On a more important note, you should definitely contribute to any one of the charities that helping out on relief efforts over in Japan. There are a ton of efforts going on right now, so you definitely aren’t out of options if you want to help: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2011-03-11/relief-funds-for-march-11-earthquake/tsunami-in-japan
Lately I’ve been trying to get things out of my backlog. One of them was Kemonozume, the first TV series that Masaaki Yuasa directed. This was aired in 2006, two years after the theatrical debut of his magnum opus, Mind Game. Without going too deep into spoilers, the show is about the story of a demon hunter swordsman, Toshihiko, falling in love with a demon (called “Flesh Eaters”) woman, Yuka. Stuff happens, etc.
Script-wise, the show starts off with plenty of intriguing drama involving the organization (the Kifuuken) Toshihiko is involved with and where the relationship between the two main characters is going given their standing in society. However, towards the end Yuasa introduces a main villain into the story that pushes these two elements aside and the question revolving the relationship was never resolved to my satisfaction. The first half of the last episode involves the main characters trying to stop a huge ball from crashing into Tokyo, so that only confirmed my view on the second half—that Yuasa did not know where to take the story that he started out with. Don’t get me wrong, though. For the most part, the villain is great to watch and the scriptwriting in the show was more than competent. But the contents of episodes 2 or 6 were more along the lines of where I was expecting the series to go.
On the visual side, Yuasa seems to try to challenge himself with everything he does by doing something completely different every time and you can see this trend continue with Kemonozume. As you can read from the Anipages link I posted before, this does present problems in terms of actually getting animators on board due to the level of skill required. This was probably an issue with Kaiba as well, where the key animators list for every episode was very small in comparison to your typical anime production. On the other hand, this leads to a great amount of work being done by skilled animators.
Every episode starts off with an avant-title section and they had quite a few notable animators work on these sections. Satoru Utsunomiya did episode 3’s, Hiroyuki Aoyama #5, Kouichi Arai #8, Nobutoshi Ogura #9, Eunyoung Choi #10, Hiroshi Shimizu #11. Kobayashi and Mihara did the avant-titles for their respective solo efforts.
Osamu Kobayashi’s was episode 7. You got what you’d expect out of Kobayashi, with his close-ups and the square mouths combined with that stuttering kind of timing. Embarrassingly, I’ve never seen a series directed by Kobayashi. I did see one episode of Beck way back when, but that’s about it. I’d like to rectify that. Kobayashi’s episodic work always sticks out no matter what, even on a show as eccentric and out of the norm as Kemonozume. So I’d like to see how Kobayashi’s vision would translate over a series of episodes instead of just one focused, singular work.
There was also an episode by Kenji Nakamura (#10), which packed in a ton of material rather effortlessly. I haven’t seen anything from him before, so I’m looking forward to his upcoming C anime series and the Bakaneko arc of Ayakashi which I ordered a little while ago.
My favorite episode was Michio Mihara’s solo key animation effort in episode 12. He also did a similar episode in Kaiba, where he drew every frame of animation for episode 4. In Kaiba, you could see Mihara giving the character’s more weight in terms of how they moved than what you would normally see in an anime. Here, the main attraction was the insane amount of detail he placed on characters’ faces or when outlining their bodies in combination with constant, vigorous acting throughout the entire episode. Even amongst series that supposedly have a “great budget”, you rarely see animation that feels so alive. By itself, the scene where Kazuma is running up the stairs to face the villain speaks for the raw energy that Mihara spread across the entire episode. Hiroyuki Yoshino's performance is also commendable.I was surprised to Kenichi Kutsuna work on this show, since I had forgotten that he was involved. He did the silly action part with a chair that defies gravity in episode 8. Yasunori Miyazawa is here too and his parts are easily identifiable. On episode 8, he did a few cuts of the Kifuuken swordsmen fighting the Flesh Eaters (notice the panning back and forth) and on episode 13 he did the really sketchy line work when the main villain transforms.
On another note, I’m looking forward to Shippuden 204. Hiroyuki Yamashita is both the animation director and the storyboarder for the episode. Judging from the preview, it looks like it will look better than his last.
Episode 194 of Shippuden was another episode where it was definitely worth watching. It was the second effort from the Gorou Sessha/Masayuki Kouda duo. It was spent of a filler episode that harkened back to the juvenile potty humor days of Naruto, but it looked great doing it. There is a chase scene in the first half that is impossible to miss that shows that Gorou Sessha was the guy responsible for a similar looking part in 135 (the Itachi vs. Sasuke part). This also shows that he was responsible for the part at the end of 26 where Sakura winds up and throws the ball (or whatever it was) Sasori. His style is marked by that crazy blur and those bad-looking hands, but it still looks great in motion.
