I just saw a video entitled edicisuM by a 23-year-old Turkish artist named Candas Sisman on nofatclips, and it immediately made me want to see more from the artist. It was a non-narrative abstract piece, but it stood out from all the other non-narrative abstract pieces out there perhaps due to its distinctive mesmerizing, dazzling visuals and smooth audiovisual rhythm. You can find ten of his videos on his Vimeo page, and he is also a prolific artist of compelling digital imagery. After you watch the video, read Candas's comments on how it came about.

His video works all boast the same perfect integration of alternately noisy and ambient soundscapes that, amazingly, seem to emanate directly from the images. He is an expert manipulator of digital means, creating a dense cascade of forms, colors and movement that doesn't grow tiring, but seems to evolve organically by some hidden inner logic. He has an instinct for beautiful images that extends into the third dimension - he creates beautiful evolving images. Sometimes the images seem purely digital, evolving subtly, moving in and out of focus, like bacteria under a microscope, while at other times the images are clearly photographs of the real world, but blended, shaken and stirred in a way that turns the shapes into abstract forms, only to actually segue into digitally-created abstract forms. He blends the real and the created in a seamless whole that is always delightful. And like Oskar Fischinger did, he has the good sense to keep each of his films short, just two or three minutes. This is among the best digital animation work I've seen in quite a while - a superb example of engaging, exciting, flawlessly executed abstract animation.

Oh, and merry xmas everyone.

Some of the most compelling animation I've seen in the last few years has been documentary animation. People have been using animation more and more to look at and illuminate real life. Animation offers innumerable ways of doing so, and the approaches that I've seen have been multifaceted and rich with personality.

Jonathan Hodgson is a British animator who's been active for more than two decades. I only discovered his work just recently, but it's all magnificent stuff and he's instantly one of my favorites. He's done a number of pieces with a documentary bent to them that are very rewarding viewing. In fact, almost all of his work seems tinged by a more realistic bent, in the sense that there isn't so much a narrative and characters in his work, as the eye of the creator looking out on the world around him. Animation in his hands is used as a means of conveying lived experience, you might say.

The first film I saw of his was Feeling My Way, and it's the film that made me want to learn more about someone who could create such a conceptually simple but tremendously exciting film, a film that empowers the viewer by showing how rich and valid each and every one of our viewpoints is. He brings to life the act of walking to work by first filming the walk, and then later in the studio embellishing the work with animation that illuminates the psychology of the walker in response to the various stimuli he encounters. In an interview I read with him, he avers that he's never really been interested in the animation scene. I can see why he would want to distance himself from the connotations of the term, as animation does carry a whole baggage of associations with form, style and substance that seem constricting and suffocating of true artistic freedom. He looks to other media for inspiration, he says, and I think that clearly shows up in this film in particular. I felt that this film showed a great way of breaking free of the shackles of animation, and taking back control to make way for a more personally meaningful approach that arises from the creator's expressive needs, whatever means those needs might require. True animation, I believe, is animation that exploits the possibilities of the medium to the fullest extent possible by seeking new formal and expressive means in harmony with the goals of the artist.

Hodgson's drawings aren't even that great, but his animation is great. His stance as a creator was already evident in his earlier films like Dogs and Nightclub, which fall closer to the typical conception of animated shorts in that the animation is quite richly executed and rewarding in itself. Yet these films deliberately avoid conventional animated narrative or characters, and retain a sort of deliberate crudeness that refuses to fall into the trap of mimesis, of attempting to create the illusion of life. Which is ironic, since what he's conveying through this approach is life itself, but mediated by the gaze of the viewer, like a pen trac(k)ing the image projected on the retina. You're watching shards of reality, but as if sketched quickly, like trying to sketch someone walking past you as you sit on a park bench.

His more recent films like Camouflage and The Man with the Beautiful Eyes are more sophisticated creations that adopt a realistic narration or format more closely resembling the documentary, using the imaginative means offered by animation to embellish and narrate the reality being spoken with a rich flow of transforming ideas. These are powerful creations that have great emotional impact, because these are real stories of humanity and frailty and life being told, and the wistful whimsy of the animation only makes them more heartbreaking. They combine the immediacy of a person telling you their story, with the imaginative embellishment of an animator's interpretation. The approach reminds me of that of the Fierlingers in the one film of theirs I've seen, A Room Nearby, in which the animation acts as a free-flowing, free-associating exegesis of the narrator's reminiscence. I think these films represent the one of the most exciting discoveries in animation of the last decade or so - the conundrum of animation being uncannily well-suited to documenting real life.

I find Hodgson's films inspirational because for one they point a way out of the box of conventional approaches to animation, and for two they feel empowering for asserting the importance of the small histories we all represent, and affirming the capacity of each individual to come up with means of structuring those narratives in a way that extends beyond the merely personal to communicate something meaningful to others.

Erick Oh's Way Home wasn't viewable on the net back when I wrote about a Beijing screening of Asianimation a few months back. It is now. I just noticed that it was uploaded to Aniboom two weeks ago. Watching it again today confirmed that I quite like Erick Oh's sensibility as a director, in addition to his obvious skills as an animator and designer. The designs are subtle but interesting and always communicate their personalities via the animation, and the simplicity of the story belies the film's richness. Each shot communicates through the nuanced acting animation and pared-down design scheme. Even though what's going on is mostly just the character rolling his ball, it's always interesting and fun to watch, because the character feels alive, and you share the character's emotional journey. Each shot is beautiful in itself, and the film overall has a unified, elegant, tasteful visual scheme. The compositions are painted with a few lines and a minimalistic color palette that is visually pleasing and efficiently sets off the movement of the characters. The music comes in at just the right moment, and brings just the right tone to the journey. The ending doesn't overemphasize or overplay, which shows good judgment. Most of all, the film has its own unique sensibility that feels honed and complete. I just feel good watching this film. I hope to see more from Erick Oh.

(EDIT: I'd just like to add that you can purchase the film on DVD directly from Erick via his web site.)

While I was there, I sampled a few of the top ranked films, but though some are technically accomplished and entertaining, I came away with the usual feeling of emptiness. None of them were affecting and genuinely interesting at every moment the way Way Home was. In the urge to cram in detail, more important priorities seem to get lost in the process. More than that, though, they didn't seem to exploit the possibilities of the medium of CGI, instead turning off their brains and opting as if by default for the same old hackneyed path of clumsy cartoon vaudeville, which I find somewhat maddening considering how much possibility the medium offers. In that sense, Christoph Grosse Hovest's Die.Art struck me as one of the only CGI films on there that seemed to use CGI in an original, effective and compelling way. Without any tangible narrative or characters in the conventional sense, we're instead thrust into a world of rusting industrial hulks on which alien creatures perch, flagellate, undulate, float and otherwise go about their daily lives. The creatures are lifelike, but very mechanical at the same time, as if they had evolved from their environment many millennia after humans had disappeared from the planet, leaving behind the rusting debris of civilization. First and foremost, it's a beautiful audiovisual piece, the CGI visuals dazzling and inventive, and the directing combined with the music to create a pleasant but provocative viewing experience that tickles the mind like an optical illusion. It's an extremely sophisticated piece with great technical skill in every aspect (I'm still not sure whether the backgrounds are real or CGI) but it's also very appealing visually and intellectually and shows us something that we've never seen before, and thus in my mind work great as a piece of audiovisual art/animation.

Ever been curious to try your hand at animation? Well there's no time like the present, and gif animation offers a quick and easy way to give it a shot. Regular reader and forum poster Huw Millar just started a thread in the forum inviting people to use the freeware program Easytoon to create their own animation, posting a few loops he made for fun by way of example.

If you've ever had the itch to create some movement, give it a shot. Even if you don't have great drawing skills, it can be quite fun to see your drawing come alive, not to mention give you a little hands-on insight into how animation is made.

Remember the action scene in Noein 12? Well, it was animated by a guy going by the name Ryo-timo whose main formal training in animation prior to busting out that extravaganza was making animated gifs in his free time. All big things started little.

(There's actually a small community of gif animators like him on the web. Huw pointed out a few before on the forum. Have a look for some inspiration.)

After many years of waiting, a DVD set of the complete works of Tadanari Okamoto is at last slated for release in Japan. Okamoto is undoubtedly one of the most important Japanese independent animators, so the absence of a DVD set of his works has been conspicuous. Koji Yamamura, who admits to being deeply influenced by the great independent, confirmed in his latest blog post (about the Tadanari Okamoto exhibit on display at the Hida International Animation Festival of Folktales and Fables) that the DVD set is scheduled for release next March. I don't know who will be releasing it, as I haven't been able to find any other information. For anyone unfamiliar with Tadanari Okamoto's work, a few of his best films can be viewed on Crunchyroll.

I remember quite liking the art in episode 7 of Casshern Sins, and the basic feeling of the art in the series overall, but the art in episode 9 truly stood out to me as among the most pleasing and compelling I'd seen in recent memory. Usually the background doesn't jump out at me, but here it stood out as among the most memorable part of an otherwise fine episode. You could feel there was real love put into the work.

I was surprised to find that the backgrounds in the episode were all drawn by a single person - Kenji Matsumoto. I've talked about solo-animator episodes in the past, but I didn't know there were actually solo-background episodes. I'm used to seeing quite a number of people credited with the backgrounds of any given episode, including other studios, which usually makes it hard to identify background artists I like, so this time around it really stood out to see only one name credited with background here. And it was great, because for once I can say with certainty exactly whose work it was I liked.

The most obvious thing that I liked about it is the way he mixes bright oranges, yellows and reds to create this dense texture that, surprisingly despite the associations with gaiety of the colors he's using, create a convincing feeling of death and decay. In the ultimate phase of the death of a boat's hull after it has sunk to its grave on the ocean floor, I imagine, it takes on just the sort of almost fleshy mix of reds and oranges that Matsumoto uses here to depict the texture of decomposition of the plague-afflicted robots. The texture is beautiful to look at, densely scarred and pocked and blotched. It's not naturalistic, either. He leaves each stroke of color quite obvious. But it has a marvelous impact.

I also found the compositions to also be very strong, downright gripping to look at, which rarely happens to me. It doesn't quite go to the lengths of something like Kemonozume, but there is more freedom here than usual. It achieves something of a fine balance between the artist being able to indulge his passions a little more than usual, while still delivering a product that works within the usual framework of nominal realism. The passion he puts into the images in fact benefits the film greatly. The shot of the robot with the flower by his side pictured above is absolutely gorgeous to look at, fit for framing, and seems to emanate a rare passion for the material that I don't know how to account for, but that helps to gives the scene and the episode its power. This is the power that backgrounds can have in the best hands.

I actually think that having had one person do it all might account for why there is a feeling of more passion there. Instead of people scattered all around the place geographically doing a shot here and there on contract, with no real stake in the production, the artist here was there throughout the entire episode. He had to understand what the episode was about, what needed to be conveyed, and he was able to think through what would best serve each particular shot of the episode, and render all the little details himself. It's the same as when you have a solo animator episode like Mihara's. You feel that the artist has more of a personal stake in the issue, and the passion is obvious.

Kenji Matsumoto was actually one of the background artists of episode 7, so I have to wonder if he wasn't the one responsible for the shots of the tower that I so liked in that episode. Also, episode 8 also happened to be a solo-background episode, by another artist named Shinzo Yuki.

This is where it becomes clear how this came about. Shinzo Yuki and his wife, Yukie Yuki, have worked as art directors/background artists on Toei Animation productions for years, as has Kenji Matsumoto. Shigeyasu Yamauchi's Toei lineage at work. I've been able to find a credit for Kenji Matsumoto as background artist dating as far back as 1972's Puss 'n Boots II, so he is not only a veteran Toei artist, but a veteran of the industry with the same amount of experience as his more well-known contemporaries like Shichiro Kobayashi, Nizo Yamamoto and Isamu Tsuchida. I thought that perhaps I was witnessing something new, a young face trying new things, but what I was seeing was in fact a the assured hand of a master.

It's rare that I write about background artists for one because it's animators who usually catch my eye, and it's animation and directing that usually interest me, but also for two because I don't know nearly enough about art to pretend to be able to talk about it. But mostly the latter. I've seen lots of great background artists in the past whose work I love. One of my all-time favorite series, Isao Takahata's Marco, would be unthinkable without Takamura Mukuo's brilliant, spot-on depictions of the vertiginous, mazelike alleyways and chalk-white seaside facade of Genoa, or later the beautiful desolation of the Argentinian pampas. His work is an indispensable part of Gauche the Cellist. The Red Shoes episode Osamu Dezaki did for the old Sekai Mukashibanashi series would not have the amazing impact and storybook beauty it does without Shichiro Kobayashi's distinctively bold approach to form, line and color. The latter is a great case of perfect symbiosis between director, animator and background artist, with each standing out for their personal style yet everything fitting together as a perfect whole.

I can't find that much info, but Kenji Matsumoto seems to have been involved in a large number of mostly Toei Animation TV productions since 1972. It seems like if you've watched a Toei production, you've probably seen his backgrounds. He seems to have been involved in a 'studio' named Atelier Robin alongside another Toei mainstay, Kazuo Ebisawa, who is regularly credited beside him, so he has presumably worked for Toei from his own studio all these years.

I discovered the music of the Fleet Foxes recently, and found that they've got a stop-motion video set to one of their songs, White Winter Hymnal, directed by Sean Pecknold. Gorgeous music accompanied by a nice slow and simple concept for the visuals that winds out and then winds back in. Very pleasing. The calm, complentative puppet animation kind of reminds me of Tomoyasu Murata. There seem to be many people using animation for music videos these days... from Sarah Fimm to Chad VanGaalen to Omodaka to The Blue Seeds to Quantic... to say nothing of ones I've mentioned in the past like Cornelius. The rhythmic chiptune wickedness of Kokiriko Bushi in particular slays me, and the animation is rich and imaginative. The animation in a lot of other videos is honestly pretty crude and not interesting in itself, but when it matches the style of a song, the images come alive and the video works, as a number of the other vids attest, which is perhaps what makes music videos such a rich form. There's plenty of leeway for a more individual, analog, handmade approach that might not work elsewhere. I'm sure this is nothing and there are lots of other great animated music videos. Please feel free to share your own favorites.

Animated music videos almost seem to be enjoying a creative renaissance these days. A lot of bands seem to find the expressive playfulness and freedom of animation appealing, if the bounty of videos and things like the Radiohead competition are anything to go by. It's like they find the handcrafted, lo-fi appeal of indie animation a fit for their songs. Not to mention that it must be a lot cheaper, easier and quicker to just get an animator to make the visuals. Even not in animation, it's possible to create videos with visuals that make us see things in a new way with very little means and just an interesting approach, like Tone Twilight Zone, which has an Eames-like childlike wonder at the little things around us. Cornelius' videos are all pretty amazing in this sense, such as Point of View Point, which is very simple in execution and concept but creates a fantastic visual experience, and even is quite interesting conceptually, as an exploration of light, motion, perspective, how points becomes lines in motion, etc, and ties in to the very rich (but catchy and pulsing) sonic exploration of the music. There seems to be a music video for almost every song on Cornelius' masterpiece of an album Point, so they're all worth exploring. Smoke is interesting to note among these, as it's an obvious homage to two of the fathers (and as of yet unsurpassed masters) of all this music video business: Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren.

The video for Venetian Snares' Szamar Madar was a favorite of mine for a long time until a few years later I discovered it to be the work of a brilliant animator, David O'Reilly, whose Please Say Something was a shock to the system when I first ran across it a year or so ago - easily one of the most thrilling recent discoveries for me in animation. Szamar was the first time I'd seen visuals do justice to IDM (putting aside Rubber Johnny). I thought it was one of the crowning achievements in representing this kind of music in animation. O'Reilly's devious playfulness comes through in the film, too. Watch it in full screen to get the intended effect. There's nothing that quite matches the thrill and ecstasy when a piece of animation and a piece of music sync into a pure and unseparable unit of perfection like they do here.

Not really a music video per se, but more like an animated short in the form of a music video that really bowled me over and remains one of my favorite animated shorts of the last few years is Massive Swerve by Robert Valley, set to Massive Attack's Mezzanine. Robert is a brilliant illustrator in his own right, but as proven by the animation he did for Peter Chung's Riddick, he's also capable of putting those drawings together in the dimension of time to create some superb movement. The film's combination of smart and edgy design appeal with loose linework and spare but craftily applied animation creates a texture and tone unlike anything else out there. The dance scene is one of my favorite of its kind, using the strobe effect to depict the girl's wild dancing with the rhythmic flashing of just a few stylishly exaggerated drawings. The pulsing, hypnotic downtempo anthem helps transform a film about a wild night at a rave party in Ibiza into something that feels like an epic descent into the bowels of a mythological netherworld.

I saw Animation Show 4 the other day. My first question was: Where's Don Hertzfeldt?? I'm sure it's been explained somewhere, but I didn't realize he wouldn't be there this time around. I wanted to see his new film. Without him, honestly, the selection was pretty thin and gimmicky, supported by almost no animation of any intrinsic worth as animation and falling dangerously close to a Spike & Mike's style fest of audience condescension with lowest-common-denominator outrage-appeal. I love Usavitch an all, and so did the audience, and I think it's great to get it seen by people. But some of the pieces on there... yeesh. Schwizgebel's Jeu was the only genuinely inventive and awe-inspiring piece there, which is ironically why it felt out of place. It's great to get audiences interested in animation. I know of a few people who saw the show who aren't into animation and who loved it. But it would also be nice to be able to do so by showing them a little more of the genuinely good work being done out there. This was a fun show for laughs, which is obviously all that Mike Judge was aiming for, so it seems kind of anal to pick on it for not trying to be something it's not. I was happy to see another piece by Luis Nieto, and again, that Schwizgebel piece reminded me why it is I love animation. Pure genius. Pes is also a really inventive animator. I like how he creates these really simple one-note punchline pieces but uses an odd new substrate to do the telling of the piece each time. What I really like about him is that he's doing inventive things with actual things, the way animators used to. I don't doubt that this selection represents US humor pretty well, but I refuse to believe that all US animators today think the only thing animation should do is gags, despite what some people seem to assert. I think audiences would have been far more satisfied with a little injection of depth and beauty here and there.

Just a quick post to mention a few things I've seen recently.

Soul Eater 34 was great, peppered with lots of exciting animation and overall simply feeling very tight in every aspect, even more than usual. This was an unusual episode. It was storyboarded by Tensai Okamura, and directed by a kind of loose-cannon figure in the industry right now, Hiroshi Ikehata, who was behind Hayate no Gotoku ep 39 among other episodes that stand out for their craziness the way Imaishi's did before he went big. It was a Telecom-outsourced episode, with Koichi Suenaga and Taichi Furumata acting as animation directors and my favorite Telecom animator, Yoshinobu Michihata, heading the animators. I was happy to even see Christophe Ferreira, aka lebuta on the forums, in the episode. More than three years ago I wrote a post about a series he was trying to get produced called Buta. I don't know what came of it, but it's nice to see that Christophe is still involved with Telecom. Can't help but wonder what he might have done here... Anyway, congrats on the nice ep, Christophe. Fellow Frenchman David Encinas was even there. I think he started out at Ghibli, at least judging by this video, so it's interesting to see that he's at Telecom now. Great to see more westerners infiltrating the ranks.

From the look of it, about half of the animators were Telecom and the other half were brought on by Ikehata, for example Masakazu Sunagawa, Ron Kamiya and Hokuto Sakiyama, who are regulars on the episodes he does. The trait that unifies the latter three, besides the wildness of their animation, is that they're all extremely new faces who have only been working as key animators for a few years now, yet already exhibit a flamboyantly individual style. They're among a deluge of new faces that have appeared on the scene in the last few years creating idiosyncratic animation right off the bat, without going through the usual process of development. It almost feels like we're seeing a paradigm shift happening right now, with the way some new animator seems to freakishly appear out of the blue with a fully formed style every other week. It's a new phenomenon that obviously has a lot to do with technology. The abundance of information available today on the internet and the deluge of media allow people with similar tastes to study their influences in more depth than ever before, as well as copy them and get their fan work out there where it can be seen and communicate with like-minded fans. A lot of these people started out as gif animators, including Hiroshi Ikehata himself, and I think that accounts a lot for the style of animation they produce, both its good and negative aspects. Sakiyama, for example, is a total Ohira epigone, (heck, proudly so), as you can see from what he did in Macademy Wasshoi 11 - and for good or ill, that can be said about a lot of these people. But then again, Ohira himself started out as a Yamashita epigone, so hopefully some of these people will eventually go beyond merely being imitators. (the animation at the beginning of Wasshoi 11 is by another Ikehata regular, Toshiyuki Sato, who adopts a Kanada-inspired splattery style that seems maddeningly pervasive among this young generation)

Interestingly enough, just before this there were two interesting episodes of Naruto. The team of storyboarder/director Toshiyuki Tsuru and animation director Hirobumi Suzuki, who were responsible for the only non-Wakabayashi Matsumoto episode, 48, did a one-two punch of eps 82 and 85 of Shippuuden. 82 is a quiet episode featuring long static shots that showcase the drama side of Tsuru, while 85 is more what one would expect from the show - a nice action episode with lots of nice fighting animation. Norio Matsumoto is there, but unlike the Wakabayashi episodes, he didn't do as big a chunk, and there are a lot of other animators, so it's a very different beast. His part doesn't even feel very polished. And overall, it does not have the impact of Wakabayashi's episodes. But it's still nice enough. Main character designer and super animator Tetsuya Nishio is there as an animator, apparently for the first time in the actual show. I catch a mild whiff of Sky Crawlers in his drawings here, so I guess this is one of the first things he did afterwards. Connecting to what I was saying above, gif-animator-turned-pro Shingo Yamashita is there after his stint on Birdy, as is Naruto regular Hiroyuki Yamashita and veteran Tokuyuki Matsutake.

Speaking of Atsushi Wakabayashi, it's too bad that we probably won't be seeing any more Naruto episodes from him, since he'll be busy for a good while directing his new show, but it'll be interesting to see what he does with his show. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm also kind of afraid. I've seen people who do great work as solo storyboarders/episode directors turn to series directors, and it doesn't work. What's great is when he is the one working to cram quality into a single episode, not when he's supervising other people doing that. The job is fundamentally different. But it will still be worth looking forward to.

Michiko & Hacchin 4 had what I presume to be some animation by Takaaki Wada that was an interesting parody of his work on Kaleido Star - an adult version of the vivid and rich dance animation he was so well known for. Otherwise I'm surprised to find myself alienated by the show.

Ep 6 of Casshern had some surprise fight animation by Norio Matsumoto. I particularly enjoyed ep 7. It had a really nostalgic feel to it, like the kind of show they used to make but don't make anymore - something that is obviously quite a conscious thing, as they went out of their way to get Mami Koyama to play the part of the tragic female character. It's wonderful to be able to hear more Mami Koyama after all these years. It's clear that this role simply needed her voice. She embodies a certain state of mind and personality that no other voice actor does. In Minky Momo and Goshogun it feels as if the roles were written for her, and writer Takeshi Shudo confirmed in interviews that she was a big inspiration. The characters would be unthinkable without her. She helped create those characters, with her husky, sensual, very womanly voice speaking of a new kind of strong female character - a complex blend of philosophical, witty and tragic. Anyway, I quite like the old-school feel Shigeyasu Yamauchi has achieved with the show.

Ep 13 of Xam'd had some rather odd animation where Akiyuki's friend transforms, and I wonder if it wasn't by Kaichiro Terada, another one of these relatively young animators with a perhaps slightly too idiosyncratic style for his experience level.

What makes animation interesting is that there can be as many answers to that question as there are people. What it is about an animated short, TV series or movie that enthralls us and makes us fall in love with the medium can range from anything as precise and specific as piece of animation in a particular shot, to any number of the many other elements without which animation could not be made - be it a story that enthralls with its epic scale and imaginative twists and turns, a character you can relate to, a powerful performance by a voice-actor, or a scene directed with hair-raising intensity. Animation can range from a massive team effort taking years to complete to a one-man project completed in a matter of weeks. Not only are the possibilities of the media that can be used to create animation limited only by your imagination, but different individuals may find inspiration in different aspects of a work of animation. In both creation and interpretation, animation offers considerable possibilities.

I can pinpoint the moment of magic that pulled me into the vortex of animation fandom to any number of very specific moments (and aspects) of animated filmmaking. When at a young age I happened across Heidi on TV in France knowing nothing about filmmaking or animation, I didn't appreciate the revolutionary nature of what Isao Takahata was doing by going to such extreme lengths to depict - not the dramatic exclamation points of conventional drama - but the little moments in our everyday lives that make up real life, in animation of all things. Nor did I catch on to Yoichi Kotabe's delicate and magnificently sensitive animation, or the authentic soundtrack leavened with Austrian folk melodies and instruments by Takeo Watanabe. But I sensed something was different. Everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge about animation, at some point has a similar gut reaction to animation that draws them in. And in my case, once I got back into animation many years later and re-discovered these memorable aspects of Heidi, that process has pretty much never stopped. I've never known everything, and never will, so I'm always discovering something new in animation, some new spark that keeps me watching and wanting to experience that spark again.

When I stumbled across anime many years later, the first spark was the eye-opening experience of seeing with Akira that it was possible to make dark, serious, complex stories that went beyond kids programming to both depict brutality as well as address complex themes. Another spark of a very different nature but that was equally significant to me came later with my discovery of the sumptuous beauty and deep-felt humanism of Frederic Back's flowing, painterly animation, which I related to on a deep level, and which showed me that it was possible to go in different directions with regards to aspects like the style, the texture of the screen, and the approach to storytelling. Again, in another case, it was seeing in Yasuji Mori's Hilda in Horus, Prince of the Sun a three-dimensional character who went beyond cartoon platitudes, who was torn apart by conflict, who was morally ambivalent - a complex character I could relate to, struggling to figure out her place in the world. In yet another case, it was the sumptuous, dreamy atmosphere and gorgeously rich, baroque visuals of Jiri Trnka's Midsummer Night's Dream, which showed me that it was possible to create not only beautiful animation but great animated filmmaking in contexts other than hand-drawn animation. In yet another case, it was Shinji Otsuka's animation of Hana berating Gin in Tokyo Godfathers, with its pliable and constantly changing expressions combining with brilliant lines and voice acting, which was one of the funniest single shots of character acting I've ever seen and showed me how much richer characters became when the animators were imaginative and got into the mind of the character. In a similar spirit, it was a shot of Milo spouting in a static shot for 30 seconds by John Pomeroy at the end of Disney's Atlantis, and any number of other shots of its ilk elsewhere.

The examples could go on and on. It was also the creatively empowering example of Tadanari Okamoto, who worked solo year after year, with a skeleton crew, to create his own small, handmade, personal films - each time forcing himself to take a creative new approach to the medium, using yarn for one film, then papier mache for the next, then engravings for the next, and so on right up until the moment of his premature death - a life lived for animation. It was the brilliantly humorous, ironic and satirical writing of scriptwriter Takeshi Shudo on shows like Minky Momo that refused to be bound by the context of children's shows and probed questions of identity and purpose in life. It was the poetic fire and sophistication of Yuri Norstein's films. The visionary genius of Oskar Fischinger, who revealed to me the pure physical pleasure of imaginatively conceived movement, with the way he eliminating backgrounds, narration and other extraneous elements to focus on the core element of animated movement in its purest form - in the process showing that animation could range beyond the classical, Victorian obsession with anthropomorphism, into unknown realms yet to be explored but only accessible via animation. It was the climax of Mind Game, where through intense, hair-raising animation of individuals engaging in an act of superhuman exertion, Masaaki Yuasa created a scene that was both powerful as animation and spoke on a meaningful level about both the nature of life and the struggle it always involves if we're to try to achieve anything, and by extension, of the act of animation, which in its highest form is an empowering struggle against a blank slate.

What unites many of these is the primacy of the animated element in accounting for what makes them appealing. Heidi would not have been as convincing were it not for Yoichi Kotabe's dedication to packing it with pared down but realistically influenced animation, achieving a watershed stable level of quality for such a tight schedule and such a small team. Hilda would not have moved with the stately grace and sensitivity of expression she does had any animator other than Yasuji Mori supervised her animation, bringing to his work as he did a somewhat more old-fashioned craftsman's delicacy and attention to detail befitting this veteran animator from the 1950s. The animation of Hana berating Gin in Tokyo Godfathers, with its more choppy motion and exaggerated poses, benefited from a different approach to timing than that of other scenes even in the same film, such as the scene of the bickering in the trash heap at the beginning by Hideki Hamasu, with its more fluid and heavy style, by dint of Otsuka's hand in its creation, as he tends to adopt a more 'limited' style (meaning using less animated drawings) in order partly to exert more control over the movement from moment to moment. As the animator of the climax of Mind Game, Nobutake Ito was no doubt in large part responsible for its impact by creating animation of the characters running that was full of dynamic exaggeration and in constant motion, conveying the urgency of their life-on-the-line exertion by making that exertion seem simultaneously mortally frail and superhumanly powerful. Films like those of Fischinger exist in a more rarefied place where the animation is in itself the appeal of the film.

There are likewise cases were it's not possible to narrow down the appeal of a film or TV show to any one element, animation or otherwise. In a case like Omohide Poroporo, the film would be equally inconceivable without its closely observed animation of gestures and expressions by Yoshifumi Kondo as it would be without its measured pacing, meticulous layout, beautiful paintings of the Japanese countryside, realistic script sensitively exploring a woman's experience growing up in modern Japan, unforced performances by the voice actors, intriguing soundtrack, and deft directing that melds all of these elements together into a seamless whole. The same could be said about Tokyo Godfathers and Mind Game. In the best situations in commercial animated productions, the animated element acts like a fully-functioning sub-unit that achieves a powerful effect on its own while making an indispensable contribution to the production that, like an actor in a film, isn't the entire production, but acts as the mouth through which the film communicates. With good animation, a film communicates more effectively.

Five or six years ago, I discovered something that kind of renewed the waning spark of my enthusiasm for anime: a set of Japanese animators creating flamboyantly stylish animation that was exciting like no animation I'd ever seen. It was the discovery of the existence within the anime industry of a coterie of animators with a deeply creative spark like Masaaki Yuasa, Shinya Ohira, Satoru Utsunomiya, Atsuko Fukushima, Yoshinori Kanada and Takeshi Koike - each working within the industry, yet managing to carve out a stylistic niche of the kind that elsewhere might only be attainable in the capacity of an independent animator - that renewed my faith in the power of animation, and showed me that some of the most exciting animation being made today was being made by these people in Japan. These animators heightened my awareness of the animated element in animation, and expanded my appreciation of the importance of movement in animation. But more than that, the sheer audacity and brashness of their individuality opened my eyes to a rich vein of creativity in the Japanese animation industry. There have been many great animators over the decades in Japan, and these animators continuing that tradition opened my eyes to a hidden narrative of anime history that broadened my appreciation of anime and renewed my faith in its potential.

In an interview with me posted on Anime News Network a few days ago, I felt there were some lingering questions about what exactly it is that sets animators apart from each other in anime that I hadn't addressed well enough, so I wanted to try to do that here.

It's not a judgment or a matter of taste to state that different animators exhibit different styles in Japan. It's a fact of life. Whether or not the viewer sees it, animators are unable to all draw and animate the same way, and stylistic disparity is an inescapable aspect of production that must either be both fought against or embraced - both of which the industry does to varying degrees, depending on the context. The main tool the industry has devised to address this issue is the animation director system that has been used in nearly every anime since 1963, in which someone corrects keys to maintain at least some semblance of uniformity over a production. But this tool is overwhelmed by its placement of the onus on a single individual, and inevitably, idiosyncrasy creeps through, if not in the drawings, then in the movement. Animation industries elsewhere undoubtedly pride themselves on lacking such undesirable human idiosyncrasy in their product, because such disparity is often viewed as a fly in the ointment, sometimes rightly so. Yet in Japan, that disparity often not only works despite itself, but often achieves greatness in its own right.

Naturally, many of the greatest animators in Japan are the animators who are able to adapt stylistically while still doing great work. But the fact is, their work remains identifiable by its intrinsic qualities in terms of its technique, or its creativity of movement or acting. A production such as Jin-Roh might be said to fall at one end of the scale, where ample scheduling permits thorough polishing of all aspects that renders it more difficult to differentiate between animators merely on the basis of obvious idiosyncratic style, which would be a distraction in the context. At the opposite end of the sale, a film such as Dead Leaves benefits from a more spontaneous and playful approach to the animation that not only permits animator idiosyncrasy but deliberately foregrounds it, and makes an asset of it.

To some extent, all anime could be said to fall somewhere along a continuum between these two extremes. Even when it's not intentional, there is usually some variation between animators present, even if barely noticeable. Although on occasion such variation is a deliberate stylistic decision, it is more often than not simply an inevitable part of the production process, with all of its rushed deadlines and geographically scattered freelance staff. However, whether intentional or unintentional, the strength of anime is that this stylistic variety often gives its animation a richness and unpredictability that is in itself unique and appealing. They've wrested what could have been a systemic weakness into a major appeal point.

This approach in which different animators are permitted to bring different styles to the table, without first being passed through a process of stylistic homogenization, may be part of the reason that Japan now boasts such a wide range of animation styles within its industry. A number of animators who grew out of that system to develop pronounced individual styles, such as Hiroyuki Imaishi and Masaaki Yuasa, received commensurate recognition and went on to head some of the most compelling Japanese productions of the last few years - precisely because they were given the opportunity to pursue their predilections and allow their talent to flower within their industry. This larger format in turn attracts similar talent of the next generation drawn to the work of these interesting animators, providing them with an opportunity to pool their talent to the benefit of the production and at the same time learn from one another, in a self-perpetuating loop of creative influencing and development that strikes me as one of the industry's creative wellsprings.

What sets animators apart from one another?

Although the issue of whether animator idiosyncrasy is desirable in a production is probably a contentious one, and whether it works will often depend on the viewer, the fact is that different approaches to animation are on display, and it can heighten enjoyment of anime to be able to appreciate different animators' contributions, so I wanted to get down a few simple pointers that I thought might point people in the right direction who are having a hard time 'seeing' the difference.

First a quick overview of the process. Based on the storyboard, the key animator creates a layout that acts as the frame within which the action takes place and defines the relationship of the animation to the background. The key animator then designs the motion by drawing 'key' poses at various points across the arc of a movement, and specifies where the other drawings should come to fill out the movement (on what's called a time sheet). The inbetweener then fills in the missing drawings to make the movement smooth. There are a number of other roles that can be involved in the animation before or after, and of course it's more complicated than this, but this is essentially how a movement is made.

There are a number of concrete ways (key) animators can differ.

Drawing
Tell two people to draw a drawing of the same person, and it will come out more or less different in how the volumes and lines of the figure are expressed. It's the same in animation, since animation is just a series of drawings in sequence. Inevitably, whether they will it or not, each animator has his or her own style of line and way of drawing forms. This is why a sakuga kantoku or "animation director" (more like a key animation supervisor) is needed to correct the drawings by the key animators 'to model'.

Timing
Animation is made by stringing drawings together, and the timing is how much of a space is placed between the drawings. Different animators might favor different timing styles. One might keep the drawings spaced smoothly, while another might place drawings more erratically. The timing dramatically alters the impact of the drawings.

Acting
The actual meat of animation. How the animator makes a character act out an instruction on the storyboard, be it by body language or facial expression. The drawings might be corrected, obscuring that aspect of the animator's style, but it's the plan of the acting that is the core of the piece of animation. Inevitably, each animator will come up with their own interpretation reflecting their skill level, predilections and imaginative capacity.

Some combination of these will account for most differences between animators.

Needless to say, it is by no means necessary to always be on the lookout for animators or to be struggling to identify the animator of each different scene. That is counterproductive and putting the cart before the horse. The whole point is that, just as we might follow a director or actor whose work we know we tend to like, sometimes while watching a TV show or movie there will be moments when the animation catches your eye or is particularly pleasing to you, and you wish you could see more like it; it's in situations like this that it can be nice to be able to articulate what you like, and to know who was behind that work, so that you can find more like it if you want.

Animation by Yoshinori Kanada (like this) and his followers like Masahito Yamashita and Hiroyuki Imaishi, for example, will usually contain some amount of uneven timing, with things kind of jumping around at odd moments, and liberal sprays of lines, geometric flashes and other assorted effects and playful insertions (like UFOs) appearing for a single frame at a time. The characters move not smoothly like in Jin-Roh but jumping almost randomly been assorted crazy poses. The drawings tend to be very loose and not highly worked. Their animation is more about having fun and creating animation that is exciting to watch than creating nuanced character animation. So these guys are identifiable through drawing, timing and acting.

The last shot of the kitten bumping into the cat in this clip by Shinya Ohira from FLCL is a good example of the opposite approach to timing - each drawing coming at the same interval, like ticks of a metronome. The drawings here are also very free and characteristic of Ohira. This is a rare case when drawings this idiosyncratic are left through into the final product without being corrected (hence the subtitles of the characters names for identification purposes). The acting is very different from the preceding Kanada-school animators. Rather than jumping around between extreme crazy poses and zooming around the screen wildly, Ohira tends to keep a shot fixed and use lots of drawings closely spaced to follow a movement through more closely from one pose to the next. So this animator is also identifiable, in his own very different way, through drawing, timing and acting.

The swimming animation here by Mitsuo Iso (of Denno Coil fame) is a similar example of animation that isn't about crazy timing and extreme jumps between drawings, but about following a movement through from moment to moment. The style here is not so much identifiable by the drawings and timing as simply by the unusual richness of the acting, with some new pose or reaction occurring in virtually every second over the thirty second span of the shot, as opposed to, say, a several-second loop of a set of the same drawings showing Kintaro swimming the freestyle stroke. In both this and the former case, the animation is unusual because it was probably drawn entirely by the key animator, without inbetweens. Inbetweens are a time-saving measure, but they also reduce the animator's control over a movement, relegating the little details to another person. Some animators don't like that, and have a very precise sense of what they want to achieve, so they draw everything themselves. So another identifying factor is this 'density', or the amount of control exerted by the key animator. An animator like Yoshiaki Kawajiri might rely a lot more on inbetweens, for example, to achieve his very smooth movements.

The differences are sometimes quite obvious, and other times rather difficult to put your finger on and articulate in words, although you sense that something is different. And there are obviously many other approaches to animation that I haven't covered here. But I hope this begins to give a sense of how it is that animators can differ from one another.

Bones is one of the most consistent studios active today in terms of maintaining a high standard of quality from one show to the next, and from one episode to the next. I can't say I'm always into the shows they produce (which is not to say they don't dedicate an equal amount to creating intricately thought-out characters, worlds and stories - and their use of original material is all the more notable in an industry drowning in manga adaptations), but I am impressed by their dedication to bringing on a variety of staff both young and old from all over the industry to maintain the quality of their work. It would be too much work to go through all the talent that's been involved at various times over the years in Bones shows, both in the animation and directing and other roles, but I find that there's always good work being done somewhere or other, whether I recognize any names or not. They are also innovative in organizing staff and bringing on people in unusual configurations to bolster the quality, creating staff configurations suited to the project at hand. Just as they seek out good animators, they also seek out good directors. Sometimes they'll gamble on young staff like ex-Ghibli directors, while other times they'll bring in time-tested talent like Toei alumni Takuya Igarashi.

What I most like about them, of course, is that the quality of the animation is always paramount in every project, and there are always a number of figures with proven talent supporting the animation, whatever the project. Bones is unique in that in almost all of their projects they always have a featured "main animator", if not several. Yutaka Nakamura is the most veteran and most identifiable linchpin of Bones' animation, but there are many other talented figures featured prominently, like Yasushi Muraki, Hidetsugu Itoh, et al. More often than not in their projects these days, though, I don't recognize the names, so in addition to using veterans, they're clearly training a lot of younger but talented animators, which creates a great balance that keeps the quality getting better. I suspect there's a sort of self-perpetuating aspect to the cycle of bringing on good main staff - the good people know the quality they need, so they in turn want to bring on talent that can provide that quality.

Indicative of their unique focus on the animation is a special page they've put up on their site for their latest big project, Xam'd, featuring the raw (inbetweened) key animation for a number of good scenes from the show so far. They're deservedly proud of the good work they do, and it's a respectful gesture to the fans of good animation who like to see this sort of thing that they've put up the little feature.

In episode 5 of Xam'd, there was an excellent piece of animation around midway of a character running that I wondered about in a comment not long ago. I didn't recognize any names in the credits, so clearly it was by someone I'd never heard of. I was dying to know who it was, but didn't think I'd ever find out. Lo and behold, I was happy to discover that Bones recently added a shot from that exact scene to the key animation page on their site (#05 C-212), revealing that it was the work of a young animator named Yasuo Muroi. I would never have known, as I don't know him at all - although upon looking into it I realized that he was apparently heavily involved in the second half of Denno Coil. (Again, a subsequent episode featured good work by other ex-Coil folks. The show's defining feature, though - if it wasn't obvious enough from the surface - is that its staff is dominated by ex-Ghibli people.)

The short commentary text by the main animation director, Masashi Okumura, reveals what was very clear from the animation - that Muroi studied himself in the mirror acting things out to help get the expressions and actions right. This sequence stands out dramatically not just from the rest of the animation in the show, but from most anime. It's the kind of animation I'd wish more animators would create - particularly so in anime, where a convincing feeling of timing and weight of the kind that makes Muroi's work here feel so great, with the reactions happening exactly in the right way to convince you of a particular movement or moment, making the character's behavior believable and by extension pulling you into the moment of the narrative, seems obviously to be something that would be critical in many situations where the audience has to believe in the 'reality' of the situation, but is all too often completely lacking. It's an amazingly important thing, but there doesn't seem to be much interest in digging deeper to figure out how to give the movement real conviction, or perhaps knowledge of how to go about doing it.

What I like about this innocuous shot is that I can believe in every little detail of the movement. The character slows down gradually with his body facing forward but his head tilted backwards just so, bounding forward a few times on momentum, as he scans behind him and pauses to see what the monster is going to do next. Then, in an instant, as soon as he realizes it's not down for the count, first his head snaps around, and his arms jump up for a frame or two as he gets in gear to start running again. It's the way he nails these little split second reactions that makes me like the movement so much. Every little element of the motion down to the millisecond-precise timing of how he snaps his head around at exactly the right moment, is totally convincing. You get the sense that Muroi has sat down, thought about what's going on, and thought through how he might behave in such a situation. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but I've long been baffled why I didn't see more animation in anime imbued with this sort of convincingly enacted, thought-through behavior. Muroi here proves that it's entirely doable and even a stylistic fit within the context of anime. TV anime is so special because you can run across so many different approaches to animation. From one shot to the next like this you are privy to the mind of an army of animators, each with their own predilections and skill levels, and if you've got talent, you can show it off. I can't think of many industries where that is not only the case occasionally, but a defining feature.

I've been enjoying Bones' other show, Soul Eater, too, as it also maintains a consistent level in terms of the animation and directing. Yutaka Nakamura's occasional presence is always exciting, but even besides this the animation is always stable and works very well with the show's sleek directing and visual style. I've been impressed how the directing in particular has been quite consistent across the board, with almost no exceptions, which I suspect is partly testament to chief director Takuya Igarashi's skills as a director. Most of the episode directors I'm not familiar with, although that other flamboyant ex-Toei director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, was in for a great storyboard recently. The latest episode, #30, was really nice in every sense, a classic case of the stable quality of the show, so I was wondering who was behind it. The episode was storyboarded and directed by a person named Shin Matsuo. He was also listed first in the animator credits, revealing that he animated a large portion of his own episode.

I'd never heard of Shin Matsuo, but upon looking into it I now realize that I've probably seen his name quite often, as he's actually something of a veteran, having been working as an animator since about the time of Zeta Gundam in 1985. He's been quite prolific, having been involved in everything from Venus Wars to Dangaioh to Genocyber to Run Melos to Lain to Death Note. Like many animators do, lately he's shifted to directing, and this is just the latest episode he's storyboarded/directed over the last few years. I guess it's revealing of his background as an animator that in addition to storyboarding and directing he should have gone so far as to animation, too, and the most animation at that. He reminds me of Akitoshi Yokoyama in that sense.

Matsuo also did eps 11 and 23 of Soul Eater, as well as Samurai Gun 9, Gallery Fake 37 and Host Club 23, which was incidentally the first Igarashi joint for Bones. He's got a dynamic and kind of whacked out style, so it made sense to discover that he was behind a show I used to like when I first started watching anime - the whacked out KO Century Beast. He directed and animated the two openings, and did storyboard/directing/animation directing/animation for episode 3 of the first series. He had a pretty wild style back in the day, echoes of which can actually be felt in this latest episode of Soul Eater, with its extreme angles and constant motion. This is another example of Bones using talented veterans in the industry, not to mention an example of how hard it is to remember so many people.