean fugitive and his kopino family living in the slumbs of Manila. I don't know whether I was more disgusted or amazed while watching the film and in the immediate aftermath, but all I know for sure is that it had the most impact on me of any film I saw that year. It was a real cinematic jolt of the kind I hadn't felt in a long time, and not just because of the lurid and gruesome images. The film is visually extremely accomplished. It's dense and masterfully shot in a way that packs its message home with an incredible wallop. A while back I read somewhere that he'd wrapped on his next film, called Politically Sexy, but the French-language Asian Cinema blog where I read the info (HKmania) now appears to be blocked as a malware site whenever I try to reach it to confirm, and I turn up zero hits in Google when searching for mention of the film, so now I'm kind of starting to wonder if it was all just a fever dream cooked up by my overeager brain... and I was really looking forward to his next film. I hope it turns out to be true.

Along with pre-ordering the Okamoto box set, I also finally bought the Genius Party Beyond DVD box set, and I intend to write my thoughts about the whole thing once I've watched it and absorbed all the amazing extras. I knew they'd include tons of extras, and I wanted to wait until I could buy the box set so as to support at least this release, even though I hardly watch or buy much anime anymore, which is why it took me so long to finally get around to watching it. I've been dying to see Wanwa, so it's been hard holding off watching the copies floating around out there.

One thing I watched recently was Violence Jack. It's not something I would recommend to anyone I like. It was interesting for the stark contrast between each of the three volumes in terms of style and production values, showing how style evolves each year in anime, and also how staff and production values can make a big difference. But otherwise it's pretty dumb and forgettable. The extreme violence and gore was mostly laughable, except for in the last volume, where the higher production values made it somewhat more squirmy. The first volume has very little of interest in terms of animation or drawings, with a very 80s style. It was co-produced by Ashi Productions. The second is more interesting in terms of the drawings than the first volume, although very little of the animation stands out. You can see a considerable evolution in terms of the style. The third volume had several excellent bits of animation, but otherwise the jump in quality of drawing wasn't as stark as it was between the first and second volume. The good bits were courtesy of Shinya Ohira and Shinsaku Kozuma, and others. There were several other good animators - Norimoto Tokura, Hirotoshi Sano, Osamu Tsuruyama, Atsushi Wakabayashi, Hirotoshi Kawamoto, Kenichi Onuki, Takashi Hashimoto, Takahiro Omori, Kazuto Nakazawa - but I haven't tried to identify their work, as it's not as patently obvious as someone like Kozuma. I doubt Kazuto Nakazawa and Takashi Hashimoto were as easily identifiable (or skilled for that matter) back then as they are now anyway.

The part that most stood out to me was the opening chase, which I immediately thought was the work of Kozuma. It has an excellent and very peculiar sense of timing and form, and even looked at today is fun and exciting to watch, unlike the rest of the animation in the entire series. Ohira supposedly did the final bit where the boss gets his legs cut off with a thrown knife as he's speeding away on his motorcycle, although I wasn't able to identify it myself. I had information that he did that part. After I looked at it knowing that it was supposedly done by him, I could sort of identify the way of drawing humans as being similar to the style he had in the Curio Shop short he did. It also had a lush, dynamic, rich feeling that set it apart. That feeling lasts only three or four shots, which is typical of his dense work of this period. Ohira was also in the second episode, but I couldn't identify what part he might have done. The episodes date from 1986, 1988 and 1990, respectively, so the second episode would have been around the time he was in his Akira/Captain Future crazy-detailed effects phase, and I don't see anything like that in the second episode (maybe I missed it - help here?). I would like to say that the show is worth re-visiting, but other than these standout pieces of animation, there wasn't much that was interesting in terms of the directing and story. In fact, the directing and story were mostly just shoddy and cliched. The films certainly represent the preoccupations of the period. You can sense that the creators were really indulging in the freedom to do things like depict sex and violence offered by the OVA format, which was new and refreshing and edgy to them at the time.

Before I write a few thoughts on anime I've seen recently, behold Felix's Machines, one of the most ingenious concepts, constructions and videos I've seen in a good while. Felix Thorn, a young electronic musician living in the UK, has been putting together a DIY orchestra of cannibalized instrument parts in his apartment for the last few years, which he connects to his computer, and somehow coerces to play music he has programmed on his computer. Felix's Machines are fascinating on any number of levels. They create a marvelous show of twitching machinery - piano hammers hitting xylophones, a synaesthetic light show, and mediating the coldness of electronic music, which perhaps puts off many people to some of the best music made in the last decade, through the warmth of instrumental sounds. You can see two rawer videos of Felix's Machines in action playing Felix's Music on Youtube.

I've been meaning to write my thoughts about the exit of the last season and entry of the new one, but I've been so uninspired by everything I've seen of the new one so far that I haven't been able to muster the energy yet. Until watching episode 2 of IG's new show Sengoku Basara, that is. Quite obviously, it's been a while since I've been inspired to a post by something I've seen, but this episode is what I was waiting for. Funny it should come not in episode 1 but in episode 2. Episode 1 was fun, but not mind-blowing. Episode 2 was splendiferous. It was a fantastic, entertaining episode jam-packed with the manic energy of which only this form called anime is capable. It was directed by Naoyoshi Shiotani, whom I first noticed now quite a few years back with some animation in the Tsubasa Chronicle movie and the opening of Blood+, I think. He's since done numerous items, each one consistently showing him to be one of the most talented up-and-coming faces at the studio. I wrote about his episode of Chevalier, but not about Tokyo Marble Chocolate, which I really enjoyed. I admired how successfully he managed to pull off its daring structure, and also to create endearing characters in such a short span.

Ep 2 of Sengoku Basara has him on storyboard and directing, with Kyoji Asano on AD. He's backed up by animation from none other than Norio Matsumoto and one of my favorite younger animators, Shingo Natsume, whom I haven't seen in quite a while actually. This episode reminds me of his episode of Chevalier in the feeling of tightness of directing it has. When he's able to focus exclusively on these two tasks, Naoyoshi Shiotani does great work, just like another director who this season debuted as series director - Atsushi Wakabayashi. His Guin Saga so far is pretty much what I was expecting: weak and disappointing from a director who in the capacity of lone episode director was able to do such brilliant work.

Shiotani started out as an animator, and I think it shows up in his work in this episode, in the most basic sense that he creates scenes that have a riveting effect on the viewer by dint of their combination of great animation with exciting pacing and staging. He uses Norio Matsumoto fantastically in the showdown in the field, adding these incredible colors and sketchy effects to convey the intensity of the gimmick of the series, where the battles between the heroes, which might elsewhere have been portrayed by something so mundane as a sword fight, are here magnified to ridiculous, landscape-destroying clashes of brightly colored light. I've never seen anything like these sketchy drawings from Matsumoto before, so I wonder if he himself did them or whether Shiotani modified his work in the studio. He uses Shingo Natsume for the exciting charge of the castle, and creates another great scene. I thought I was seeing Hisashi Mori at first when I saw that scene, but later figured it must be how Natsume is drawing these days. He seems to have been influenced by Mori over the last two years. The showdown with the old man also has the hair-raising intensity that is a perfect match for this series' overtly silly and anachronistic re-visioning of feudal Japan, with all its off-the-wall nekketsu energy, and looks like it might have been animated by Shiotani himself. I recall he seems to have animated the scene with the old man in his Chevalier episode, so he seems to have a fetish for animating old men. A refreshing change of fetish for anime.

I've never been particularly interested in Kenji Kamiyama as a director, mainly because he's so far been devoted almost exclusively to directing Gits, which never did anything for me and I never watched, so I've never really had the chance to examine his work as a director in a neutral context. I was given that chance this season with another show from IG called Eden of the East. In spite of its obvious title, the first episode turned out to be quite enjoyable and intriguing and got me wanting to find out more, which no other first episode this season did (including Sengoku Basara - I only watched it because it was fun). He has a unique perspective that comes through in the odd situation, with its very subtle hint of a political tinge coming through already. The character designs by Satoko Morikawa are very cute, but not cloyingly so, and a refreshing change from the typical cookie-cutter 'cute' that riddles the rest of the season. I've long associated her exclusively with the World Masterpiece Theater, as I learned her name from the amorphous, blob-like characters in Lassie. But she's come a long way, and I like how that lineage has evolved in new directions (although of course she adapts someone's design concept). The fact that Yoshihara Masayuki is co-director makes me particularly eager to see where it goes. I recall liking his work on the sniper scene in Kamiyama's Gits film, so the two appear to be joined at the hip these days. At first glance the show seems to be IG's answer to Denno Coil, with its round kid designs and its tone and content, but I'm sure it will develop in a very different direction.

I enjoyed the first episode of Cross Game at first, despite entering with skepticism about the need to create yet another Adachi Mitsuru anime in this day and age. It was a well paced and had a simple, classical story setup that was a welcome change from everything else I've had to watch, and it had an unexpected punch at the end. But thinking about it, I was turned off by the manipulativeness and ease of hinging the emotional impact on the death a child. I also disliked how the faces were impassive and unchanging across every emotion, as it seems like a good design, one that would warrant more freedom with the expressions, kind of like Ayumu Watanabe's revamped Doraemon. But I still liked the directing by Osamu Sekita, and it's a refreshing change from the look and material that dominates today's anime environment, so I might watch a bit more to see if it's worth it. It's been a long time since I was inspired to watch an entire series based not on its merits in terms of the animation or directing, but on the story and characters. It's interesting how, even in the spring of 2009, we can still get a new baseball anime. It's like without a baseball anime on air, people feel a vacuum that needs to be filled. Do young kids today still enjoy this sort of thing the way young kids (heck, back then the entire country) watched Kyojin no Hoshi in the 1960s? The tenacity of certain genres is impressive to me.

I think I watched or sampled over 20 shows, but that's about it in terms of stuff that was remotely bearable. Nothing too exciting this season. And I probably missed it, but I didn't notice any Madhouse shows this season, which was a real surprise. Instead, IG takes the spotlight this season in terms of interesting shows. Madhouse has been in the spotlight with great shows for quite a while now, so perhaps they're preparing for the next wave. I was honestly kind of sad not to see some more good new Madhouse shows.

I just watched Erick Oh's latest film, Symphony (2008, 5 mins), and I was happy to find that despite the difference in subject matter, it's just as wonderful a film as Erick's previous film, Way Home (2008, 8 mins), which so captured me a few months back when I saw it at a screening in Beijing. Erick has again created a short that feels like a perfectly honed combination of stylistic elegance, richly worked hand-drawn animation and theme simultaneously cosmic in scale and microscopic in character.

The transition from his previous film to this one felt like a kind of test. Namely, a test as to whether what made Way Home an enjoyable film was just its 'cute' (?) characters. I had no doubt that that was not the case, but this film confirms it. The characters in Symphony are not the cute bug characters of Way Home, but rather impersonal, shape-shifting blobs as far removed as one could imagine from the characters of the former film. And yet, the film remains just as compelling, and just as immediately identifiable as an Erick Oh film, revealing that Erick's skills were indeed the real star.

In Symphony we find ourselves plunged into a strange microscopic world, a sort of amniotic ether where protozoan-like blobs dash about the rocky crags in an elemental struggle to eat or be eaten. Suddenly, one of the anonymous blobs seems to awaken from its precambrian slumber, dashing off on a danger-fraught journey that has presumably never ended.

In terms of the animation, there is just as much nuance in the 'acting' of the blob as it dashes across the screen as there was in the acting of the dung beetle in Way Home, which is quite impressive, as it has no eyes or hands to emote with. A great feeling of three-dimensionality is created in the ether through simple layering of pure black lines and shapes. There are no shades or color in the film, just a gorgeously organic mesh of black and white spaces and forms. Just like in Way Home, Erick makes remarkably effective use of such spare means, resulting in a film of great visual clarity. The animation is tied closely to the movement of Vivaldi's Seasons that provides the background music, creating a symbiotic unity of music and animation.

In terms of the theme, the film comes across as thematically related to Way Home. Although Way Home did feature conventionally identifiable characters and a clear narrative, the film didn't strike me as being about those things as about a much more cosmic theme. Rather than being about characters, or a story, or even a message, both Way Home and Erick's latest film strike me as compelling explorations of a very basic concept that permeates every aspect of our lives and of the universe we inhabit: the macroscopic versus the microscopic. The films strike me as humbling reminders that we are not the center of the universe, that we are but part of a continuum that reaches far above us and far below us. It's just clearer in Symphony than it was in Way Home.

What fascinates me about Erick's work is that a film like Symphony, which is otherwise rather ephemeral in terms of narrative and characterization, somehow manages to get across a very clear narrative, and the audience can follow what the 'character' is feeling at every moment of the film, entirely through the nuances of the very active and emotive animation - such as when the blob recoils in fear, stretches out tentatively in curiosity, or soars through the ether joyously exploring its new-found freedom. The same could be said of the dung beetle in Way Home. I love Erick's films because he creates films that are not only beautifully animated and have a compelling and intelligent theme, but the animation is the voice in which his mute characters speak to the audience.

Way Home was made in Korea, where Erick obtained his BFA, while Symphony was made at UCLA, where Erick is now completing his MFA in animation. Since making Way Home, Erick has also made a very nice short film entitled Welcome to Vokle for a new social networking site entitled Vokle, which just opened its doors to the public last month. Welcome to Vokle is compelling both technically and thematically, continuing as it does to explore grand themes, this time examining no less than the history of humankind in one and a half minutes. Welcome to Vokle can be seen in its entirety on Erick's web site here. Clips from Symphony and all of his other films can also be viewed on his web site, erickoh.com.

Erick was kind enough to answer a few of my questions by email, so I'm happy to be able to present a short interview with this great young animator.

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What made you choose animation?

As an artist who has a background in fine art with experience in other mediums like painting, illustration, etc, I consider animation to be one of the greatest art forms to convey my thoughts and feelings to others. It allows me to express whatever I want with the message as well as the style, ranging from narrative to abstract, traditional to experimental. One of the best things about animation is that the tool itself inspires me to blur all the boundaries between all the mediums. It mixes up all the great art forms like music, images and the narrative. The more experience I gain in animation, the more respect I find I have for the art.

What was it that made you turn to hand-drawn animation in this day and age, instead of CGI?

I just like hand-drawn images because usually I can feel the artist’s ideas and feelings sincere. However, I also admire CG-based animation and video art and would love to apply some CG effects to my projects in the future if it’s necessary. It’s all a matter of how effectively I use these tools. I’d like to be someone who uses these tools to create his own world, rather someone who just follows the tools.

Your films are wonderfully animated, with great technique, and a very unique style. How do you do it?

I made my first animated film in my senior year for the graduate exhibition. Since I was in a painting-based fine art program, I had to self-teach using all the references and video I could get online and offline. It was extremely difficult to learn all the techniques by myself but I think that experience helped me a lot with establishing a foundation in animation strongly and firmly in my own unique style.

What's your stance towards animation in your work?

Animation is a device that connects me to the world. I think my 'ego' projected onto the final product in the form of animation is the most sincere reflection of myself.

Any animators or filmmakers who influenced or inspired you?

Everything I see and hear inspires me. To specifically talk about one of the directors who directly influenced me with ‘Way Home’, I’d like to mention Michael Dudok De-wit, the director of ‘Father and Daughter’. I was very impressed by how amazing a film he made using the contrast between light and shadow and the beauty of blank space with his charcoal. Understanding how he made this beautiful film, I’d like to create a whole new world of my own with the oriental calligraphic brush. Leaving the ground in white color, I showed the passing of a day with just the change in the color of the sky and the tone of the shadow.

Can you tell me about the production process for Way Home and Symphony?

Pretty much every animation I did is traditionally hand-drawn animated. I usually use 30 frames per second to make the animation more fluid. For the camera and composition, I don’t really use any particular technique. After Effects and Premiere are basically all I use. There is some stuff I did in Flash or Maya though.

How did your approach change between Way Home and Symphony?

First of all, the message or the story I’d like to tell is always about my thoughts and outlook on ‘life’. As for the style and the approach, the project I just finished always influences the next project I plan. After finishing ‘The Bag’, my very first animation, I wanted to make a cinematographic film because the world described in ‘The Bag’ is totally surreal. The land becomes the sky, the food chain goes backward and everything is awkward in this animation. That was the start point with the style in ‘Way Home’. As you can see, the way I set the camera, the transitions from shot to shot, etc, all come from studying film. After 2 years working on ‘Way Home’, I was exhausted from dealing with all the cinematography. I decided to make a film that breaks the rules and blurs all the boundaries between everything. Because the interaction with the viewers is the most important thing I consider while making films, it was extremely hard to achieve both goals. After lots of experimenting, finally ‘Symphony’ came out as a film that is somewhere in the middle between abstract experimental and narrative character animation. ‘One’ is another experimental work I collaborated with media artists on as a sequel to ‘Symphony’. It’s more like installation art, but I think it’s meaningless to categorize things. These two works have received attention not only from theaters and film festivals but also art galleries. ‘Welcome to Vokle’ or ‘Gunther Sausage’ are pretty commercial and entertaining compared to other films. But I believe that the viewer will still be able to find my style and philosophy in these films as well.

Why did you leave Korea to study at UCLA? How does animation education in Korea compare to animation education in the US? And on a related note, how is the situation in the Korean animation industry? We don't get to hear much about that industry over here.

I can’t deny the fact that there is more opportunity in the US. It’s not about the education, it’s about the environment. Especially this city of Los Angeles is where all the studios and industries are all gathered around. I can’t really compare animation education between Korea and US since I studied fine art in Korea. But in my opinion, the faculty in Korea are not that experienced in animation because the history of Korean animation is quite short, compared to Japan or the US. Everything including the animation industry, education and culture grew up so quickly overall in Korea that it feels like we didn’t have enough time to put the right instructors in the right place. For example, most of the faculty in college animation programs are designers, cartoonist, filmmakers, critics and so on. They can still teach students, but the education can’t have depth. It is slowly changing and getting better and better. The facilities in Korean schools are really good though.

As for the industry, Korean animation studios have been doing other people’s work for the past 20 years. As far as I know, all the Disney movies and other Hollywood animations are actually produced and animated in Korea. That made Korea have really good technique and skills in animation but no creativity in it. We are definitely at a turning point right now. Various Korean’s own productions are coming out going over all the trials and failures. But we need this process to grow up.

What are your current projects, if you can say? And what do you plan to do once you get your MFA?

I’m working on this film as another story in my ‘Life’ series following after ‘The Bag’, ‘Way Home’ and ‘Symphony’. It’ll be traditional character animation just like 'Way Home'. My grandfather passed away last April in 2008. While experiencing all this sadness and missing him, I came up with lots of fragments of ideas. I developed a story out of them. The title is ‘Tree’ but it might change. I just started animating so I’m not sure when this journey will end.

After graduation, hopefully I’ll stay in the states working on this and that. My ultimate goal is to be left as an artist, not an animator or filmmaker. Of course the animation would be the main medium I use, but I’d like to always be flexible to borrow from other art forms or try different things blurring the boundaries of art.

One of the animators I discovered while watching Dirty Pair was an animator named Saburo Sakamoto, who died around age 61 in 1996. He was an interesting figure for the fact that he was originally involved with the famous Tokiwa-so manga group from the 1950s that included luminaries like Fujio Fujiko and Fujio Akatsuka. Instead of continuing down that path, he changed careers and became an animator, much like fellow Tokiwa-so member Shinichi Suzuki, who eventually went to work for Ryuichi Yokohama at Otogi Pro before co-founding animation studio Studio Zero in 1963 with many of the members of Tokiwa-so. Saburo Sakamoto was primarily involved in Toei and Sunrise TV shows throughout the 70s and 80s, having perhaps most famously been heavily involved as an animation director in the classic Yoshiyuki Tomino productions of the early 80s. In Dirty Pair, he was an animator in episodes 3, 5, 6, 13, 20 and 23 of the TV series.

I've mentioned several important animators who have passed away recently here in the blog, including Reiko Okuyama (1925-2007), Daikichiro Kusube (1934-2005) and Koichi Murata (1939-2006). Not surprisingly, many of the important figures of the very first generation of Japanese animation production are no longer with us - including Yasuji Murata (1896-1966), Kenzo Masaoka (1898-1988) and Noburo Ofuji (1900-1961), perhaps three of the most important figures from the very first generation who paved the way for everyone who came after. Kenzo Masaoka lived to a respectable 90, so he got to see a considerable many of the changes that overtook the industry since he left the world with masterpieces like The Spider and the Tulip (1943) - and not all of them good. More than 60 years later, the latter remains an unsurpassed achievement in many ways.

Two of the important figures of the next generation, Ryuichi Yokoyama (1909-2001) and Masao Kumakawa (1916-2008), also lived into their 90s. Masao Kumakawa worked under director Kenzo Masaoka as an animator, having animated the ladybug in The Spider and the Tulip among many other of the best pieces of animation from the 1940s and 1950s, even going on to work as an animator in the first few classic Toei Doga films until around 1964. Ryuichi Yokoyama, meanwhile, famously founded animation studio Otogi Pro, which I touched very briefly upon way back when and would like to expand upon eventually.

Otogi Pro notably featured one of the great animators of the next generation after Ryuichi Yokoyama: Shinichi Suzuki. Also from the generation of Shinichi Suzuki, but following a very different path from the latter, was Yasuji Mori (1925-1992), who seems to be one of the successors of the work of Masao Kumakawa and Kenzo Masaoka at Nihon Dogasha. Mori in turn went on to train and influence many of the figures of the next generation who worked at Toei Doga in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Daikichiro Kusube and Reiko Okuyama. Chikao Katsui was another now-departed animator of this generation who started out at Toei Doga and went on to work at Mushi Pro. At Mushi Pro, meanwhile, an animator named Shinji Seyama passed away at a prematurely young age just a few years after drawing, among other things, the animation of Aldin walking out into the desert in the very last shot of 1001 Nights. Thankfully many of these animators have lived full lives, but there have been a number of tragically premature deaths, and Seyama's is among the first one that stands out.

Both Koichi Murata and Kazuo Komatsubara (1943-2000), among the founding members of Oh Pro and among the greatest animators of the 1970s and 1980s in Japan, passed away what feels like too early, as did one of the greatest animators of the generation afterwards, Yoshifumi Kondo (1950-1998), who left behind some of the best work of each decade in which he was active right since the year of his debut in 1968.

A number of figures from the next generation have already left us in tragically early deaths, including Junichi Watanabe (1962-2007), a director who started out at Tomonori Kogawa's legendary studio Beebow; Hiroshi Osaka (1963-2007), who was very prolific and much relied-upon for his drawing skills as an animation director, leaving behind much great work as an animation director and animator, including work on most Bones shows of the last decade; and Toshiaki Tetsura (?), among whose most memorable work was his work as visual director, mechanic director and layout supervisor on one of Akiyuki Shinbo's best early works, Soul Taker. Among his last contributions was animation in the first two episodes of Shinbo's masterpiece, Cossette. Among other scenes, he animated the scene in the cafe at the beginning of ep 1. He was also heavily involved in Yamamoto Yoko under Shinbo on the mecha and effects side of things, as well as in the movie Shin Kaitei Gunkan (1995). He had a sharp, refined style as an animator that immediately set him apart.

TV Series (1985)

Movie (1987)

OVA (1990)

Dirty Pair was one of the big titles for me back when I was first getting into anime. It probably doesn't get much attention anymore, as the last 'real' installment was made more than 18 years ago, but for people like me who got into anime through fansubs in the early 90s, the Dirty Pair one-offs were fresh and new and among the various titles from the 80s that embodied the mysterious attraction of the form. The movie in particular pushed all the right buttons in terms of what I was wanting to see in my anime at the time, and was stylishly directed and well animated.

Well, I had myself a little Dirty Pair marathon over the last few weeks, and I've now seen every Dirty Pair item ever made. It's a pleasant show to revisit - among the few I've lately been able to watch in its entirety - and its evolution over the five years in which the various installments were in production from 1985 to 1990 offer some insights into the industry during that period.

The director of the TV series from 1985 and the last OVA from 1990 was Toshifumi Takizawa, who more recently will be remembered for having directed Samurai 7, so he serves as a good starting point for examining the series. His directing work seems to act as the guiding spirit for the show, setting the tone at the beginning and making the last statement in the very nice final OVA.

I personally remember Toshifumi Takizawa as having been the line director of my favorite robot anime, the terminal Ideon: Be Invoked movie. Tomino Yoshiyuki is the one who is generally remembered as the director of Ideon overall, and rightfully so. But when it comes to the last movie, reading has led me to realize that, besides animation director Tomonori Kogawa, it's line director Toshifumi Takizawa who was in large part responsible for giving the movie its legendary power and tension. He's the one who did the work of what we usually term director, or 'enshutsu', namely checking the genga, putting together all the material, etc - basically everything after the storyboard.

Takizawa wasn't long after having debuted when he directed the film, having been heavily involved in the TV series drawing storyboards and directing episodes. He relates that episode 39 of the TV series, which he storyboarded and directed, is the one on which he feels he finally achieved what he wanted as a director. He clearly learned much from the speedy, cinematic flow of Tomino's storyboards, and in the film he builds on that to create one of the most terrifyingly tense and perfectly built dramatic flows of any anime movie. This is clearly when Takizawa established the tight and speedy directing style that has come to define his later work. At his best, he is unbeatable at creating a seamless flow that threads breathlessly between drama and exciting action. Notable is that he himself volunteered to direct the film. It was his first great achievement, and remains one of his most impressive.

His next major job would be on that other classic Sunrise 'real robot' anime of the 1980s, Votoms, on which he served under chief director Ryosuke Takahashi as the 'enshutsu chief', in which capacity he drew storyboards and focused on polishing the final quality of the episodes in terms of achieving the right dramatic flow - having just proven his talent for just that on the Ideon film. It's not long after this that he directed the Dirty Pair TV series.

Takizawa only storyboarded the first episode of the Dirty Pair TV series, and directed none of the episodes. He appears to have focused his skills on directing the directors and maintaining the overall tone for the show rather than been in there doing things himself. The first episode is definitely identifiable as his work in terms of the nimble pacing and variety of the scenery and action, and the rest of the series shares something of this feeling, although it's overall not as tight as his own work.

The Dirty Pair series is unique among Sunrise's shows from the 80s, for the obvious reason that it's not a robot show, and for its more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek tone that sets it decidedly apart from the more serious and 'realistic' tone of the usual robot shows. There are transient moments of seriousness, of course, and people die, but the tone is something akin to that of the Roger Moore James Bond movies, in that the seriousness is subsumed within an encompassing atmosphere of nonchalant whimsy. It would just be ludicrous if they took themselves seriously with stories about cartoon madmen armed with laser satellites out to take over the world. It feels the same with Dirty Pair, and Toshifumi Takizawa is probably the one who guided the show in this direction as the director. He has stated explicitly his his dislike for dark, serious stories, and Dirty Pair provides a unique and grandly entertaining side-show on the menu of 80s Sunrise productions. And of course, this was a seminal show for its unusual protagonists and 'buddy movie' format. It had female protagonists, but was aimed at boys rather than girls, and they were strong female protagonists in commanding roles, rather than the docile girls of love comedies.

After directing the series, Takizawa was away from Dirty Pair until 1990, when he came back to direct the last OVA in the series. In between, he worked on various Sunrise shows, including drawing storyboard for ZZ Gundam and directing the Dunbine and Crusher Joe OVAs. Crusher Joe was originally a movie released in 1983, and it's in this movie that the first anime adaptation of Dirty Pair appeared briefly, showing up as a program on TV. Going back further, Dirty Pair was originally published as a novel in 1980.

While Takizawa was away, quite a bit of Dirty Pair got made by other directors. Right when the TV series was about to end in December 1985, an OVA entitled The Nolandia Affair was released. Revisited today, it's the blandest entry in the series, and not interesting in terms of the animation. The protagonists have a more adult design that comes across as a departure from everything else. The TV series had ended prematurely on episode 24, even though the script for the last two episodes had been written, so the last two episodes got produced and released as an OVA just prior to the release of a movie in March 1987, as a lead-in. Episode 25 in particular features some of the better animation of the entire series.

As much as I like Takizawa's work on the show, if you only watch one item of Dirty Pair, it'll probably be the movie, which is itself quite well directed by Koichi Mashimo, but just in a very different style. His distinct style with garish color schemes and loud musical interludes is on full display here and has actually never worked so well. The film also has the richest animation of the series, featuring plenty of great animators like Hitoshi Ueda, Sachiko Kamimura, Koji Ito, Koichi Hashimoto and even Satoru Utsunomiya.

A few months after the movie came a 10-episode OVA series released over the first few months of 1988. The OVA series is also directed by a different director, but holds up quite well nonetheless, and comes across as a higher quality version of the more light-hearted, variety-style TV series. Surprising names like Shinji Hashimoto and Norimoto Tokura even turn up.

Finally, after completing his work on the Crusher Joe OVAs, Takizawa returned to direct what turned out to be the final installment of the series in an OVA entitled Conspiracy on Flight 005. There was technically an OVA series entitled Dirty Pair Flash made a few years later, but it looks and feels nothing like the rest of the series, and comes across as a failed experiment to take the series in a new direction. The 005 OVA comes across as the true final word, the ultimate expression of how the Dirty Pair universe should be handled.

The final OVA is quite a nice OVA, and is one of the most satisfying installments in the series. It benefits from five years of added experience for the entire staff that was involved, including the director, the animators and the animation director, and so things have the assured feeling of the work of people who have learned how best to handle material they've been handling for years. Takizawa's directing is tighter than ever, with a dramatic finale that recalls the action of the Ideon movie, and most of all, the designs and animation are perhaps the most refined in the series. Character designer Tsukasa Dokite had by then continuously honed the character designs, and he brings to the drawings as animation director a more controlled line that gives the drawings new strength. The line and form of his work by this time kind of reminds me of Tomonori Kogawa's best work a few years earlier.

Which brings us to the other, more obvious, star of the Dirty Pair series - character designer Tsukasa Dokite, the man who created the sexy, daringly costumed designs that made the characters iconic and undoubtedly played a big part in making the series the hit it was. Dokite had worked extensively on Urusei Yatsura and then Maison Ikkoku, and this clearly influenced the development of his style, as the drawings in the TV series still have a whiff of Maison Ikkoku about them in terms of the arrangement of the features and the jawline. Dokite's drawings continued to evolve over the course of the series. The characters took a sharp turn towards the older and more realistic in the Nolandia Affair OVA, while for the movie he returned towards the younger TV series design, changed the costume a bit, and honed the design in a more cartoony direction. He continued to soften the edges over the course of the OVAs, and the 005 OVA represents his final word on the designs. You can see this evolution clearly in his character design drawings from each installment above. This evolution is obviously not something that's limited to this series, and probably to some extent is simply a reflection of evolving stylitic tendencies in the industry.

The opening for the TV series and OVA series, incidentally, are nice little films that showcase Dokite and Takizawa at their best at each particular period - Takizawa creating richly conceived, dense flows of entertaining imagery, and character designer Tsukasa Dokite providing some of his best rendered drawings of his own characters.

One of the things that most interested me in watching the TV series and examining the contrasting styles of each animation director is that so many different studios were involved in the animation of the show. Everybody knows it's common practice for the various parts of anime episodes to be outsourced, and I know it happened on other Sunrise shows of the same period (Anime R in Osaka and Nakamura Pro were major collaborators throughout Sunrise's history), but I was surprised at the extent to which this show seems to have been produced largely by outside staff, in looking up the names. It's obvious that this was not the Sunrise of today, with its ten studios allowing it to run any number of productions simultaneously.

I've been able to associate animators with no less than 10 different studios, partly because many times the studios are actually credited, and partly because I've been able to identify certain animators who were affiliated with certain studios at this time. I'm sure there are other animators who I haven't listed here who may have been affiliated with some studio at this time, but at the very least, from what I've been able to gather, the following studios were involved in the animation of the TV series. I list it here because it's an interesting list. It's testament to the intricacy of the web of interconnections that underpin anime production in Japan that they were able to produce a TV series using a small handful of animators scattered around at a dozen different studios.

Dove
  5, 8, 9, 12, 25, 26
  KOIZUMI Hiroshi, NISHIMURA Masayoshi, MATSUSHITA Yoshihiro, KANEMORI
  Kenji
Gallop
  10, 15, 17, 19, 24
  SATO Yuzo, TSUJI Hatsuki, ICHISHITA Satoshi, KOBAYASHI Kazumi,
  MATSUSHITA Tokuhide, SHIMURA Izumi, TSUKAMOTO Atsushi
Artland
  6, 7, 11
  MORIKAWA Sadami, OZAWA Naoko, YOSHIMOTO Kinji, YUKI Nobuteru,
  FUTAMURA Hideki
Mu
  13, 16, 25
  MURANAKA Hiromi, NAKASHIMA Miko, YAMAMOTO Sawako, KISE Kazuchika,
  OSHIMA Yasuhiro
Minamimachi Bugyosho
  2, 3, 7
  YAMASAKI Osamu, ONUKI Kenichi, TSURUYAMA Osamu
Kugatsusha
  1, 5, 8, 12, 21, 25, 26
  TAKAHASHI Kumiko
Hibari
  ISONO Satoshi
Graviton
  2, 4, 7
  SHOICHI Masuo
Doga Kobo
  18
Last House
  2
Anime Roman
  22

The proliferation of studios is enough to make you wonder if any of the show was actually produced at Sunrise, but there are plenty of staff I can't account for, and I'm sure that many of them must have been in-house animators. The first four studios listed were obviously the big ones in this series. The rest were more piecemeal. Some episodes appear to have been wholesaled out to certain studios, but mostly it's more of a mix of different animators from different studios. For example, episodes 10, 15, 17, 19 and 24 appear to have been entirely wholesaled to Gallop, whereas Dove animators handled only a portion of the episodes they're involved in. The same applies to the other studios listed above.

Studio Dove perhaps deserves special mention, as its members are credited