Quote:
Originally Posted by solomon
Frankly I think on average, animation for TV work is far superior. Look at our best Naruto eps, recent One Piece eps (like Marineford and Impel Down and Thriller Bark). And like tons of stuff by Bones, A-1, KyoAni, very lively drawings and animation on a TV budget.
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This is exactly what I was talking about budget spending, money only goes into big action scenes and the rest of production suffers from it.
If you look outside of battles, One Piece hardly has any notable animation, some battles are even suffering from the amount of money put into Marineford, Merman island for example.
Studio Bones is a great animation studio simply because they believe in pushing animation for quality. And its the exact reason why they keep on making mecha anime, its the genre that requires the most amount of work to animate; and they pull off spectacular mecha battles.
As for Gainax which I feel is the best animation studio in Japan, they are very traditional in their art, they use just about every single one of the 12 principles of animation to produce quality from low budgets.
The reason why Gainax's animation looks so lively and dynamic is because they utilise principles like "squash and stretch" and "exaggeration. They have extremely skillful key animators who knows how to draw exaggerated keyframes. In fact Gainax is the only studio I see in Japan who uses squash and stretch regularly on human characters and mecha, they are the most traditional animators in Japan. As most studios tend to go for subtle and 'realistic' movements in anime, they don't apply distortion to the characters, combined with the overall lack of animation it makes them look more stiff and sterile.
But Gainax also cheats alot to save budget, one of the ways they do this with extremely fast looping animation usually only involving 3 frames. And they have clever directors and storyboarders who know how to pace scenes and hold frames with the right camera angles. Gurren Lagann actually has a ton of still frames but are made dynamic with clever angles and rapid panning shots with speed lines. Just look at how still those scenes are when Simon and Kamina were giving epic speeches in pose and even Giga Drill Break is a series of static looping animation with rapid camera movement.
Gainax animation is not really smooth but they have skillful use of exaggeration and distortion of characters to manage their lack of frames along with great camera work makes their animation look much more dynamic than other studios.