Research
In this section, most of the new research I'll be doing will be an extension of what I did back in the specialist study unit where I also looked into anime, so the main points of what I did there will be copied and pasted over (again, with a few new additions that were supposed to be there the first time around but due to time restrictions, I couldn't get around to it), since I don't want to end up repeating a lot of the same points. With that all out of the way (and my criminology out in the open), let's get it started in here.
The Secondary Research I Already Did, But Touched Up Slightly
What Is Anime? And What Makes It Different From Cartoons?
According to StudioBinder, anime has evolved to mean two things over the years depending on where you live, the primary meaning of "anime" (and the one that generally applies to Japan specifically) is that it's simply a Japanese abbreviation of the word "animation" and could refer to any animation that exists regardless of origin, meaning that something like Disney's Beauty And The Beast could be seen as an "anime" under this first definition. (I find this a bit weird because I've only ever known anime by the secondary definition but I understand that to a Japanese person this would be normal) However, the secondary meaning (which is the more popular meaning that applies to the rest of the world) of the term "anime" refers exclusively to animation that originates from Japan itself, for example, under this definition, Disney's Beauty And The Beast would not be seen as an anime by any stretch of the imagination because it was produced in North America by The Walt Disney Company, but something like Sailor Moon would qualify as anime because it was produced in Japan by Toei Animation (the same people who did the animated opening and ending cutscenes for Sonic CD) and not anywhere else in the world.
While the two mediums aren't all that different on a technical level because the same tools that created Mickey Mouse were also used to create Goku from the Dragon Ball franchise (those being a pencil, some ink and paint and a piece of paper):
While this may be the case, stylistically, the two characters look very different from one another (besides the two being from wildly different species of course), because while Mickey Mouse looks a lot more simplistic in nature with not too much detail in areas such as the face or even his shorts, Goku has way more detail going on with his design with his clothes in particular being where a lot of the extra detail can be found. For example, with Goku's head you can see that not only does he have a few extra lines on his face but we can also see a few extra lines around his hair in order to represent some of the smaller strands that would ordinarily make up part of his hair style (there's also a lot of extra shading on this particular image of Goku):
Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse's head is significantly more simplistic in nature, lacking a lot of the extra detail that Goku's has, since Mickey doesn't have any strands of fur that sticks out from the rest of the fur on his head or even his body for that matter (to the point where he doesn't look as furry as he actually is) but much like Goku, he does actually have a lot of extra shading going on, which can easily be noted with the fur because the highlights stick out a lot more due to how the fur is normally all black. (mainly because this is a still image of Mickey that was created specifically to help promote general Mickey Mouse merchandising such as T-shirts and toys)
Another stylistic choice that differs between the two is the fact that Mickey's head (at least when he has his mouth closed) is circular and rather large while Goku's head is shaped and sized a lot more like a real human head. (despite him actually being a "Saiyan", which is a fictional species from the Dragon Ball franchise) Part of the reason for these drastically different designs is actually because of the sorts of stories that these characters primarily appear in with Mickey mostly appearing in more simplistic stories that are meant to make the audience laugh with each episode being self contained, in some cases the entire premise can be explained in just the title (as is the case with the short "The Little Whirlwind", where Mickey Mouse has to clean up Minnie's yard while dealing with a small tornado):
Meanwhile with Goku, he mainly appears in stories that are meant to span over the course of multiple action packed episodes with stakes that rise as the storyline goes on and characters that change and evolve over the course of time, so naturally they'll want to make him look a little bit more believable. well, as believable as they can make a flying saiyan person who's hair occasionally changes colour, I'm not saying they haven't managed this mind you (the fact that Dragon Ball Z is a sequel series of the original Dragon Ball is evidence of this), but I'm saying the concept is slightly ridiculous. (well, in the same vain as a blue hedgehog who runs fast or even a cartoon mouse and duck who have to put their cartoon dog friend back together) An example of this continued story would be this fight scene between Goku and a character named "Frieza" as part of something called "The Frieza Saga" ended up lasting around 8 episodes (I got that total by going to an anime forum that was discussing the longest ever Dragon Ball Z fights, learning when the fight started and when it ended and then taking the number of the episode the fight ends and subtracting the episode number where the fight starts in order to find out the total episode length via Google's calculator, thus angering math teachers the world over once again):
{There would have been a video here showcasing said fight, but unfortunately for all of us, Toei's copyright policy doesn't seem to allow for those kinds of uploads)
With the design differences in mind, as you watched the two clips, you may have also noticed a significant difference in the way the two sets of characters moved too, as Mickey Mouse has a lot more movement in his cartoon than Goku did. The reason that this is the case is in part because of the differing elements both forms of animation choose to focus on.
In the case of "The Little Whirlwind", the people behind that short decided to emphasise the comedy of the movement over the story, so they placed a greater amount of effort into the movement of the characters mainly animating them on ones or twos (which means they do a new drawing of a character and/or object every one or two frames), thus giving the characters smoother movements overall (of course, a lot of older Hannah-Barbera cartoons such as Yogi Bear and the original Scooby Doo: Where Are You are outliers here, as they use limited animation and place greater emphasis on the dialogue based humour instead)
In contrast, Dragon Ball Z's characters usually don't move around as much and even when they do, it's usually slightly choppier than in a typical western cartoon due to how anime is usually animated on either threes or even fours (meaning they do a new drawing every three or four frames) but they make up for it by putting more effort into the storyline for the series as a whole rather than the movements (which leaves way less room for one off episodes where Goku has to deal with tornados coming along to ruin his day), although one notable part where the amount of movement cranks up slightly during an anime is during action scenes, I.E: when the characters are fighting each other like in the "Goku Vs Frieza" fight where the two are blasting each other with energy attacks and flying all over the place.
So Where Exactly Did Anime As We Know It Today Come From?
well to answer that question, we'll be going back in time to the early 60s (almost 7 years after the end of world war 2) when a guy named Osamu Tezuka was busy reading about the comic book adventures of Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck (which were written by a guy named Carl Barks), until one day he got the idea to write his own comics similar to that of the Donald Duck and Scrooge Comics and in 1952 this would eventually manifest in the form of the "Mighty Atom" series, or as it would later be known, Astro Boy:
Heck, we can even see a cartoon duck dressed in a sailor outfit (who for legal reasons is totally not the famous Disney character known as Donald Duck what so ever) appear in one of the pages of the original manga where he's harassing one of Astro Boy's friends before getting beat up and having his outfit stolen (I assume the reason Tezuka was able to get away with this is because of his friendship with Carl Barks):
Astro Boy would go on to be very successful, as the series would end up lasting all the way up until 1968 (a whole 16 years after the character was first created), this paving the way for other manga series to start cropping up over the years (including the likes of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball)
While the original Manga was running, Astro Boy would go on to become the second anime series ever produced in japan, beat out only by a show called Instant History in 1961 according to Wikipedia. (yeah, Wikipedia, while not the most reliable source since anyone can edit the information, much like they can on a lot of the other wikis I've found on the internet over the years come to think of it, but they do at least have volunteers come in to help make sure the articles are as truthful and informative as they can be) The Astro Boy series was animated by Osamu Tezuka, as he decided to take the Disney-esque designs he had made and simplified everything by using limited animation techniques. While this was only meant to be a temporary thing to help him produce the episodes on time, this technique would later be picked up by other artists and animators looking to create their own anime series and after that point, it became more or less a defining feature of the medium as a whole, even to this day.
Lip syncing
One of the most notable differences between western animation and Japanese animation (besides aesthetics) is actually the way the two mediums handle the lip syncing process, because while most western animation typically tries to make their characters lips sync up to the words as accurately as possible in the cartoon's native language (whether that be English, Spanish, Danish, ext), most Japanese animation usually doesn't pay as much attention to this particular aspect, mainly opting to just have the mouth switch between two or three poses. This can easily be observed when you compare the mouth movements of the characters from Ed Edd and Eddy vs the mouth movements of the characters from the Pokémon anime:
Western Lip Sync (Ed, Edd, n' Eddy)
Japanese Lip Sync (Pokémon)
Before I found out why this was the case in reality I likely would have chocked this one up to the fact that Japanese animation typically has less of a budget than that of a typical western cartoon, but then I ended up watching this video by a guy named TheCynicClinic that was about this very subject, and as it turns out, the real reason anime doesn't place much of an emphasis on lip syncing is because of how little of an active role the lips play when speaking Japanese in general, as even the most rounded vowel in their lexicon doesn't require the lips to round off as much as the most rounded vowel in the English lexicon does. On top of this, most Japanese animations actually have the dialogue recorded after the animation is already finished (meaning the actors have to match their performances to the length of time the characters are flapping their lip for (with singing and particularly prudent lines of dialogue being a bit of an exception), this is especially true in a lot of older anime such as the original Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon, one particularly notable exception to this rule is 1988's "Akira" by Katsuhiro Otomo where they animated the lip movements after the dialogue was recorded (but even then the lip sync boils down to the lips flapping up and down)
Most western productions where the dialogue is actually recorded before the animation is finished (usually during the animatic or storyboard phases of production), thus meaning that the animators have to sync the animation of the lips to the recording that the voice actors made in the studio earlier in the production, thus allowing for more accurate lip movements for whatever the native language track happens to be. (since they don't ever re-do the lip sync when airing in international territories with the only exception that I know of being when Kung Fu Panda 3 had its lip-sync redone in mandarin for the Chinese release)
But How Did Anime Become Mainstream In The West In The First Place?
Well according to Fandom.com, Anime started to show up in the west at around the same time it started gaining momentum in Japan during the early sixties, as English adaptations of shows such as Astro Boy, Kimba The White Lion (which would later go on to be known as that anime Disney used as inspiration for 1994's The Lion King) and even Speed Racer began to appear on western television thanks to a guy named Fred Ladd making a deal with the creators of those particular shows.
From there it would be a slow burn over the next few decades with more and more anime such as Science Ninja Team Gatchaman in the 70s, also known as Battle Of The Planets and was re-adapted as G-Force in the 1980s (not to be confused with the Disney film of the same name that featured guinea pig spies), and the film Akira in the 1980s (over a week after The Simpsons aired its first episode) slowly making its way to English speaking territories, but it wouldn't be until the 1990s when anime would really explode onto the western scene with big hits such as Dragon Ball Z, The DIC dub of Sailor Moon (with DIC being the same people behind the western Mario and Sonic cartoons of the 90s) and even the Pokémon anime (which was just one part of the wider Pokémon franchise), combine this with Cartoon Network introducing Toonami in 1997 and anime would eventually gain a strong foot hold on western culture that can still be felt to this day, with series such as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (which originally aired in 2012 but was based upon the manga series from the 80s) still going strong to this day, with it's most recent "Stone Ocean" arc being the 6th most viewed series in America at the time of release according to Wikipedia (keep in mind that on Wikipedia, information can actually be edited by anyone, which can be useful if a big fan of the topic the article is about is making these edits, it can also has the potential to lead to misinformation and a few funny jokes, like that time someone edited the Wikipedia for Shark Tale so that it was directed by the fictional character known as "Mung Daal" from Chowder and it was hilarious while it lasted)
This in turn has led to some western artists choosing to adopt the style of anime into their own works, with examples such as Avatar: The Last Airbender, Totally Spies and even the Castlevania animated series based on the game series who's parent company (Konami) recently ruined a celebration of it's 35th anniversary via NFT (also known as Non Fungible Token) garbage:
While I myself don't really enjoy or watch a lot of anime in general, with the main exceptions being Sonic X and Pokémon since I watched them when I was a small child (although I do still enjoy them to this day, as you'll know from the previous unit when I brought up Sonic X near the beginning), I'm hoping that looking closely at this medium will give me more of an appreciation of the medium as a whole and equip me with enough of an understanding to dip my toe into the water with my Final Major Project (albeit in Dreams PS4/5 of course, so the whole thing will be in 3D)
Differences in Demographics
Another significant way the two mediums differ from one another is actually in the target audiences that the creators will commonly aim for their respective works, because where as most western cartoons are aimed at children (with some obvious exceptions being Family Guy and Robot Chicken) due to this silly idea that our culture has about cartoons being meant exclusively for children which in fairness, isn't as big of an issue in more recent years (as stuff like Bojack Horseman and Sausage Party would re-prove) but it's still something some people erroneously believe due to just how commonly western cartoons are aimed at kids:
In contrast, Japanese anime seems to be a lot more balanced in this regard, with a lot more stuff aimed at adults as well as children:
On top of this, stuff like the Pokémon anime and Sonic X actually had to be changed and modified (in ways that aren't translating the dialogue) when coming over to the west in order to be considered kid friendly because Sonic saying the S word on English television wouldn't have flown with parents at the time (which would still be true to this day) unlike in Japan where it's treated more like the word "Damn" where it's a mild curse word that appears on kids media every once in a while to make a work "PG":
In fact, let's get a little bit statistical for a moment (which is not something I usually like doing so let's see how it goes):
Here, we can see that in 2017 when this study was conducted, a whopping 57% of the 500 people that were asked said they watch anime works "more than once a week", this could imply that they either watch anime twice a week or even every day in a given week or somewhere in between the two extremes (so do keep that in mind), but among the 500 people asked, 86% of males who were in their thirties said they watched anime more than once a week with no-saying they don't watch anime at all. Meanwhile, 62% of females who were in their teenage years (in this case meaning aged 10 and up) said they watch anime works "more than once a week" (again, meaning either twice a week, every day or somewhere in between) while 18% say they don't watch anime at all.
What I find particularly interesting about this study however is that while not as many older folks watch anime "more than once a week", a combined 86% of women in their fifties and 82% of men in their fifties do indeed watch anime (I got those totals by adding up the percentages of people in their 50s who said they watch anime "more than once a week", "more than once in 2-3 months" and "less than once in 2-3 months"), because to me it really puts into prospective just how popular anime really is in Japan since even the majority of the seniors that were asked seem to watch anime works as well. I mean I knew animated works weren't stigmatised in Japan as being " just for kids" since there they make more animated works for adults than we do, but even this just blows my mind, as usually in the west it's older people from around the "baby boomer" generation who are stigmatising the medium of animation.
Now that we've taken a look at the "who" when it comes to anime demographics, let's take a quick dive into what anime works are actually popular in Japan:
Here, we can see the first definition of the term "anime" coming into play, as while I wouldn't expect to find Disney's Frozen on this list of popular anime works (especially since I come from the west where it wouldn't be considered an anime), but since this study was conducted in Japan (where the first definition of the term "anime" would apply), it starts to make a whole lot more sense, now that that little tangent is over, let's get on with the study.
Here, we can see that the people conducting the study wanted to know how many people recognised certain "anime works", in this case we have Doraemon, Spirited Away, Dragon Ball (not sure if they mean the franchise as a whole or just the original Dragon Ball series specifically), One Piece, Disney's Frozen (unfortunately), Naruto, Death Note, Full Metal Alchemist, Your Name and Puella Magi Madoka Magica, in order to see how many people out of the 500 subjects have seen or recognised said works.
One of the first things to note is that Doraemon and Spirited Away are actually tied for the most recognition of the bunch, as 99% percent of the people surveyed actually recognised both works, but Doraemon ended up out pacing Spirited Away in terms of viewership, as 97% of those asked said they had seen Doraemon while only 87% of those asked said they'd seen Spirited Away. (around 10% less than those who have seen Doraemon) I actually think Doraemon ending up with the most recognition and the largest viewership out of the bunch actually makes a lot of sense when you consider that at the end of the 2016 Rio Olympics, they actually teased the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which thanks to Covid, are now a work of fiction that only Mario, Sonic and a bunch of digital video game humans got to participate in, as we ended up getting the 2021 Tokyo Olympics instead) with a video (which near the beginning has the likes of Hello Kitty and Pac Man show up) where part way through, the prime minister of Japan at the time, Shinzo Abe decides "right, that's it, I'm Super Mario now you guys" and then gets the help of Doraemon in order to get to Rio on time via a warp pipe (thus leaving Sonic to get shafted onto the side-lines despite appearing in the Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games series along side Mario for years now):
Going back to the topic at hand, the most interesting and unexpected part of this study for me is actually the fact that 98% of the 500 people asked actually ended up recognising the movie Frozen meaning it somehow managed to beat the likes of Dragon Ball and One Piece in terms of recognition (I guess Disney's marketing department must have done wonders on this one), but in a strange twist of fate, it turns out that only 60% of the people asked had actually watched Frozen. (although with recognition rates that somehow beat Dragon Ball, I'm sure Frozen still managed to rake in a massive profit regardless) The most likely reason I can parse given the circumstances is likely because Frozen (as a film, not a general merchandising juggernaut) simply wasn't as relevant in Japan during 2017 as it would have been in 2013 when the film originally released, thus explaining the huge percentage gap between people who recognised the movie vs people who've actually seen it at the time the study was conducted.
Overall, I found this study to be somewhat interesting (which is not usually something I can say about these types of studies) because of some of the unexpected twists that ended up coming up, I.E: the misfortunate but still interesting inclusion of Frozen as well as the fact it managed to surpass even the Dragon Ball series in terms of recognition in Japan (at least in 2017, but even then, part of this is due to how I wouldn't even expect to find a western work on a list of anime but hey, they were studying this in Japan where the first and more lenient definition of anime would apply), but a part of the reason this study was way more interesting than all the other studies I've come across in the past is because I'm currently not as familiar with the field of anime as a whole unlike western animation which is more my forte.
I know I'm skimming over things quite a bit but I really want to move on to doing the practitioners and analysing their work soon or else I won't be able to get this done on time.
Who Actually Does Anime For A Living?
Much like every single form of media that has existed, currently exists and any new forms of media that may come into existence in the future, anime has had (and will continue to have) many great practitioners across many decades in the form of individual creators and entire animation studios. This week we'll be looking into at least three different practitioners, starting with...
Studio Pierrot
According to the Avatar: The Last Airbender Wiki of all things, Studio Pierrot (also known as Pierrot Co. LTD) is a Japanese anime studio that was founded in the year 1979 by former employees of a company called Mushi Productions after they filed for bankruptcy in 1973 (according to Honey's Anime.com at least) and in 1977, while Mushi was making it's comeback, another bunch of former employees from another company called Tatsunoko Productions wanted to tell stories that were cut from a different cloth than what the company usually made at the time, so together with a group of former Mushi employees who had moved on to forge their own path in order to eventually form what would be known as Pierrot Studios.
One of the first anime they would end up working on was a show called Nils no Fushigi na Tabi (also known as The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), which from what I've found out seems to be about a boy named Nils who ends up shrinking down in size to less than three inches tall after he insulted a gnome and now has to fly all the way through the country of Sweden with the help of a flock of geese in order to learn empathy and humility so that he can become his normal size again. It was based on a novel called The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and given the fact that the show is an adaptation, I'm going to assume the book has the same basic plot as the anime, as a lot of book adaptations will usually take a pre-existing story from the source material and adapt it to fit the new medium. (much like what they did with the film adaptations of books such as Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach)
The company would eventually go on to produce their first original series to become a big success with 1983's Mahou no Tenshi Creamy Mami (or Magical Angel Creamy Mami in english), which would go on to be just one of many anime that Pierrot would produce under the surprisingly prominent "Magical Girl" sub-genre, which itself is where young women and girls inexplicably gain magic powers and transform into souped up versions of themselves who will either fight evil or become pop stars depending on the show. It's a bit of a weird sub-genre that I don't entirely understand the appeal of:
Getting back on track, my personal favourite project that they've ever done (and the entire reason I chose them in the first place) is actually the Sonic The Hedgehog OVA:
For those of you who are new to this term, "OVA" is an abbreviation of "Original Video Animation" and according to random people on Anime Stack Exchange, it's simply another way of saying that something is a straight to video/dvd release. The was originally released as two thirty minute episodes over in Japan between the 26th of January and the 4th of February respectively, the two episodes were titled "Welcome to Eggmanland" and "Sonic vs Metal Sonic!!"
Why do I say this was "Originally released as two thirty minute episodes", well to answer that question, we'll have to head on over to north America in the year 1999 (around 4 years later) when a company called A.D Vision would receive the licensing rights for the north American release of the two episodes. What A.D Vision then did with it was that they re-dubbed both episodes in english and then combined them into a single movie and then on the 7th of September (a whole two days before the American release of the first "Sonic Adventure" game), they would then release the whole thing under the new title of, "Sonic The Hedgehog: The Movie" (meaning it predates the first live action "Sonic The Hedgehog" movie by a whole two decades):
Now that all that historical window dressing is out of the way, now it's time we look into a scene from this OVA and see how Pierrot handles things in the scene where Sonic fights Metal Sonic (or as he's called in this film, "Hyper Metal Sonic") for the second time:
The first thing we can see here is actually the way they handle Sonic's signature speed, because instead of depicting him as a blur (at least most of the time), here they choose to turn him into a bunch of blurry pencil lines and then have him disappear or re-appear depending on whether he's entering or exiting the scene. This particular approach is actually quite similar to the way that Toei Animation handles the "instant transmission" move throughout their Dragon Ball anime franchise (which itself is based on a manga series of the same name), with this in mind, while the approach allows the animators to save plenty of time drawing the frames for Sonic and/or Metal Sonic's movements since this implies that they're moving too fast to even be seen by the naked eye, it also happens to give off the effect that the characters are actually teleporting from point to point even though they're supposed to be running and jumping really quickly.
The first thing we can see here is actually the way they handle Sonic's signature speed, because instead of depicting him as a blur (at least most of the time), here they choose to turn him into a bunch of blurry pencil lines and then have him disappear or re-appear depending on whether he's entering or exiting the scene. This particular approach is actually quite similar to the way that Toei Animation handles the "instant transmission" move throughout their Dragon Ball anime franchise (which itself is based on a manga series of the same name), with this in mind, while the approach allows the animators to save plenty of time drawing the frames for Sonic and/or Metal Sonic's movements since this implies that they're moving too fast to even be seen by the naked eye, it also happens to give off the effect that the characters are actually teleporting from point to point even though they're supposed to be running and jumping really quickly.
The reason that earlier bit of framing was super important is because it proceeds the part where Metal Sonic and Sonic both start charging at each other for the first time in the fight because due to the way this part is shot, the characters are actually so small that they become invisible, meaning the trails of dust and snow that come rising up as a result of Sonic and Metal charging into each other become the only means of knowing where the characters are in screen space (speaking of the plumes of dust and snow, I just realised that our Sonic's plume is actually made out of snow because he's running while Metal Sonic's plume is actually made of smoke due to the fact he's hovering using his jet turbine in his back, so that's yet another way you could tell which character's which without seeing them):
Moving on to the fight itself, we can see that in this shot much of the fighting happens from so far away that the characters themselves become blue and red light trails (with the blue trail representing Sonic while the red trail represents Metal) which allows the animators to save lots of time and effort while also showcasing the sheer speed at which both characters are going since now they're moving so fast they become mere trails of light. (of course, the light trails aren't literally emitting light, especially in the case of our Sonic since they're mere representations of the characters)
In fact, because of how far away from the camera Sonic and Metal Sonic are in this shot, the only reason we even know there's any sort of fighting going on between the two is due to the fact that whenever they reach certain points on the screen, a literal cloud of snow comes rising up from where the impact takes place, meaning they're colliding with such force that the ground itself is having trouble handling the impact. (something that's not too dissimilar to what happens in a typical Dragon Ball Z fight, except in this excerpt of the Sonic fight scene, we don't see much areal combat going on because Sonic can't fly)
Remember earlier when Sonic and Metal Sonic were staring each other down and Sonic was facing the right while Metal was facing the left? Well in this part where they're charging towards each other before Sonic says the classic "You might know what I'm going to do" line, the roles are now reversed, as Sonic is now facing slightly to the left while Metal Sonic is now facing slightly to the right. To be honest I feel like this scene would be slightly improved if they kept the characters facing the same direction they were when they were staring at each other going on about how "the last Sonic standing will be the winner" because then it would bring this little excerpt full circle and respect the established screen direction from earlier (granted, this change of direction doesn't ruin the scene mind you, but I feel it would be better if they didn't change what direction the characters were facing mid battle)
Here, we can see that Sonic's legs are actually moving so fast that they instead take the form of a red figure eight, the reason for this is because it would be rather impractical for the animators to animate Sonic's legs moving how they would in reality because of how fast they're moving and as an added bonus, it also makes this part more faithful to the actual Sonic CD game's Super Peel Out move where Sonic's legs turn into that very same figure 8 (which means this O.V.A is officially more faithful to the source material than the first live action Sonic movie):
Overall, I enjoy this scene quite a lot because of the way they were able to capture Sonic's speed with so few frames as well as the intensity of the action where both characters are clearly established as wanting one another dead (I also like the way the steaks are continually raised as the fight goes on but a lot of that actually happens after the excerpt I covered here so I won't dwell on it too much), but before I move on to my next practitioner I just wanted to make a quick correction about the animated cutscenes of Sonic CD, I know this might seem random but I figure I'm not going to get another chance to correct this later on so I may as well do it now while Sonic's still the focal point.
Earlier I said that Toei Animation (the people behind the Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon anime) handled the animation for the opening and ending cutscenes for the game Sonic CD, it turns out that wasn't the entire story, as Toei actually had help from another anime studio called "Studio Junio", who ended up doing the bulk of the work with lots of crunch (which is a very questionable practice where employees end up working lots of over time in order to get things done within a specific time window, often burning them out in the process, you find it a lot in game development sadly) with very low pay as I found out from other members of the wider Sonic community. (hence why some people have taken to calling the Sonic that appears in those cutscenes "Junio Sonic" instead of "Toei Sonic")
Now that that's been rectified, it's time to move on to our next practitioner. This is the part where I would talk about someone like Osamu Tezuka and his work on Astro Boy, but after making the "shocking" revelation that Astro Boy has five fingers (four main fingers and one thumb) on each hand and telling some of my friends (who themselves are actually know more about anime as a medium than I do at the time of writing) about it, they ended up showing me some mind-blowing stuff by a studio called "Mappa Studio", who are apparently behind stuff like the 4th season of Attack On Titan (the other seasons were handled by a different company called "Wit Studio") and a show called Dorohedoro (which features a big green 3D lizard guy named "Caiman" in the trailer), so without further ado, let's discuss...
Mappa Studio
According to what I found on a fandom wiki called Otaku Encyclopedia Wiki, Mappa Studio (also known as simply, "Mappa") actually came about relatively recently, as the studio was founded by some guy named Masao Maruyama on June 14th 2011 after he presumably got sick and tired of working for another studio called "Madhouse", citing how it had become a "large organization with little freedom." (between this and Studio Pierrot, I'm starting to notice a bit of a pattern here) However, despite getting their start in 2011 (the same year Sonic Generations came out), it wouldn't be until April of 2012 when they would their first work, which was a show called "Sakamichi no Apollon." (or Kids on the Slope in English) From what I could gather from watching a review by Chris Stuckmann, this show seems to be about a group of kids who decide to get together and form a jazz band during the 1960s.
Here, we can see that while the designs of our main characters still very much like anime characters, we can see that Mappa have chosen to take a much more realistic approach to the anatomy of the characters than most other anime out there (likely due to the "slice of life" nature of the show in combination with the fact the show is supposed to take place in reality), as their eyes are actually much closer to the size of real eyes than most other anime characters such as Goku or Sailor Moon.
Another difference I noticed between a lot of the older anime I've been talking about this whole time and Kids On The Slope (and by extension, most modern anime) is actually the improved shading that's happening here since in the image above, the characters are significantly darker than the rest of the environment (likely due to an object or building creating shadows off screen) with a little bit of a highlight coming from Sentaro's (at least I think that's his name) jacket. This is likely due to the digital technology that a lot modern anime producers use (according to animenewsnetwork.com/answerman, they use something called the RETAS Studio Suite) to make the animation, thus allowing them to do shading in ways they couldn't have done as easily with traditional cel animation due to now having access to an unlimited amount of digital ink and paint.
One more change that my friends pointed out to me in terms of modern anime is actually the use of CGI for characters such as Caiman (the guy with a lizard head from earlier) in Dorohedoro and the Titans in season four of Attack On Titan:
Now the blending of CGI and 2D animation like this, while not a new phenomenon by any means, isn't something you find all too often because you have to put in a lot of effort to have the computer generated elements blend into a 2D environment so that things don't look super jarring in the final product. In fact, one of the main western films I think of when it comes to this technique is Brad Bird's adaptation of The Iron Giant, although films such as Disney's Beauty and the Beast (the good one, not the live action one) and The Lion King (again, the good one, not the live action one) do the same thing during the ballroom scene and the wildebeest stampede respectively:
Of course, due to the differences in how long they linger on a single frame during both mediums (western animation is usually animated on ones or twos while most anime is usually animated on threes or fours while occasionally moving on ones or twos), the frame rate of the CGI is tailored to match... Well, this is much more true with Caiman than it is with the Iron Giant since the giant is more likely to move on ones, meaning he has smoother animation than that of the 2D human characters (although due to the fact he's an alien robot from another world, his smoother movement would actually help put the audience in Hogarth's shoes), where as Caiman (as well as all the other CG elements) from Dorohedoro are actually animated at the exact same frame rate as all the other (actually 2D) characters, thus making them all blend in better with the rest of the environment, and thus convince people like me who aren't well trained in this sort of thing yet that those elements are actually 2D.
After much careful consideration of which of Mappa's work I should look into for this next part (because to be honest, I want to avoid content that is too graphic or sexual in nature and this is the deepest I've ever dived into the medium of anime), I think I'll look at the part in Dorohedoro where the character of Caiman (also spelt "Kaiman" in Japanese) gets a job at a restaurant. Keep in mind, I don't have a whole lot of context on the show itself or the manga it's based off, so I'm going into this mostly blind (except for watching the clip itself to review for content that could be graphic or sexual of course):
So the first thing we should establish here is that this scene is of a much slower pace than a grand majority of the stuff I've analysed thus far, so this might be a bit difficult for me to find as many points of interest in terms of shots and techniques here, especially since I covered some of this stuff with the analysis of the Sonic OVA (although come to think of it, I didn't find much on that front either), so let's start off with that first shot of the meat pies. (which from what I learned from asking friends that actually have seen this show, Caiman really likes meat pies)
I believe the reason they show these meat pies off so prominently is so that we as the audience can end up thinking "man, those meat pies look so good" just like the character of Caiman does, thus putting the audience (or at least those who actually like meat pies) into his shoes like how they likely would have been doing all throughout the series (since this part happens in episode 8 according to the video title):
I know I'm jumping ahead and skipping a lot of the character discussion, but I don't really know much about these characters as it is and I don't want to risk being inaccurate with something (which is why I've been turning to my friends for help a lot more than usual in the first place) so I'm going to mention the camera for a moment.
Basically, in this shot we can see that Caiman is actually facing to the left of the screen. This might sound like a minor detail to point out but stick with me here, this is going somewhere:
If you look at the majority of these shots from the sample I collected, Caiman is actually framed off to the right while facing the left side of the screen, there's only one where he's facing to the right while being positioned off to the left, but even then he's not even the main focus of that particular shot, instead it's a guy named Tanba. (I'll come back to him and the other guy named Fukuyama later) The reason this is the case is because of something called "the 180 rule" (I alluded to this when talking about the Sonic OVA and the way Sonic and Metal Sonic were positioned relative to the screen throughout most of the excerpt I chose to look in to), which is a rule that states that if a character is established as facing in one direction in a given scene, then they should stay facing that direction as much as possible or else the audience will get confused about where the character is relative to the screen:
Going back to Dorohedoro before I go in a massive ego trip, I actually think this scene does a much better job of keeping the character directions relative to the screen consistent than the Sonic OVA because unlike that film where the characters have all but switched places by the end of the excerpt, unlike Dorohedoro where everything's nice and consistent (never thought I'd say something like that regarding Sonic), although I don't really have much of an opinion of the show itself due to literally discovering it over the course of this unit. (maybe I could watch it in my spare time if I get the chance)
These two are known as Tanba (the guy with the sharp teeth and less rounded eyes who wears a disguise for most of the scene) and Fukuyama (the black haired waiter who's eyes are a lot more rounded), throughout the scene, these two try and mask their true identities (especially Tanba with that fake skin suit) until near the end of the scene when they decide to give Caiman a job working at their restaurant washing dishes. (I think that's what his job is based on the fact that it's what he gets told to do once he's finished eating all the meat pies) I don't really know what ramifications end up happening in the show, which is one of the biggest cons of analysing an excerpt of something without having actually seen the whole thing first (for example, I went ahead and analyse the Sonic OVA first because I was much more familiar with the film as a whole), but my current interpretation is that it means they've taken quite a liking to our "hero", I say this in quotation marks because I asked my friends about whether Caiman was actually the hero of the show (and I suppose by extension, the manga it's based off) and they said he was more of a "morally ambiguous character" (meaning some of the actions he takes in the show and manga may not actually be very heroic, but it'll be fun to find out eventually), and have decided to reveal their true selves to him, especially after they kind of forced Caiman to reveal his true self to them, only for them not to immediately kick him out the building. Although judging from the trailer I saw, he does sometimes tend to eat people, but at the same time this episode does come later in the series, so I'm not sure what the ultimate fate of Tanba (who instructs Caiman to call him "President"), Fukuyama and Kirion (who is the one who walked out of the scene early on, I've neglected to mention him because I literally have no frame of reference as to who this character even is, and I'm typing this part at my house, so I can't ask my friends about it as easily as I would if we were together) ends up being, but I have a hunch they'll either make it to the last episode or end up being killed in some way by these "Collectors" that get mentioned. (I'm going to assume they're bad news for the time being)
With that being said, I think I might conclude my research on the practitioners in this field. I know I said I'd look at three practitioners but to be honest, as I continued doing this part (especially when looking into Mappa studio), I ended up realising more and more that maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for me to continue looking into films and shows that I haven't even seen or heard of since at that point, it would end up being like writing an English essay on the meaning of a dusty old house I've never read about prior all over again and on top of that, I also want to avoid making the same mistake I did during my FMP last year where I meant to look at a classic Wile E. Coyote cartoon only to accidently analyse one from the 1990s instead of the 1940s. (luckily, both cartoons were directed by Chuck Jones)
Another reason for this is because I'm actually hankering to get on to the practical side of things so that I have my own experimentation to present during my presentation.
The Practical Side Of Things!
For this part, I'll be undertaking a little bit of experimentation of my own in order to see if I can capture the feeling of the anime aesthetic myself, because if I can't capture the anime aesthetic this time around, then I'll be able to take what I've learned here and use it to jump start the production of my final major project and by extension, the new IP I want to make for said final major project.
As such, I feel the first step is to take Super Sheep and do a pose for him in three different styles of animation (where Super Sheep is likely to look relatively different depending on the medium), those being 2D western animation, Japanese 2D animation, and 3D animation. (meaning Dreams PS4/5) With this in mind, let's start off with the 3D Super Sheep since that'll be the easiest to work with, although I did have to contemplate whether or not to include this one since it arguably isn't super relevant, but I ultimately decided to include it in the discussion for kicks and giggles:
This was quite easy to whip together quickly because I used Dreams PS4/5. The reason this Super Sheep has more balanced colours is because I tinkered with the sun and sky gadget after the stream was over (mainly because I was dissatisfied with the other version)
In 3D animation, unless you're going for a more stylised look and feel to the animation (and thus stylise your character models) like what The Peanuts Movie or Spider-Man: Into The Spider verse did (especially Spider-Ham from Into the Spider verse), you have to make sure that your character poses can look good from every conceivable camera angle. (even if the shot doesn't necessarily call for orbiting the camera around the character) Speaking of the camera, you can move the camera around a lot more quickly and easily than you can in 2D animation (and that's even with multiplane cameras) due to the fact that everything on screen is a 3D model within a 3D environment. (well, except things like fire, fluids and the skybox which are considered "effects")
Yet another factor to consider when working in 3D that relates to the characters looking good from all angles is to avoid a little thing called "clipping", which refers to when parts of a given model pass through the environment, other models or even parts of itself, the reason this is something that can happen in 3D animation and not something like 2D or stop motion is because the 3D models are all stored in a digital environment and often have minimal collision data attached to them (with the main exception being things like clothes due to how they're often simulated rather than directly animated in order to make things easier):
As such, it means that if the animators aren't careful about how they animate the characters and other props, it could result in things passing through each other like there's a glitch in the Matrix:
A related phenomenon to try and avoid when making something is called "Z-fighting", which is a lot like clipping but it's where textured surfaces that exist in the same space are constantly flickering between each other in order to fight to be the dominant texture:
The reason neither of these things happen in 2D animation is because there, you have to draw every single frame from scratch (unless you're working with 2D rigs in digital software like Flash or Toon Boom) and unless you're deliberately drawing parts of the character passing through each other and/or including 3D elements, it is physically impossible to encounter any Z fighting or clipping issues, and it doesn't happen in stop motion because there, you're using real objects and models. (so clipping and Z-fighting are physically impossible)
Now that we've seen Super Sheep in 3D, it's time to draw the character in 2D twice, once for the western animation style and once more for the Japanese anime style, and because I'll be drawing the character this time around, it means I'll be going into more detail about how I'm doing things (meaning lots more screenshots):
First, I'll be drawing the character in the western style since that's the one I'm more familiar with
And the first thing I usually do when it comes to drawing the characters in my usual style is the head, which I normally make very round since it's easier to draw a circle than it is to draw a more realistic head.
Next comes the eyes
For the eyes, I usually tend to draw them to be quite big (especially in Super Sheep's case) because bigger eyes allow us to more clearly see what the character is feeling (especially when combined with the mouth, which I'll get to in the next snipped screen cap), thus meaning the character will be a lot more expressive. (as for why his eyes look like one big eyeball with two independent pupils, I made them that way because I decided to try out the look one day when storyboarding an old project that never came to be because I ended up having better things to do and I ended up liking the look enough to where it became part of his design)
This time around, I also decided to add in eyebrows and also erase part of the eyes to make him seem more cocky and arrogant (since I'm copying the same pose I did for the 3D one in order to make the comparison between art styles easier)​
The reason I even drew the whole eye in the first place is so that I could then erase a part of them after drawing the extra angry lines. Personally I think this is easier than just drawing the character's eyes being angry already since then I'll be able to decide which direction the pupils will be looking beforehand. (I'll only draw the characters eyes to be certain emotions before doing the pupils if I'm absolutely sure I know where I want the pupils to go before hand):
And now for the most difficult part of the head, his ear
The reason I say this is the most difficult part to draw is because I often end up making the ear (or both ears if I'm drawing Super Sheep from the front) slightly different shapes and sizes when I don't intend to, thus leading to inconsistent results on that front (luckily, I think I might be getting better at it, as I'm not having to undo and redraw the ear as many times as I used to)
And now for that little woolly body of his
Once I finish drawing the head, I like to move on to making Super Sheep's (or any character I draw for that matter) body since at that point, I can use the head as a reference point for the proportions of the body (plus I find it much easier to draw the body after the head rather than doing the head after the body, although that's just because I've been doing it using he "head first" method for a lot longer), sometime the body can actually take a few tries to get right, meaning it can take quite a few undos before I draw one I'm happy with.
This time, I think I'll draw his legs first
The next part of the process depends on how I'm feeling when I draw the characters, as really the legs and arms could be drawn in an interchangeable order to me since at that point I can just use their relative position from the body as a reference for where they should go anyway, but I was in the mood to draw his legs first, so that's what I'm doing here.
Afterwards, it's time to draw the arms
The approach I like to take when drawing the arms these days (in most cases anyway) is actually to draw the hands first because I think doing it this way is much easier than doing the arms first (which is what I used to do whenever I'd draw my characters)
It's cleaning time
After I finish drawing everything, I usually move on to a step called the "clean up" phase, which is basically where I erase any unwanted lines in order to make the picture look better and get it ready to be coloured in via the fill tool
Hey, speaking of the fill tool
Once the clean up phase is finished, it's time to move on to the final step in my process, which is to colour the image in using the fill tool and clicking the appropriate spot with the correct colours.
And boom, one instant blue cartoon sheep at your service
Right away when you compare this new 2D Super Sheep to the 3D Super Sheep, you may have noticed that this Super Sheep actually lacks the depth that the 3D Super Sheep has since, he's now a 2D character again. With this in mind, because of the fact that he's 2D, the animators only ever have to worry about drawing the character (as well as any object, environment and/or effect) from only the angle that the audience will see, meaning they're able to fudge reality more effectively than they can in 3D animation by doing things such as omitting certain features at certain angles or even changing other elements outright depending on the camera angle. (sort of like how I only give Super Sheep one ear unless he's facing directly towards or away from the audience and how I change the way Super Sheep's hair is flowing depending on which direction he's facing)
Another benefit to working in 2D rather than 3D is that you don't have to worry about drawing every single aspect of your characters in every single frame, as when certain parts of the character go off screen and/or disappear behind other parts of them, as far as the animators are concerned those parts can stop existing at that point:
This can save the animators plenty of time as well as plenty of ink and paint, especially back in the days when 2D animators required actual ink and paint in order to colour in their characters, in fact there were even entire departments dedicated to the production and management of said ink and paint:
The last version of Super Sheep I'll be drawing will be what he would look like if he were created for an anime rather than a western cartoon. Of course, you should bare in mind that characters such as Felix The Cat did appear in both western and Japanese cartoons while still retaining his classic design (so technically, whatever I end up making here is going to be rather redundant):
With this in mind, I'll be disregarding the existence of the original design for the most part (mainly because I want to keep the character as a blue sheep who wears a big yellow cape) and treating this as if it's the first time I'm ever drawing the character so that there are a few differences in the design. With this in mind, let's get this party started:
And already we have our first difference
Here, I've chosen to do the head first, but unlike my usual western work where I just draw the head as a big circle, here I'm actually attempting a more realistic head shape. (since in general, most anime characters tend to have a more realistic head shape thanks to having a little bit of a bone structure going on) This is actually proving to be quite difficult, so don't be surprised if by the next screen shot it suddenly looks different:
Right, that's it, I'm officially giving up on realism for this one
after experimenting with the eyes multiple times, I ended up not feeling happy with what I was making, so I decided to turn to my friends for help and they suggest that I give it a bit more of a cartoonier style, specifically citing the Chibi art style (which is where you draw the characters with really big heads and small bodies in order to get that "cutesy" look)
However, that doesn't mean I won't be making minor changes to the design as I go
In this case, I'll be doing things like giving Super Sheep's eyes an actual eye colour rather than making them black like I normally do (since I want this design to look slightly different from the normal Super Sheep for the sake of people being able to tell the difference between the two)
Now his wool looks a bit different
Here, I've decided to take a little bit of inspiration from Goku and have a few rogue strands of wool protruding from different spots on his head, but after consulting some of my friends about it once again, they ended up pointing me in a bit of a different direction:
Ok, now it's different again
So my friends ended up pointing out the existence of a guy named Mondo Owada from a game called Danganrompa (the only reason I knew of the game before learning more from friends is that it's that game with the half-white, half-black bear):
Here, we can see that instead of having the hair look like real hair, the artists have decided to make his hair look and feel more like wool (which is actually quite a clever approach considering what type of animal I'm depicting here)
With this in mind, I'm also going to be doing the same thing for the body since that too would also be quite woolly
FIVE FINGERS?! ON AN ANIMAL CHARACTER?! WHAT KIND OF BLASPHOMY IS THIS?!
The reason I'm choosing to give Super Sheep five fingers here is as a reference to the fact that I realised that Astro Boy has five fingers on each hand (which in hindsight is pretty obvious at even a passing glance, but I guess I was only realising it at that moment because I was paying a lot more attention to it), so it's more of a weird tribute to Astro Boy as a whole than anything else.
And now Super Sheep's got a neck
For those of you that were observant during the screen shot where I did Super Sheep's body, you may have noticed that Super Sheep has a neck now (because realistically speaking, lots of animals have necks), so now I've got to depict Super Sheep's cape as being tied around his neck rather than just hanging out of the top of his back like I would normally do (since the normal Super Sheep design doesn't have a neck)
It's cleaning time
And now I'm on to colouring the whole thing in
I've decided to make Super Sheep's eyes green in order to pay tribute to the Sonic The Hedgehog series (since Sonic does serve as a part of the inspiration for Super Sheep as a whole and the green eyes were a big point of contention in the Sonic fan base for a while)
Ok, and now I have a strange facsimile of Super Sheep to show for this
I'm going to be honest, looking back I think I may have gone wrong somewhere, as I don't think this drawing really captures the anime aesthetic I was going for, although my friends seem to see what I was going for, but still, as someone who doesn't watch too much anime, I still feel this design I made doesn't hit the mark as it doesn't naturally click as an anime character, it's almost as if a person from the west was trying desperately to capture the aesthetic regardless of the actual context behind what makes real anime characters so appealing in the first place. (oh, wait a minute) Two pieces of feedback my friends did end giving me in order to improve upon this design were that I could have made the limbs a little bit thicker since quite a lot of anime characters (especially the more cartoony looking characters like Astro Boy) tended to have much thicker limbs in general (in fact, feedback from my friends while I was making this design was actually part of what gave me the idea to abandon the more realistic head and eyes in the first place):
One of them also mentioned how I could have included an extra line on one of the hands near the thumb in order to add a little bit of extra depth to the hand without going super overboard with detail like I did on Super Sheep's wool. (yeah, let's just say that when turning existing characters like Sonic and Felix into an anime, there's a reason they don't mess with the character design too much)
Like I said at the beginning of this little research expedition, anime and 2D western animation are fundamentally one in the same in terms of the tools (those being either pencils, ink and paint or a computer depending on whether you're doing cel animation or digital animation respectively), but where the two differ is actually on a cultural level, as in Japan, animation is actually a lot more widely accepted as a medium for telling serious stories than it is over in the west where it's mainly viewed as "kids stuff" (and the 80s were no help in this regard either, as many western cartoons at that time existed mainly to sell toys to kids thanks to the deregulation of entertainment at the hands of former U.S president Ronald Regan):
Another difference between anime and western 2D animation is that while we've more or less relegated 2D animation to the small screen (because the grand majority of what we make is computer generated these days), Japan has actually continued to utilise 2D animation in even some of their more recent movies, with films such as "Mirai" (which I'm just finding out about now after googling modern anime films in order to find an example I could name) being released in Japanese theatres in 2018:
Another difference between anime and 2D western anime is that while for the most part the west is fairly content with playing by the rules for the most part (since a lot of them are created with the intention of bringing in massive profit margins), anime creators (especially in more recent years) have actually been experimenting with adding in computer generated elements in some of their shows much like what the west used to to with theatrically released 2D films of the 90s and mid 2000s (no, I'm not calling them the "noughties" because I think that sounds stupid) before abandoning the medium entirely because Disney and Dreamworks didn't make enough money off of films like Home on The Range and Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas to justify continuing with 2D moving forward (although we do get films like The Mitchells vs The Machines which actually puts 2D elements in a 3D film), but I think if they continued to experiment with this stuff beyond that point, we could get things like what we see in Dorohedoro and the 4th season of Attack On Titan where the CG can sometimes be mistaken for actual 2D animation (much like I did with Spider-Ham in the trailer for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse):
granted, there are still times where you can tell what's 3D and what's 2D just by looking at it if you have a trained eye (but I'm only able to tell the difference now because I've been made more aware of it in the first place thanks to my friends)
Of course, because the two are fundamentally the same it means a lot of what I said about western animation applies here but instead of ones and twos, a lot of anime is animated on threes and fours while occasionally switching to ones and twos, so I won't be repeating myself too much on that front.
With all that said and done, it's time to move on to the second piece of practical experimentation, which will involve...
Speed Lines/The Blur Effect That Happens When The Characters Are Doing Things Really Fast
What exactly am I talking about when I say speed lines? Well you see, it's an effect that's predominantly used in a lot of action scenes where whenever the characters are running, jumping or even falling down, the background will actually turn into what I can only describe as a stream of colour with motion lines spanning across the whole screen:
The main reasons that a lot of action heavy scenes will use speed lines boil down to budgetary restrictions, since there's only so much of the background that gets drawn at once that the only other way to make these shots work is if they loop the background like what shows such as The Flintstones would do whenever there's a travelling shot:
The other main reason it's done is because as much as this helps out with the budget, it also works to add in a little bit of extra flair to the scene, since it implies that the camera has to move so quickly that the entire background becomes nothing more than a nebulous blob like in this scene in Sonic X where Sonic is racing Sam Speed (actual name of the character) in his race car to see who's the fastest (I think we all know who the winner of that race would be):
Now that I've laid down the general ground work of what speed lines are in the context of anime, let's see how I ended up doing on that front.
So for this experiment (which I actually did before the day even began because I'm currently sick while writing this and I had nothing better to do), I wanted to see if I could recreate the speed line effect in a 3D environment like Dreams PS4/5. (since I already know that's what I want to use to make my Final Major Project)
In order to get the effect to move and animate in the way I wanted it to, I decided to go ahead and use Dreams' paint tools, which I've used in the past to make things such as everyone's mouths and even their eyes (specifically their pupils), in combination with the surface snap guide (because there's no way I'm going to be able to make it stick to the surface without creating small wrinkles here and there) to create a stroke of paint flecks that goes from one end of the default platform to the other, from there I would copy and paste that same stroke in order to make the rest of the effect where I would then use the tweak menu on all of them at once via the multi-select feature to actually get the paint effects moving. However, I figured that the effect I wanted to go for wouldn't work nearly as well I would hope if I had just one pure colour that ran through the whole thing, so I decided to actually utilise the colour wheel, specifically the part where you can actually mix different colours together, in order to create a custom colour that cycled between different shades of the same blue colour, although with the part that's supposed to represent the grass, tweaked the hue (meaning I changed what part of the colour spectrum it draws from, so now instead of blue, it's green) in order to make it green, however the variation of green shades here now reminds me of the chequered grass from Green Hill Zone:
Getting back on topic, I figured this would help make the effect a little bit more obvious. (personally I think this works quite well to that effect because it makes it obvious the character is moving quickly while not being super distracting in any meaningful way)
Afterwards I decided to animate Super Sheep running, but before we discuss that any further, I just want to address something about the model seen in this stream. For those of you that are particularly observant, you'll have noticed that Super Sheep's model looks slightly different than it did in the previous experiment. Well the reason for this is because in my spare time, I've been going in and trying to improve the models for some of my characters, particularly those in the Super Sheep line up as those characters are going to be part of "Super Sheep in Holly-weird Hijinks" (which if all goes well and I balance my time correctly, I should have it out by the time I'm about to head off to Edge Hill University to learn the professional tools and end up having to transition away from using Dreams PS4/5), I did this by giving them alternative outfits (and by making said outfits fully 3D modelled rather than just 2D textures) and even doing things like making Super Sheep's wool (by which I mean the wool on top of his head) separate from the rest of his head so that I could make it match the orientation of the camera like the mouth does. Now that that's been addressed, let's get back on track.
Animating Super Sheep's run was actually one of the most difficult bits of the entire process, not because of any actual difficulty of doing so, but because it was the part that took the most effort to do out of the entire process of making this experiment. (especially since I only animated a simple running loop)
Going back to the actual star of the show here (that being the speed line effects), I only did one side of it since I originally planned on the camera angle being more of a side on view but I didn't quite like the way it ended up looking (since it meant you couldn't see Super Sheep's pupils), so I changed the angle to be a bit more of a profile view. This of course meant I'd have to add in extra speed lines for the top, bottom and left of the screen, as well as a blue text box behind everything so that the white sky wouldn't be visible. Luckily, I could simply copy and paste the first set and then change them accordingly by making the "ground" set exclusively green and the "top sky" set exclusively blue. This was the case because earlier, I'd grouped the entire speed line, thus meaning that I would have to scope into that specific group in order to edit the colour scheme (thus meaning I don't have to worry about accidentally editing something else from outside that specific group)
I decided to make the sky white because I really liked how it made Super Sheep's colours pop out more than they did under a blue sky because with a bright blue sky, everything would have a slightly blue tint to it, thus washing it out a little bit even with the colour saturation turned all the way up (although that could be due to some of the settings I picked for the grade and effects gadget in general):
Blue Sky
White Sky (behind the backdrop)
After all was said and done, it was time to place the timeline and camera into the scene, let it roll for a few seconds, record the results and then put the whole thing together in the "editing" phase. (although one thing I wanted to have was a few additional 2D lines whizzing by to accentuate the sense of speed, although due to the settings I applied to the camera, it didn't end up coming through like I wanted it to) Looking back however, I don't think that a cuboid shape is really the best choice when it comes to the shape of the speed line tunnel, but I can always do further experimentation with that once the FMP starts, as right now I've got to make sure my PowerPoint doesn't exceed 8 minutes. (while at the same time making sure it doesn't last less that 5 minutes)
As for the editing phase, it was nothing too remarkable, as all I really did in terms of actually editing the whole thing was adding in a fade in and fade out and the theme song from a show called Mega Man NT Warriors: Axess (yes, that's spelt with 2 s' at the end), although the reason I added that song in was actually because it was used as the intro theme for the original version of a fan made web series called "Super Mario Bros Z", a fondly remembered series that uses video game sprites ripped from various Mario and Sonic games (mostly the Mario and Luigi games and the Sonic Advance games) in order to tell a story where our heroes (Mario, Luigi and Yoshi from the Mario series along with Sonic and Shadow from the Sonic series) must gather the Chaos Emeralds before Mecha Sonic from Sonic The Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles can use them to destroy the Mushroom Kingdom:
But other than that, there's not really much I can say other than the editing actually took me a lot less time than I thought it would, mainly because I thought more time had passed. (the process felt like it took half an hour when in reality it only ended up taking around 16 minutes)
Oh, By The Way I Got A Third Piece Of Feedback On My Super Sheep "Anime" Design
So while I was writing about what speed lines are, I ended up getting a third piece of feedback on that "anime" Super Sheep design I made 2 days ago from one of the people I've been turning to for help as of late, and I think it might shed a light as to where I may have gone wrong initially. While he said he thought it was great, he actually brought up how a lot of traditional anime has "more of a cel shaded look to it."
All names, profile pictures and other personal information is redacted for the sake of protecting people's identities
The reason I think this sheds a light on what may have gone horribly wrong with my "anime" Super Sheep is because of the lack of shading going on with him:
The guy that claims to be Super Sheep is back for more
You see, the reason I generally don't do shading very often in my 2D artwork is because a lot of the aesthetic is rooted in western cartoons, specifically television cartoons which generally don't have shading either (or at least, they use it quite minimally):
Meanwhile, anime works that are produced in Japan tend to have a little bit more shading going on (especially the newer stuff):
The reason I bring this up is because it's given me a bit of a clue that highlights where I went wrong when making that design, as while the amount of detail is fairly sound (if a bit overboard in places), it's the lack of shading that brings this specific design down, as while a minimal amount (or even a lack) of shading may be ok in a typical western cartoon, if I wanted to capture the style of anime, I probably would have needed to put a lot more effort into the shading like I did back in the fashion project (and maybe change the green eyes and mouth so that they're closer to the normal Super Sheep in the first place), since then I would have been able to better make Super Sheep into an anime style character. This segway's us nicely into the subject of...
Art-Styles and Aesthetics
The Art-Style of any given piece of media is responsible for dictating how things like the characters look, for example, something like Attack On Titan could be described as having a more detailed and realistic looking art-style:
Meanwhile, a show like Baby Felix and Friends would go for a more cartoony art style where the characters aren't anatomically accurate to real humans (or even real cats for that matter):
With that being said, why is it that one show can have lots of realistic shading while the other one can't? Well you see, that has something to do with a little thing called the aesthetics. The aesthetics of a given piece of media, while related to the art style, are actually a set of principals that artists will typically follow when creating a specific piece of media in order to make sure that their work lines up nicely with that specific piece of media on an artistic level. For example, in a show like Dorohedoro where characters such as Caiman are 3D characters being rendered in a 2D environment, the creators would have to make sure that the textures and shading on the model closely match that of the 2D characters so that he doesn't stick out like a sore thumb:
With this in mind, why is it important for media to even have specific aesthetic choices and art-styles in mind in the first place? Well you see, if you don't stick to a specific set of aesthetic choices or pick one art style for your work, then the whole thing would likely fall a part on an aesthetic level, and to demonstrate this, I'll be using Sonic Generations as an example of when aesthetics and art-style are adhered to and Garry's Mod as an example of what happens when art-styles and aesthetic choices clash:
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it's been a while since I used this graphic
Smash Bros references aside, let's get down to business:
here, we can see that the game Sonic Generations goes for a rather colourful aesthetic but keeps in some small elements of realism here and there as a nice bit of detailing in order to make the world feel more real. (I.E: stone pillars feeling like stone pillars and Green Hill Zone's trees retaining their original look but with more added detail on the trunk and even the leaves) With this in mind, Classic Sonic still fits in quite well within this game despite not being as detailed because he still sticks to the rules of the more colourful aesthetic the rest of the game uses, plus it allows Classic Sonic to pop out from the background enough for people to take note of him first rather than the background since he and his more modern counterpart are the central points of focus in the game. (since you play as both Sonics throughout)
With this in mind, I now want to compare this aesthetic to another game called Half Life 2. (I know I said I'd be using Garry's Mod next but stick with me, this is going somewhere):
Here, we can already tell just by looking at it that Half-Life 2 looks very different from Sonic Generations because unlike Sonic Generations which strikes a balance between realism and cartoony (since Sonic Generations is meant for both younger players and long time Sonic fans such as myself), Half-Life goes all in on the realism angle, as things such as Gordon Freeman's (the guy shooting the combine's helicopter in this screenshot) hands, the SMG (sub-machine gun) he's holding and even the hills and trees in the background look more like something you'd find in our world than Sonic's brown chequered boarded cliffs hills and geometric palm trees. With this in mind, what happens when we put Classic Sonic's character model into the Half-Life map using Garry's Mod?:
Well, that's where things get a little bit weird (don't mind the lack of finger posing or even Alyx Vance's mouth, I was trying to get this done quickly to illustrate the point)
Yeah, all of a sudden, the big bright blue cartoon hedgehog looks very much out of place in this more realistic environment. The reason for this is because I simply spawned the model for Classic Sonic from Sonic Generations, which I downloaded off of the Steam Workshop for Garry's Mod (since that's where a lot of mods for the game can be found), into a part of the Canal map where you fight that combine Helicopter in Half-Life 2 without any regard as to whether or not Classic Sonic was even meant to be there in the first place, but the aesthetic clashing doesn't stop with just putting cartoon characters into realistic environments:
Not by a long shot (before you read any further, see if you can guess which of these characters actually belongs here based on the art-style alone)
Here, we can see a bunch of gaming icons (and Strong Bad from the Homestar Runner series) all standing in the "2Fort" map from a game called Team Fortress 2, which goes for a more cartoony aesthetic than Sonic Generations. With this in mind, you'd think Classic Sonic would finally fit into place right? Well you're wrong, as here in this image we have (from left to right) a bean person from the game Fall Guys: Ultimate Knock Out, Mario from the Super Mario series, Alyx Vance from the Half-Life series, the Heavy Weapons Guy from Team Fortress 2, Strong Bad from The Homestar Runner series (who's model was ripped from the Tell-tale games based on the series), Sora from the Kingdom Hears series (specifically the one from Kingdom Hearts 2) and Steve from Minecraft, and on top of that, there's also me standing there with the Physics Gun (which by default looks exactly like the Super Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2) overseeing the whole mess.
Out of all the elements we see here, the only character amongst this particular lot that looks like he belongs here is actually the Heavy Weapons Guy, since he perfectly matches the cartoony aesthetic of Team Fortress 2 (due to him actually being from that game) while other characters such as Classic Sonic, Alyx Vance and especially Strong Bad (mainly due to the "Cel Shaded" look he has going on) and Minecraft Steve (since he's so blocky) end up clashing with each other and Team Fortress 2's visual style (since Heavy's visual design goes for a more 20th century commercial illustration look look while Classic Sonic's is inspired by characters such as Felix The Cat)
Of course, there actually are some cases where visual styles clashing with each other is actually part of the point, since at that point the main characters not belonging in their current setting can make the audience feel just as alienated as the characters. A brilliant example of this is New Donk City from the game Super Mario Odyssey:
Of course, part of the reason that the more realistic humans in New Donk City are able to clash with Mario, who is ostensibly the same species as them yet looks more cartoonish than they do, is because while this is a clash of art styles, it technically still follows the rules of Mario Odyssey's aesthetic because much like Sonic Generations, the game's cartoonier art style is also complemented with added details that make it look more realistic than most other Mario games, with the exception of the Luncheon Kingdom where all the food is very polygonal in nature, yet it still works because they made sure not to add in too much detail into Mario so that even when he does look out of place, it's ok because he's just out of place enough to where it's jarring yet it doesn't break the aesthetic.
With that, I think I'll end this tangent here because if I go on any further we'd be here all day and this research unit is supposed to be about anime, not video games or western cartoons. So without further ado, it's evaluation time.
The Evaluation
well folks, here we are again. The end point for the research where I look back on everything that I've done up until this point and talk about what I think went well and what could have been improved upon, but before we begin, I just have to say that this has been one heck of a roller coaster ride for me, as not only was I looking into a medium I was only passingly familiar with, but I also ended up drawing upon the knowledge of my friends for help in certain areas, as they ended up helping me discover Mappa Studio and Dorohedoro in the first place, which ended up helping me gain a proper frame of reference as to what modern anime is like so I have them to thank for pointing me in the right direction when I didn't even realise I needed it, and to think all that came from me realising that Astro Boy has five fingers and telling my friends about it.
But now that I've established what's going on here, let's get started by asking the big question.
Why Did You Choose Anime Over Western Cartoons?
Well, if I'm being honest with myself, as much as I enjoy western cartoons, I've already looked into those cartoons multiple times on this course and during Creative Media Level 2, so if my specialist study were to be on those cartoons again, I feel like I'd just be repeating myself when to comes to certain aspects such as the techniques used, and there's only so many times I can talk about Pixar or Walt Disney without repeating the same points over and over again.
Sure, I could have talked more about other studios such as Aardman, Cartoon Network, Illumination and many others on this theoretical go around, and doing so would have probably been much easier for me too (since I know a fair bit about those studios out of the gate), but would doing this even lead to me being able to work on a new IP that's not a direct clone of another cartoon, whether it be an existing show and/or one of my own? Probably not, and on that same token I don't want it to be a part of my already existing IP because I've already used Super Sheep for literally everything else this year except the Sandwich Shoot since the rules there didn't leave me any leeway to even include my characters in the mix. You could probably think of this like the "Jack's Lament" scene in The Nightmare Before Christmas where Jack longs for something new and different, except nowhere near as sad and take out the parts where he sings about being the best in his field. (and even the parts about being famous and being able to remove my head for that matter)
So How Was Looking Into The Subject Of Anime?
I'll be the first to admit that when I first started looking into this subject, I'd gone into it with the pre-conceived notion that the main differences between it and western cartoons was that anime had a more detailed art-style and all the characters were either magical girls who lead double lives or dudes with wildly colourful hair going on adventures in far off lands (although come to think of it, the fact that I've seen shows like Sonic X and Pokémon as a kid and have been aware of the existence of Baby Felix and Friends should have immediately prove me wrong on this front), but as I got deeper and deeper into my research (especially after my friends helped me discover Mappa Studio), more and more of what I ended up finding and talking about ended up shattering those pre-conceived notions entirely, as there ended up being a much wider variety of styles than I originally thought, with everything from shows about a guy who wants to stop being a CGI lizard man to a show about a younger version of a cartoon cat learning lessons with the help of himself as an adult (and yet they never touch upon the time paradox palooza that would cause despite explicitly saying that adult Felix is from the future) and even one about a friendship that blooms with students who like jazz music
With all this in mind, while I've known that on a fundamental level anime and western cartoons use a lot of the same tools (those being paper, pencils, ink, paint and now even computers), I now have much more of an understanding of where the actual differences between the two mediums lie, it's all rooted in the cultural differences between Japan and the west (specifically in how both view the medium of animation as a whole):
As for my actual research, I'd say I've finally gotten a bit more of a grip on timing everything out so that I'm not stuck on one part for too long, whether it be practitioners, experimentation or even statistical analysis. This is probably because I actually had a project management table for the research phase, which under normal circumstances I wouldn't have done since research would have been one part of a grander project (although with the way I'm structuring this as a prelude to my Final Major Project, I'll be able to copy and paste most of this for my FMP and skip a bulk of the research phase, thus allowing me to jumpstart production)
In terms of the actual contents, I feel like I did a fairly good job describing the differences between western cartoons and anime in terms of both aesthetics and demographic differences, as I decided to use Mickey Mouse and Goku (two of the most recognisable characters in their respective mediums) as a nice reference point as to what a typical western cartoon character and what a typical anime character looks like respectively, although getting a video of the Frieza fight scene from Dragon Ball Z ended up being a bit more difficult than I anticipated due in part to Toei's constant copyright claims (as I ended up finding out thanks to my friends telling me about it), so after replacing the video once, I just chose not to bother in the end, since any replacement video I get today will more than likely be gone tomorrow or even several hours from now unless it comes from Toei themselves. The reason I even did that was to compare it to the short known as "The Little Whirlwind" by Disney, although I originally chose to look at "Gone To Pieces" but then decided to replace it so that both pieces of animation could be on the same playing field, since both The Little Whirlwind and Dragon Ball Z were originally animated using traditional cel animation, where as Gone To Pieces was created using digital 2D animation.
When it came to the statistical side where I looked more into the demographics of anime as a whole, I would say I did a little bit better on finding more statistics than I did last time (even if both sets of statistics were technically based on the same study), but looking back, I think I could have made this part way better if I'd also found a similar study but for western cartoons rather than anime so that I could more directly compare the two mediums in terms of demographics. The closest I could find was related to the viewership of various TV networks such as Cartoon Network but even then, it didn't detail specific shows, just viewership of the network as a whole, so I once again chose to ignore it for the sake of keeping things fair. Speaking of the statistics I found for the anime side of things, there actually were a few twists and turns I didn't expect to find along the way, such as Frozen even being on this chart and beating the likes of Dragon Ball in terms of recognition percentage, although that one could be chocked up to the fact the study was done in Japan where the definition of anime is an abbreviation of the word "animeshon" (which itself is the Japanese word for "animation"), meaning stuff like Frozen and even Wallace and Gromit would have no problem counting as anime works, so really that particular turn was more of a cultural whiplash more than anything. (since I'm so used to the term "anime" referring exclusively to Japanese animation)
How Was Looking Into The Practitioners This Time Around?
When it came to looking into the practitioners who work on anime, I didn't fully know where to turn to at first, since I was coming at this from a fairly fresh angle. Sure, I might have known about people like Hayao Miazaki and studios such as Toei Animation, who I originally wanted to discuss as an excuse to talk about the intro cutscene for Sonic CD before discovering that Studio Junio actually helped them handle the animation for said cutscene, but that probably would have been low hanging fruit and the fact I couldn't get a lot of solid information on Studio Junio meant one of my potential excuses to talk about Sonic got dashed. I also considered looking into a studio called TMS entertainment, who animated Sonic X (because then I would have had another excuse to talk about Sonic), but eventually I landed on Studio Pierrot, who were the people behind the Sonic The Hedgehog OVA that got turned into a movie. (meaning I'd finally found a good enough excuse to talk about Sonic)
After I'd finished talking about Studio Pierrot, I ended up finding myself at the same crossroad I did before, and since I didn't want the entire thing to be me talking about different versions of Sonic (since that would probably get a bit repetitive even by my standards), originally I was considering looking at the likes of Hayao MIazaki (the man behind Spirited Away and Ponyo) or even Osamu Tezuka (the guy who created Astro Boy) at this point since I didn't know where else to turn to, but then I told my friends about the "stunning realization" that Astro Boy has five fingers on each hand, which then prompted them to introduce me to Mappa Studio (the people behind Dorohedoro and the fourth season of Attack On Titan), which ended up becoming really critical in helping me understand what more modern anime looks like. Of course, the main improvement I would make here is that I'd actually go ahead and talk about a third practitioner (preferably an individual since the two practitioners I did end up looking at were companies) since earlier I did promise that I would do so and I never got around to it because of time constraints (so for as much as I'm getting the hang of making sure I get everything done within each week, there still ended up being a ton of information I had to just leave off the table)
How Was Getting Help From My Friends, And Why Now?
I'll be the first to say that for as strange as it was at first (especially since it came as a result of me realising Astro Boy has five fingers on each hand), it was actually quite nice to have people who are experts in terms of the subject matter I could turn to for help if I didn't understand a particular element, I.E: the context behind the characters in Dorohedoro when I was analysing the scene with the meat pies in episode 8.
It also helped to have my friends assist me by influencing the direction I ended up taking when drawing the anime style Super Sheep by suggesting I try and keep it more cartoony rather than realistic like I originally tried to do (one of them even gave me reference images to pull inspiration from):
Looking back at this image in combination with the fact that Baby Felix, Sonic from the Sonic OVA and Goku exist and all have black eyes, I'm now starting to think maybe I should have just kept the anime Super Sheep's eyes black too
Looking back at the results of my anime Super Sheep, while I wouldn't call it my best work, I know that it probably would have been a lot worse if I'd gone with the more realistic direction I wanted to originally before asking my friends for guidance, especially since I have next to no experience with realism.
How Was The Experimentation Phase?
Speaking of the experimentation, I actually enjoyed what little I ended up doing in the end, as I was able use Super Sheep in order to discuss some of the foundational differences between 3D animation, western 2D animation and Japanese 2D animation after using said mediums to draw/pose Super Sheep himself, although for all three I chose to keep the same pose in order to make the comparison much easier in the PowerPoint Presentation I've been putting together at the same time:
When comparing different mediums of animation, it can help to have the same character doing the same pose in all the mediums you intend to compare so that the differences can shine through
The 2D Super Sheeps were simple enough to make since I simply drew them both in PIxlr like I normally do when drawing the character, but the 3D Super Sheep ended up being a little bit more complicated (although not necessarily difficult) because once I finished posing him I had to take a picture of the screen in front of a pink screen so that I could then take that picture into Pixlr and have an easier time making it transparent like all my 2D work, although if you look closely at the outline you can still see bits of pink since I wanted to get this done quickly for the sake of the experiment and it was my first time doing such a thing in the first place.
The main point of improvement here is definitely with the "anime" Super Sheep, because for as detailed as he is (especially with the wool), the lack of shading in combination with the changes I made to the character design in an attempt to make him more anime-like (mainly making the eyes green and moving the mouth to the middle rather than to the side) ended up causing this design to not work out as well as I would have liked, although with that being said, I can take what I've learned here and use it to make sure the character designs of whatever I end up deciding to make as the new IP don't fall into those very same pitfalls.
As for the "speed line" experiment, I feel like that one was actually a rousing success, as I managed to more or less achieve the desired effect quite quickly by using Dreams' paint tools and I even got to try mixing various shades together to make the movement of the "background" more obvious. In fact, I'm so proud of how this turned out that I'm starting to wonder why I didn't just create a looping background using the paint tools back in Captain Cartridge and Friends in Operation Compact Disc, as that way I wouldn't have to adjust the camera in order to hide the fact the characters were actually stationary as much since the doors would be hidden by the blurry backdrop, although in this particular experiment I did end up having to improvise with a different camera angle after finding that I couldn't see Super Sheep's pupils from the side (yeah, that's one of the problems with working in 3D, certain features of the characters stop being easy to see at certain angles unless you're character models are heavily stylised) but other than that, I didn't run into any real issues.
The PowerPoint Presentation
Ok, I may not have mentioned much about the coinciding PowerPoint presentation since much of it is based on what I've been doing in this blog, but I've been working on it more or less at the same time as I've been working on this big ol' piece of research. With this in mind, making this was surprisingly easy since all I was really doing for most of it was slapping a bunch of images on a few slides while adding a bunch of both western and anime characters for the sake of comparing the two styles while also having characters who have appeared in both anime and western cartoons (mainly Mario, Sonic and the PowerPuff Girls) in order to let others compare the differences between them (with Felix The Cat in the middle because aside from a change in his finger count, he looks more or less the same across both styles of animation):
Originally I wanted to compare Sonic from the Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog with Sonic from Sonic X but I felt that it would be better to compare the two classic Sonics since having modern Sonic in the picture wouldn't be fair (especially since Sonic Generations classifies both designs as being past and present respectively)
Personally I quite like the way this PowerPoint looks as a whole, But I can't really comment on the presentation itself because it hasn't happened yet so I'll have to make an update after the fact.
So How Was My Presentation?
Ok, so I'm back from my holiday, to make a long story short I had a great time even though as a result I never got the chance to actually rehearse my presentation in the end since I also ended up in France near the end. (the storm caused my flight to divert right as we were coming into land and I had to spend the night in France)
Now that that's out of the way, how did I actually do when presenting my presentation? Well the lack of any actual rehearsal phase ended up leading to the whole thing turning into a big disaster, as I ended up stuttering the whole time like I was suddenly turning into Porky pig and since I never got to refine my points because of the lack of rehearsal I ended up going well beyond the five to eight minute window meaning I've managed to screw the whole thing up right at the finish line and the fact I ended up going first probably didn't help matters. (although my friends were very supportive about it) Maybe if I had a little bit of time to rehearse the whole thing (and perhaps if I went a little bit later) maybe I could have at least cut the whole thing down to around eight minutes although with how little time I would have ended up with to come up with a new way to make the whole thing flow naturally (what with these presentations being done over the course of this week and the fact I've got to actually start my final major project), I probably wouldn't have been able to improve much on the stuttering (so it would still have come off like Porky Pig was presenting the whole thing):
This download button is for the version I presented to the class
Now that this unit is finished, it's time for me to actually start my Final Major Project at long last (although things have changed ever so slightly since the last time I was at this point, so I may have to adjust my plan of attack)
In Conclusion
While doing this unit may have started out quite tough because I didn't have much of an understanding of the medium but after getting help from my friends who actually know what they're talking about when it comes to anime, things certainly got a lot easier from there, so if I learned anything from doing this, it's that it's OK to ask others for help when you don't understand something fully, as you might end up getting insight into parts of the subject matter you may not have considered when doing everything on your own, as I've often done in the past. (maybe if I thought to ask for help earlier in the course, I could maybe have avoided the "Wile E. Coyote" incident where I confused a cartoon from the 1990s with a cartoon from the 1940s)
With this in mind, I think this unit has helped me gain more of an appreciation for anime as an art form and may even consider checking some of this stuff out once I get a chance in the future.
But now that this little research unit is more or less over with me being only one day away from the deadline (the closest I've ever been thus far), I can't wait to get started on my Final Major Project, although because I'll be on holiday for most of the half term so I won't be able to get as much of a head-start as I would like, meaning I'll probably be doomed if I don't get started fast. (luckily this bit of work can be copied and pasted into my FMP in order to skip much of the research phase. (so that'll be a nice offset I suppose)
Alright, The Copy Pasted Part Is Finally Over
My goodness did that take a lot longer than I expected it to, not to mention it was the most boring part of the entire process since literally all I was doing was copying and pasting most of the research I'd already done (with the exception of the original project management updates since those won't be as relevant here) into this very website (and I thought I would never find anything worse than looking into demographic statistics or creating shot lists), as an offset however, it did save me from repeating the exact same information in a different and probably more abridged format (since this part is once again a smaller part of a larger project), so there's that I suppose. To be honest, I never thought I would ever see the day where this sort of thing would even be ok, as usually copying and pasting stuff from other websites blindly like this is frowned upon, and may even get you in trouble with the teacher, but not only does it seem to be above board this time around, but it's actively encouraged, since the specialist study is supposed to act as a prelude to the FMP. (likely so that we can get to the more practical stuff faster, which I do appreciate since animating the cartoon is usually my favourite part anyway) With that being said however, I sincerely hope I don't ever find myself in this situation ever again, because even after getting the "all clear" from my tutors to do this multiple times, it still didn't feel right to me. (probably because I'm hard wired to want to do original stuff now)
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The one nice thing I do have to say about all this is that because this isn't a blog post anymore, I was able to go back and get higher quality versions of many of the images I used originally (since Wix doesn't seem to be as stringent of memory used across an entire website as they are with memory used in a single blog post) and because on a website I can place images where ever I want on the page, I could have comparison images and videos side by side rather than on top of one another, so that's something positive I can take away from this.
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But now that the nightmare of copying and pasting my previous work is finally over, I can finally move on to doing research that is actually new while also using it to amend what I did previously, meaning I might only end up looking into one or two new practitioners this time around due to the other two having already been covered by the stuff I did in unit 12. (so think of this as the "Sonic and Knuckles" to unit 12's "Sonic The Hedgehog 3") But first...
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update
Oh boy, that copy paste job took a lot longer than I expected it to, most likely due to the fact that I'd also put in a lot of pictures in that specialist study blog and the approach I ended up taking meant once I came to the end of a piece of text, I'd have to go back, click on the image to go straight to the source (which luckily I'd recorded during that particular unit), save a higher quality version of the image and then manually upload said image to the website so that I could add it into the page. The reason for that fairly long winded approach is because when working on a website, you can't just copy and paste images straight onto the page like you can when doing a blog post, so that alone may have bumped up how long this particular task took to do (it also doesn't help that I also had to copy over the little annotations below each image separately in order to avoid making every single word a link to where I got a particular image), but due to the way I chose to approach it, I was able to make improvements to the spelling of certain words (I.E: in the original, I mispelt the word "Species" as "Spices", so I was able to fix it here) and even making the parts where I compare two things easier for the reader to see, since now both elements are side by side rather than on top of the other.
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Although I enjoyed being able to go back and make minor amendments to what I'd copied and pasted over previously, I don't really want to find myself in a situation like that again, as it takes away a lot of the discover ability that usually comes with doing research on stuff like this. Now that that's been taken care of, it's time to get on with some actually new research
The Actually New Research Done Exclusively For This Project
Hayao Miyazaki
According to a book called "Hayao Miyazaki: Exploring The Early Work of Japan's Greatest Animator", which I discovered on a website called The International Institute for Asian Studies, Hayao Miyazaki was born in the year 1941 to a family that happened to own a factory where they would make airplane-rudders. This factory would prove to be quite prosperous, especially during world war two and afterwards since Japan's military needed airplanes fast and even after their surrender, the people of Japan still needed to fly from country to country in order to trade goods with the rest of the world and even go on holidays, because of this, Mr. Miyazaki would end up developing a passion for flight and airplanes. (which would be evident in pretty much all of his films) One day, in the year 1958 when he was at the age of 17 years old, Hayao Miyazaki would see a rather historical animated film called "Hakujaden" (known as Legend of the White Serpent and even Panda and the Magic Serpent in english), which from what I could gather after watching a review of the film by a guy named STEVEM (yes, that is in all caps) for his "TOEI MONTH" series, this particular film is known for being the first ever full colour anime film to exist and (as you can probably guess from the fact that the video I watched was part of a "TOEI MONTH" series, it was actually made by Toei Animation, the same people who would later go on to work on Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball and many other popular anime works over the next several decades.
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Another particularly big influence that would manifest in a lot of his work (at least according to the book) was the fact that during his childhood, his mother ended up falling ill with spinal tuberculosis, thus causing the threat of becoming an orphan to become a very real one. (this would end up manifesting in the character of "Yasuko Kusakabe" from the film "My Neighbour Totoro", as according to the Ghibli Wiki, she also suffers from the very same disease)
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While Mr Miyazaki was growing up, Japan's manga industry was steadily gaining traction thanks to the likes of Osamu Tezuka leading the charge with works such as Shin Takarajima (or New Treasure Island in english) selling around 400,000 copies and helping to eventually springboard the creation of Astro Boy in the early 60s, which was after Mr Miyazaki saw Legend of the White Serpent and decided he wanted a career in the animation field.
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Despite this, he started out by trying to draw his own manga at around the age of 18 (one year after he watched "Legend of the White Serpent"), but he ended up with a spike of anxiety after people started comparing his style to that of Osamu Tezuka. These comparisons caused Mr Miyazaki to collect all his initial sketches and burned them to a crisp, never to be recovered again. (personally, I think that's a bit of an extreme reaction to finding out your work is inspired by someone else, but I'm not entirely sure how these sorts of things work in Japan so maybe what he did WAS justified) After that was all said and done, Miyazaki would decide to try and shake off Tezuka's influence by finding alternative sources to take inspiration from so that he could develop his own style that would be distinct from that of Mr. Tezuka's work. This would eventually lead him to find inspiration from a guy named Tetsuji Fukushima, another fellow manga artist who was rather successful in the 1950s with works such as Sabaku no Mao (or Devil of the Desert in english), which was his flagship title (the plot is a grand adventure set in the modern world but with a little bit of an "Arabian Nights" flavour to spice things up) but who isn't as well known today. While Fukushima found a lot of inspiration from western media like Tezuka, Mr Fukushima chose to take inspiration from some of the more serious works from the west, baring more of a resemblance to the works of a guy named Milton Caniff (who also seemed to have a more realistic style):
On top of this, Miyazaki was also inspired by the work of The Fleisher Brothers, although the inspiration here leans more towards the themes and essence rather than the art-style (this was probably related to the fact that Mr. Miyazaki was trying to avoid getting compared to Mr Tezuka in terms of his work)
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Moving forward to the early 60s (because if I don't I'll be here all day describing stuff I don't fully understand and I won't end up getting this done on time otherwise), after a brief period of training, Miyazaki got right to work as an animator for Toei, where he would work throughout the decade as an animator on shows and films such as Okami Shonen Ken (or Wolf Boy Ken in english) and Wan Wan Chushingura (known in english as Doggie March) in 1963, Gariba ni Uchu Ryoko (also known as both Gulliver's Space Travels and eventually, Gulliver's Travels Beyond The Moon in english), which apparenately turned heads in the studio in 1964 and even Mahotsukai Sari (aka, Sally the Witch in english) in 1966. Most of the time he was an inbetween animator for said productions but when it came to Gulliver's Travel's Beyond The Moon in particular, he and the rest of the team would give the film a very stylised look which at the time was considered very experimental (remember, the medium of anime as a while would still be in it's infancy at this point in time:
Because of this however, the film didn't end up doing so hot in the west, much like a lot of Toei's other works at the time because they couldn't seem to scratch the same itch that a lot of Tezuka's work such as Astro Boy and Kimba The White Lion could, not only that but some of the anime that Mr Miyazaki ended up working on were actually adaptations of manga made by none other than Mr Tezuka himself, meaning that Tezuka was, as the hip young kids of today would say, "totally owning" Miyazaki in this little rivalry the two had going on at the time.
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However, the tables would eventually turn for Ol' Miyazaki, as he eventually leave Toei in 1971 and 8 years later, in 1979, he would go on to get his directorial debut with a film called Lupin III Castle of Cagliostro (By "Lupin III, I mean Lupin The Third, not "Lupin 3") by a company called Tokyo Movie Shinsha (who would later be better known as TMS entertainment, the very same company that made Sonic X):
The film itself wasn't a massive box office success according to the Ghibli Wiki, but the film would eventually gain more of a steady following thanks to it's numerous re-releases and the fact that Mr Miyazaki directed the film since by that point, Studio Ghibli would already exist and Mr Miyazaki would become Japan's answer to Walt Disney, so much so that the film is credited by Monkey Punch, Lupin II's original creator, as being the very thing that got 95% percent of English fans into the Lupin III series in the first place.
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Speaking of Studio Ghibli (and also skipping quite a bit of history for the sake of brevity and being able to get to the analysis part faster, thus increasing my chances of getting this part finished on time), according to Tokyo Treat (which is funny because apparently they deliver snacks monthly using a subscription based model), Studio Ghibli was formed in the year 1985 by Mr Miyazaki with the help of two other guys named Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, and the name was heavily inspired by both the Arabic name for "hot Sahara wind" (thus communicating the idea that they wanted to give more wind to the anime industry) and an Italian war plane (thus meaning Mr Miyazaki's love of planes got to strike again) and once they released their first film one year, which was called Laputa: Castle in the Sky, the rest would end up being history (especially since this recap took way too long to put together and now I want to get on to the analysis before this week is done so that I can do more experiments next week):
Of course, much like my analysis of Dorohedoro from unit 12, I'll be going into this one from a more or less fresh perspective, I say "more or less" because unlike Mappa Studio, I actually knew of Mr Miyazaki and his work over at Studio Ghibli before doing this, but that knowledge probably won't be of much help since I've only seen brief clips from some of the films, a few trailers and the Totoro cameo in Toy Story 3:
With this in mind, I think I'll look at a clip from the film "Spirited Away" since that's one of the more famous ones of the bunch, although because I don't actually know any scenes I'll have to go ahead and get a few suggestions from my friends on the matter (the same people I turned to for help back in unit 12) since they're more likely to have even seen the film in the first place.
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After consulting with my friends about what scene would be a good fit to look at, we ended up landing on the scene where the main character (after reading the title, I'm going to assume that her name is Chihiro) and the character of "No-Face", the shadowy guy who lacks a proper face and wears a mask, are at dinner with another character named Zeniba (who's the old witch lady who has an evil twin sister) in hopes of getting her help to turn Chihiro's parents and another character named Haku back into humans because they got transformed into pig people:
One of the first things you may notice about this scene is that much like the meat pie scene from Dorohedoro, things are going at a relatively slow and relaxed pace as the characters are sitting around discussing some of the characters that Chihiro has met earlier in the story, mainly Zeniba's twin sister Yubaba (who my friends tell me isn't the villain outright but she is the main antagonistic force in the plot) and how she's a rather "obnoxious" person due to how "tacky her home is" (which tells me that this scene at least takes place after Yubaba is already an established character in the plot)
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The reason I think Miyazaki and his team have Zeniba state things the audience might already know at this point is because it allows the film to refresh the audience (specifically those that may have missed out on Yubaba's initial introduction due to having gone the toilet during that scene in the theatrical release) on who the character of Yubaba is and what it is she did to Chihiro's parents while also letting those that didn't miss out due to toilet related reasons learn a little bit more about said character while also giving them a clever bit of insight into Zeniba's more caring and hospitable nature when compared to her physically identical yet mentally opposed sister (since Zeniba apologises to Chihiro for what Yubaba did to her parents):
Much like the meat pie scene from Dorohedoro, we can see a much more liberal version of the same rule of screen direction being employed so that the audience don't end up getting confused as to where the characters reside on screen (meaning that when Zeniba is on the right side of the screen in the first shot she's in, when the camera cuts to the next shot, they'll try and get the camera re-angled so that she stays on the right side of the screen (even though the only thing you can see in this shot is Zeniba's nose)
Unlike Dorohedoro however, the food isn't actually a point of focus for this scene, as the main purpose is to have Chihiro ask Zeniba to change her parents and Haku back into human beings, only to get told that there's nothing Zeniba can do to help, meaning Chihiro and No-Face are pretty much on their own for the rest of this adventure, but she does tell Chihiro that her memory of those people might be the key to restoring them back to their previous form.
Another point that makes this particular scene different from the meat pie scene from Dorohedoro is the fact that once the idea of memories being able to bring back a person's previous form is introduced, they cut to Zeniba and No-Face sewing after re-establishing the house. (I say "re-establishing" under the assumption the house was already established before the clip we found even began) It's at this point that the film's score (which is the instrumental music made specifically for the film that plays in the background throughout) begins to kick in as a means to enhance the relaxed yet somewhat sombre tone of the scene, the reason I bring up the score now is because the it was actually absent earlier, since Miyazaki and his team felt it likely would have been a distraction from the focus of the scene, but now that the main character is going through an emotional moment, the music can help the audience better relate to the character on an emotional level.
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This scene also demonstrates a good example of characterisation through both dialogue and actions at the exact same time, as while No-Face's softer side is firmly established with the fact he's being very careful when using the thread spinner (thus demonstrating characterisation through action) while Zeniba's demonstration of characterisation comes to the forefront when she turns towards No-Face and asks him "No-Face, where did you learn to spin thread? You're really good at this", thus establishing not only that she's not really afraid of No-Face (who if I remember what I learnt from a random YouTube video I watched ages ago correctly, is a monster who wants to help others but his greedy side sometimes gets the best of him), but it also establishes how surprised she is at just how good No-Face seems to be at thread spinning (thus demonstrating characterisation through carefully chosen dialogue)
A little bit later, when Zeniba sees that Chihiro is upset about not being able to remember anything about her parents or Haku (I'm going to assume Yubaba might have had something to do with this earlier in the film because I haven't seen it and my friends haven't seen the film in a good while), Zeniba decides to give our hero a special purple hair-band "made from The thread [her] friends wove" (probably meaning either the spirits of her parents and Haku and/or even Zeniba, No-Face and the two animal characters I've neglected to mention thus far)
Speaking of the animal characters (whose names I don't actually know on account of having never seen them before), while they don't get a lot of screen time within this scene, the little screen time they do get, especially during the close ups of the thread spinner, is actually used to demonstrate a neat animation technique that often gets employed whenever things are moving really quickly, as here the bird's legs and the wheel's rims (at least that's what I think those inner pillars on the wheel might be called) are actually represented as smear frames. The reason that smear frames are whenever things are going super fast in any 2D work (or stylised CG films like Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse) is because it can be used to simulate motion blur, the reason the animators don't just draw the wheel spinning and then speed up the animation is because in a stroke of irony, speeding up a full animation would actually look a lot slower, even if it's sped up, when compared just smearing certain parts on specific frames:
Overall, while I still don't have a lot of context as to what exactly is going on in the film as a whole, I actually do quite like this scene because not only is does it provide the audience with a break from the action that was likely occurring before, but due to some careful consideration of dialogue choices and the fact the scene seems to act as a bit of a re-cap as to some of the things that have already happened (granted, I'm not sure if this was done intentionally or not, but I do find it refreshing that a scene like that is willing to even do this considering I'm still a bit of a newcomer in the field of anime), it actually left me with a little bit more of an understanding as to what the film is all about in the literal sense, it's the story of a girl wants to help her parents and someone she knows but hasn't seen in a long time after they get turned into pig people by a witch (granted I don't know all the nuances as to why any of this happened but I now know that it does)
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With that being said, because this scene served as a plot synopsis for me and because the clip I found ends abruptly due to being uploaded by HBO Max of all channels (not to mention this accidental synopsis is coming from Zeniba's point of view), I'm actually quite intrigued since now I'm left wanting more, so I think I'll give Spirited Away a whirl someday. (either after this project is done or in my spare time during the project because my friends have told me it's on Netflix of all places)
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Now that I've technically managed to look at three anime practitioners (even if the other two were technically copied and pasted from my unit 12 work), it's time for me to start doing a little bit of primary research of my own. This part will mostly consist of me doing experiments in order to see if I can pull off certain effects (I.E: making the movements intentionally choppier, mixing that in with smoother characters and even experimenting with potential colour schemes for a theoretical "fully coloured" version of Ruff Bup) but I may also throw in a survey in order to see if people would even want a fully coloured Ruff Bup in the first place and after I've done all that I'll get around to designing the main character, although I forgot to put the actual character design phase on the project management chart itself. (meaning I'll have to go back and add that in)
Experiment 1: An Attempt At Doing Choppy Animation
For this experiment, I wanted to see if I could capture the slightly choppy movements that a lot of anime has as a result of being animated mostly on threes and fours instead of ones and twos like most western cartoons. The reason for this is because if I want my anime inspired work to feel more authentic despite being in full 3D and the fact that it literally cannot qualify as anime under the second definition due to it not being made in Japan, then I'm going to need to have the main character look and move like a proper anime character as much as possible.
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With that being said, I am using Dreams to do this experiment, and as I learned when trying to do a similar effect while working on my Super Sheep game that didn't make it past the early stages before being put on the back burner indefinitely, this effect is a lot trickier to pull of in Dreams than I'd initially realised since Dreams likes to slightly smooth everything out even if there's no actual tweening going on (likely due to how it actually takes an extra frame or two to get everything into position, especially with puppets), while that might be great for making smoother animation, the goal here was actually to make it look as choppy as possible, so this slight smoothing may prove to hinder things along the way if I don't figure out a solution soon.
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With that in mind, doing the choppier Super Sheep was actually quite a different experience than I was used to, since here I was actually creating every single pose manually (inclduing the inbetweens) instead of just creating a few key poses and relying on tweening for the in-betweens (almost like I was doing a bit of virtual stop motion), although since this was meant for a quick experiment and I only did a single second of animation, doing this didn't take me too much longer than doing it using my normal method, although I do feel the results could very much be improved since the engine Dreams uses (that being the custom made BubbleBath Engine) still managed to make it look smoother than I'd intended it to be (although this could be due to some of the settings I set on the original Super Sheep model, I'll have to try again with a fresh puppet to make sure though)
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After I did the choppier version, I decided to then clone the Super Sheep model after grouping it with the timeline (since then I could just edit the copied timeline to add in the tweening to the clone without accidentally affecting the original) and I've got to say, I really like how that one ended up turning out because in my personal opinion, it ended up coming out even better than if I'd done the smooth version first and then made the choppy version later (probably because there were a few more key poses this time around as a direct result of the fact I deleted some of the original inbetweens and even added an ease in and out transition between the first two key poses), and I just decided to add in the smoother Super Sheep as both a point of direct comparison and for the heck of it, so that'll certainly be something to keep in mind when I'm actually animating the main short.
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I did decide to see if simply removing dynamic physics from each individual part of the choppy Super Sheep model would fix this but then the model started breaking so I decided to abort the mission entirely, though perhaps that'll be something to keep in mind when I try again with a fresh puppet where I can remove both the physics and collision detection before-hand
I Finally Found The Real Culprit!
Remember earlier today when I said that Dreams has a tendency to smooth out particularly choppy animations for Puppets in particular? Well throw all that away because as it turns out, that's actually a falsehood. Why the sudden revelation? Well after the football match was finished, I was able to go back onto the TV again, so after a few quick rounds of Super Smash Bros Ultimate, I decided "hey I've suddenly got time, why don't I take another crack at the choppy animation experiment with a fresh puppet this time", so I did just that and ended up finding out something bigger than I could have anticipated, something that upends something I thought I knew about Dreams PS4/5 and may even diminish any and all previous achievements, but before I can reveal this bomb-shell of knowledge, I first need to give a bit of context as to what I actually did:
For this particular experiment, I wanted to test whether or not removing dynamic physics would actually do anything to negate the smoothing problem I've not long been having since this problem only came up a few hours ago, although I did bump into the same issue when working on the defunct Super Sheep game before making Super Sheep in Convention F-3 back in 2020, so technically this problem goes back two or three years but I'm not counting that here because I couldn't solve it the first time around. Putting all that to one side, when I made a small piece of the animation and did a test after disabling dynamic physics on every part of the puppet, I found that the smoothing was rather persistent so that meant the physics engine wasn't to blame for this one.
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But if it wasn't the physics engine that did this, then what was causing this in the first place? well, after fiddling around with many of the puppet's settings (everything from making all the pieces effectively weigh 0 kilograms to disabling the collision detection), I eventually figured out the real culprit behind this, because as it turns out, it was actually the puppet's "Springiness" slider that was causing all this, not the BubbleBath engine that Dreams itself runs on! Figuring this out was so satisfying because not only was I able to figure this out the same day it cropped up (which is not something I can really say for a lot of these problems that have and probably will crop up later), but now I was able to actually make the animation a little bit more authentic to Japanese animation as a whole by replicating that slight bit of choppiness that can be seen throughout many shows and movies from Dragon Ball to Spirited Away. (again, due to the fact anime is done on threes and fours most of the time) For as much excitement as this solution brought me however, it did come with a bit of a caveat (and this is where that "bomb-shell" comes in), because it also gave me a little bit of insight into another oddity I've just sort of ignored up until now.
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What do I mean by this? Well have you ever noticed that during my streams, whenever I would preview an animation cycle while time was paused, the animation would play out straight without any bounce to it but then the moment I press the "play time" button the animation was suddenly a bit more bouncy even though I never added any manually? Well as it turns out, it was all because of that "Springiness" slider this whole time, meaning I've finally got the ultimate proof that I still lack the talent others claim I have.
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Next time I think I'll experiment with getting a good run cycle going, I get the feeling that doing an intentionally choppy run cycle might be a bit more difficult than doing a smooth one with tweening inbetween the key poses, but as I showed you in the stream when I brought in my unfinished model of Sam from the Totally Spies series (the model was so unfinished I never got around to changing the name from "Captain Cartridge" to "Sam" since I used Cartridge as a base for her logic) and ran around with it, this isn't going to be my first rodeo.
We Interrupt This Program To Bring You Another Project Management Update
Ok, so last week ended up being quite an eventful week for me because not only did I get to look into Mr Miyazaki and a scene from Spirited Away, but because I managed to finish it slightly earlier than I expected to, mainly because I cut a few corners when talking about his history in order to get to the analysis faster (and because I also had a little bit of help from my friends when looking into Spirited Away since I haven't actually seen that film before aside from bits and pieces in video essays), I was also able to do a little bit of experimentation in order to see if I could re-create the choppier feel that most anime has due to being animated in threes and fours rather than ones and twos like a lot of western cartoons tend to be animated on.
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Doing that particular bit of experimentation turned out to be quite a roller coaster indeed, since at first I couldn't seem to get it to work because Dreams PS4/5 (the game I've been using throughout the duration of this course and a good chunk of level 2) seemed to enjoy smoothing out the animation ever so slightly, which is not good for what I'm trying to do here since the entire point is that the animation is supposed to be choppy, but coming back a few hours later after a football match was over, I decided to take another crack at it and ended up finding out why it was even happening in the first place, as it turns out the puppet's "springiness" was turned up ever so slightly (around 15% or so), so after turning it all the way down to 0, I ended up getting the effect I was going for to begin with, but it also ended up having ramifications I was not prepared for, as now I know why whenever I would preview my animations while pausing time they would move in a significantly worse way than if I'd started the flow of time (meaning I finally have undeniable proof that I still lack talent)
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With that being said, I may have to have a change of plans, as I'm away from my house right now and college don't have any PlayStations for me to utilise, so now instead I'll be experimenting with giving Ruff Bup colour
We Now Return You To Our Regularly Scheduled Program, Now With Added Colours
For this experiment, I'll be doing a new drawing of Ruff Bup the cartoon ant-dog thing but this time I'll be making two versions of it, one where he's black and white and one where he's coloured in, that way I can ask people which version they prefer and make the final decision on the matter because to be honest, I've been thinking about giving Ruff Bup a "proper" colour scheme for a while now and I figured this might be the perfect opportunity to try it out
Usually this is where I would go ahead and do a bunch of screen caps where I go into my usual process of how I draw my characters, but I think I want to save that for when I'm designing the new character (which will arguably be more important than what I'm doing here since that'll be a brand new character), so there may be less screen caps this time around.
Here, I've decided to go ahead and duplicate the drawing I did in order to save me from having to re-draw the whole thing all over again just to add in colour this time around
And just like that, we've got ourselves two Ruff Bups, one that's black and white like in his original cartoon and one that's got a new colour scheme (which may be subject to change if I do decide to go with the coloured version), I decided to make his gloves yellow because back in the 20s and 30s, whenever merchandise for characters like Mickey Mouse would be made, they would sometimes colour the characters gloves yellow for some reason (but not all the time, it's actually the same reason Cuphead has yellow gloves in the new Cuphead show on Netflix and in the results screen from the game)
With that being said, what do other people think?
Well so far, it seems to be a 50-50 split, as half of the people I asked seem to prefer colours while the other half seem to prefer the original black and white look. To be honest I didn't really know what to expect when making this, so these results are quite surprising to me. If my reflection here seems rather lacking in comparison with other stuff I've done, it's because I'm actually having a really difficult time putting it into words because I went in without any base expectations to use as a point of reference (since to me, this was an excuse to see if adding colour to Ruff Bup would even be a good idea to begin with) so here's a small sampling of what people had to say (although again, under the guise of anonymity since I don't want to comprimise any personal information around here)
With that being said, which Ruff Bup am I going to go with for this project? Well, I've been thinking long and hard about this topic basically ever since the idea to give Ruff Bup colour and I think I may have come to a decision on the matter. For this project, I think I'll have Ruff Bup start out as a black and white character like in his original cartoon since during my "fashion" shoot, I more or less kept him the same without any real issue:
But at one point, something will happen that essentially gives him a colour pallet, which will not only allow for jokes about how Ruff Bup would react to suddenly having a colour pallet, but it would also establish an extra bit of information about the Development Dimension since I could show how it can also affect my existing characters as well as my newly made characters that have yet to have their stories told, all without resorting to needless exposition that drags the pace down to a screeching halt.
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Now that that's taken care of, I find I'm once again trying to figure out what to do next, since I can't do any animation until I get home, although even then the chances of that happening are low since sometimes by the time I get back home, someone else is already using the TV and there'll be nothing I can do about it, so it'll be likely I'll have to wait until Wednesday to start my next actual experiment.
Update: We're Moving On To The Pre-Production Phase
After talking with my tutor about what I could possibly do next, he ended up telling me I was actually at a stage where I could move on to the pre-production side of things, thus giving me a little bit more time to come up with a design for the main character and even get the script written up, meaning I'll be able to spend more time getting everything ready for when the animation process starts.
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With this in mind, I think I'll take my tutor's advice and end the main research phase here.
So How Did This Research Phase Go?
Well, in terms of copying and pasting my work from unit 12 (which sadly takes up a good majority of this page), I thought that doing this would be a lot less time consuming than it ended up being in the end, since I was under the logic of "hey, all I'm doing is taking work I did previously and plopping it in here with slight alterations to improve my grammer and spelling, this'll be easy as pie." Oh how naïve I was, because not only did it end up taking me way longer than I anticipated it would, probably because I also decided to go back and gather higher quality versions of the images I used originally since I was no longer working under the stringent memory limits of Wix's blog posts. Luckily, this didn't take too long since I already put in links to the original sources beforehand, so for the most part it was just a matter of going straight to the source, saving the higher quality image and uploading said image here.
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The longer the process of copying and pasting went on however, it ended up getting more and more tedious because of the fact that it was taking up more time that could be better spent looking into actually new and interesting stuff because then I would be able to find out way more about the medium of anime than I did last time.
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Luckily, I was able to finish the copy and paste job in the nick of time, meaning there ended up being room to actually do new stuff after all, and thank goodness for that, because when looking into Hayao Miyazaki, I found out that he actually had a lot more history than I could have ever imagined, from his fascination with planes to his time working under what would later become TOEI animation and even the fact he got his directorial debut directing a Lupin III movie, which really caught me off guard because much like Mr Miyazaki himself, I also knew about the existence of the character in passing beforehand, especially thanks to that CGI film he was in that I still haven't seen yet, and thanks to the power of getting guidance from my friends, I was able to find a scene from Spirited Away and ended up getting more out of it than I did with Dorohedoro and the Sonic OVA combined, which is especially strange to me because I really like the Sonic series so you'd think I'd get the most out of the OVA movie (since I'm the most familiar with it but regardless)
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When it came to the experimentation, it ended up being quite eye opening for me, as not only did I finally figure out how to do choppy animation properly, but I also ended up gaining a little bit of insight as to how Dreams PS4/5's puppets actually work, because as it turns out the puppets I've been using to make Super Sheep, Ruff Bup and all the rest of them have a "springiness" slider that allows the characters to have springiness without me actually having to do it manually, and all puppets have that slider turned up slightly by default, it created a situation where I would animate a character, preview it when time was paused (meaning the game wouldn't apply the springiness), but then once I hit the "play time" button there would be a bit of springiness all of a sudden. This was something I just sort of ignored until now but it explains so much and now that I know this, I can go ahead and make the animation on the anime character actually choppy, which itself would facilitate a bit of frame rate humour because while I want the anime character to have choppy animation, I also want Super Sheep and Ruff Bup to have much smoother animation in order to create a contrast between east and west.
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When it came to the part where I went ahead and saw how people would react to the idea of Ruff Bup having colour, I originally thought I would have to do an entire survey, but luckily at the last minute I ended up getting the idea to simply ask the question in teams and see what the others thought instead, which I think was much better than building an entire survey and/or questionnaire since there, I would also probably have to put in a few other questions to serve as filler material (and since I only really wanted to know if giving Ruff Bup colour was a good idea, I feel what I ended up doing was for the best. With that being said, I do plan on having this story take place in a Development Dimension, so the way I see it, there's no reason I can't just do both anyway.
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With that being said, I can officially put a cap on this section.