Hanasaku Iroha (generic discussion thread)
 

P.A Works 10th anniversary work Hana-Saku Iroha just got announced, has character designs by Mel Kishida. Hopefully they give the designs more justice than A-1 did with Sora Noto.... anyway that's Itou Kanae speaking in the promo isn't it?

A girl working at a hot spring inn? I like the designs and all, but...I pretty much suspect there's gonna be ecchi all over this. I apologize for being a weirdo.:heh:

The clothes and building remind me Taishou Yakyuu Musume so Taishou period ?
I wonder how they'll adapt Mel's design. There's a staff list on 2ch but nothing official.

ITOU KANAAAAAEEEE <3

I'm excited. =3

The characters look gorgeous. Hopefully, the anime's chara design will be good as well, I doubt it'll be worse than A-1's anyhow, but you never know.

The soothing song, the speech and the designs makes me think it'll be slice of life. I can't really picture something ecchi after watching that trailer.

Hehehehe. I tend to be kinda over cautious and OCD when it comes to anime being clean of all ecchi. I want to be sure of that in advance before watching it. I'll wait for more information to come out.

I'm just here for Mel Kishida's beautiful designs :heh: Girls working at a hot spring inn? I dunno, original anime are usually a bit more...ambitious. But it's true that from the preview, I am feeling more like "Aria" than "Love Hina".

Also, congratulations to P.A. works for finally making a completely original series, especially after so many well-made half-original series.

recognized her voice right away lol.

Hope its as good as all the past shows they've "worked on", although the story seems kind of...unique.

Agreed on the designs (although its just art atm), much different than sora no woto.

Another "public lie" ?
I'm still remember how I cried out aloud after seeing Sora no Woto turn to.

If that just concept, and wouldn't adapted to actual work. I will never watch anime from P.A again. (I know SnW not from P.A bruh)

Enough with this "Original Chara Design" shit.

Are people seriously still bitter about SnW? T_T

There's an original character designer and an anime character designer who adapts the original artwork into something a team of animators can draw 1000+ times. As cool as it would be to have an anime that looks like a moving Kishida Mel illustration, it's simply impossible without a budget the size of Japan's GDP.

I mean seriously, the creators aren't trying to displease their audience. I'm astounded by people who seem to think that anime staff and studio are "out to get them" by ruining their favorite artists/manga/novels etc.

(Endless Eight is an exception)

Sure, I'll watch.

Then don't show shits about it then... Seriously they show it just seems like they gonna use it in actual works (put that SO BIG as main illustration in their webs for example.)
And if this one is another "lie" I would be so pissed off, because they already make a PV with that chara design concept, even though I have no expectation they gonna really use it in actual works.

Btw as glorious as Kishida Meru arts looked, I thinks that not so "expensive" to adapt it into animation. Its just the pastel color effect that make it seems like that.

I'd like you to point me to somewhere that says or even implies, "Hey, this is what the anime is actually going to look like!" Where is this "lie" that you are so caught up on?

It's concept art. As in, these are the original character designs and we're currently in the planning stage. When they put up character profiles on the official website I guarantee they will use the anime character design art instead of Kishida Mel's illustrations. You shouldn't expect the anime to look exactly like the illustrations. The illustrations represent the character designs, not a frame of animation; do you even know what a character design is?

As for whether animating in that illustration style would be hard... god I really don't want to give a lecture on the differences between illustration and animation. Put it this way: why are cartoons or anime or ANYTHING 2-D animated NEVER drawn to look like realistic people? After all, any skilled illustrator can make a contour drawing of a realistic person, right? So why aren't they animated like that? Think about it.

Well I know they didn't actually lie in literally, but still they'll pissed off some (if not most) people if they put it as it seems that gonna be the looks in actual works.
Yes that an only concept, but you can't deny that concept that make people turn their eyes to that subject eh ?
So what the point to show the concept if wouldn't showed in actual works ?Blah... what you talking about ?

Animations work is always about adapting.
Concept --> Actual works, that its. simple.
Its can be like realistic people if the concept's want the animator draw it like so. you want to say the animator can't draw similar object looks like certain people work ?

Well at least they can give justice in their initial concept.

SnW was disappointing in many ways the art happens to be one of them, talk about being moefied. Anyways moving on from that disappointing series, this series looks like it's a slice of life, will give it a try. Hopefully they don't dumb down Mel Kishida art here.

you are the only one that seems "angered"/concerned by some kind of possible change they might do to the character designs. yes, they are going to **slightly** change the character designs, so they can animate the work within the time/budget constraints. it's a rather far-fetched idea to think that they are going to use the original illustration as the artwork of an animated project.

so you can get an idea of the concept they are working on.

it's not as simple as you make it out to be.

excuse me sir, your point?
I'd read the alterations of Kishida Meru design in SnW is one of disappointment point from the fans.
And I'm sure you read some of it on here
Well... yeah ?
If they shown some illustrations, that means we can guess it right ?
Once again... yeah ?
But you can't possibly if planned paint something blue and turned out as red right ?
If anything, that turn to be variation of blue (royal blue) unless you attempt to make your initial plan as sample.
But people that already looking forward to finalization of that sample/plan can be reasonably disappointed because that different from they heard/expect from that sample.

Btw yeah I'm always loud about unannounced alteration of initial concept, feel like your tailor change your ordered torso design without you know it. lol

Btw lets stop this OT before mod's scold us.

hope the best from this project, at least the actual works arts would still looked great regardless they use Kishida Meru's drawing as the base or not.

I'm rather underwhelmed by some of the comments that have been made of this show, especially with regards to the artwork. We have only seen so far the original character designs; we have no idea of what character designs they are going to use for the actual animated project. However, it has come to the general consensus of some "people" that "they" are not going to like the artwork, nor the character designs, because a former show "they" had watched have disappointed "them" in those regards---and it just so happens to have the same artist doing the original illustrations. Though, the issue seems to be on the fact that those original illustrations have been released before the ones that are going to be used in the actual animated project, therefore creating some form of confusion among said "people", only because "they" were expecting those original illustrations to be the ones being used---Or at least, with character designs that "closely matches" the original ones. The key point here is the fact that we haven't seen the said character designs, and yet there is the assumption that they are going to be relatively worse. Thus, why I think discussing this sort of expectations---to this extent---is rather pointless.

There seems to be the perception that having the original illustrations is bad for some "people" because it plays with "their expectations", however ignoring the fact that probably at this stage they are still working with the concept and have yet to finalize what the show is going to be like. And thus, having probably not enough material to generate interest among the potential viewers, except for the original illustrations which they've so gladly included in a trailer along with music and voice acting. And yet, "people" complain because they just had to release the "original illustrations", which for "them" is worse than nothing. Rather, it's only a form of publicity at this early stage of the project, which normally is not to be confused with anything more than a way to get a general idea of what the show is going to be about, not a determining factor of what is going to be like.

I swear I was one of half a dozen people who actually enjoyed SnW. =__=||| It seemed like everyone was so caught up with the moe-hate that they wrote it off without even giving it a chance.

... okay, uh, do you draw? Because you're making some crazy assumptions here. I mean, first off, animators are people. They're not human photocopiers.

People don't animate in a hyper-realistic style because it's NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE. It's not about "doing justice" to an artist's work, it's about practicality, because drawing something that moves is exponentially more complex than drawing something that stands still.

Like I said, you seem to have the idea that the creators are conspiring to ruin the original concept. They're not. They're doing their best to follow the original designs while having to adjust that to the limitations of animation and various other requirements. The final model must be expressive, able to be drawn consistently thousands of times, fit the atmosphere and style of the rest of the show, etc. etc.

Besides, SnW was far from the biggest change from original art to anime design that I've seen. Ever seen Vofan's original illustrations for Bakemonogatari? Compare to Watanabe Akio's designs for the anime. Shinobu is especially noticeable. Yet I never heard anyone complaining about that. (to elaborate: Vofan, Watanabe Akio)


... bringing it back to the topic at hand. There's no way for them to animate those designs from the PV exactly. Expect the final anime design to be more simplistic and probably more expressive (more exaggerated features). It's perfectly normal for there to be significant stylistic changes in the transition from original designs to animated form. If you just want to bash SnW and "moe-fication" I'm sure you can do so in another thread.

You are not alone in this good sir/maam. I literally had to explain in detail why SnW isn't the typical moeblob people judge it to be and I'm sure the same thing will eventually apply here. Just because the adaptation doesn't look anything like the original doesn't make it the suck, and I'd like to point to Spice and Wolf as proof of this.

I'm not going to worry too much about PA Works' ability to adapt Kishida Mel's character designs. They have proven to be adept at the "Type-Moon" style before. And they actually improved on Na-Ga's concept art for Angel Beats, for example Noda and Fujimaki look much, much better in the anime than in the concept art.

PA Works are excellent at animation and I have faith in them here. What I'm worried about is their pacing and storyboarding abilities, which haven't been very pretty in the past. (Canaan was too long while Angel Beats was very much too short.)

New teaser

The characters designs looks great I wonder how it will look in animated form...

I love Mel Kishida's art so much. The last pic in the PV is so adorable <3

Still waiting to see the anime's chara design. Please don't mess it up.

Itou Kanae is the best when she's voicing a cheerful girl. It's Amu all over again.

Mel Kishida. <3

I agree. She's got such a delightful voice.

As someone who has worked on simple animation for a short while now (mostly in Macromedia Flash Player and Adobe Imageready) there's an understandable reason why concept art traditionally is not translated 100% into animation: the simple fact that it is animated.

Traditional 2D Cell animation in essence is a series of still shots that are superimposed on top of each other in rapid sequence to give the illusion of movement. There are two types of frames necessary to animate a scene: Key Frames, which are the main art stills for that scene, and the in-between transition Frames (aka "Tweens" ) which is the series of stills that portray the animation of the scene from one to state to another. In a 10 second animated sequence for example the keyframes would be say, a person standing, and then the person sitting. The tweens would then be the series of frames that show how the person transitions from standing to sitting position.

Now the important thing to remember is that even in a short animated sequence, you need a large number of frames to animate the scene smoothly and not appear choppy. You'll need at least 25 or so frames per second (minimum industry standard) to portray a scene with at least decent quality, and you'll need a much higher number of tweens if you want to make the animation as smooth as movie animation.

Even at 25 frames per second of animation, that means that for a single second of animation you'll need at least 25 individually drawn frames with small differences between them in order to animate the scene properly - frame 1 could be a hand, then frame two would be the hand moved a millimeter to the right, and frame three another millimeter, and so on... Unless you don't want your animation to look like a poorly made flash animation you'll need to draw each individual frame with the proper perspective, coloring, lighting and other variables that are affected by the slight movement of each frame.

Now imagine trying to draw Game-CG or still art quality drawings across 25 different frames. Considering that one game-CG drawing will set a person back about several hours of work just on the drawing and then coloring, imagine having to make 25 of them... and that's just from a single minute of animation.

Imagine having to maintain that quality over 25 minutes of animation. That's:

- 25 frames per second x 60 seconds in a minute = 1,500 frames per minute. With your average anime episode being 24 minutes long, that's 1,500 frames times 24 minutes.

Which adds up to 36,000 FRAMES!!!

36,000 frames if we're going 25 FPS - 36,000 frames of still images devoted solely to animating an entire episode. And making said 36,000 frames for animation isn't easy, let alone at the level of quality found in concept art or game-CG's.

Of course no TV anime ever reaches that number of frames in an episode, due to the prevalence of various animation shortcuts and optimization methods that exist to help reduce the number of frames - for example the famous "panning", where a still scene is simply moved from one end to the other, or only animating the lead elements while keeping the backgrounds intact which is a classic cost-cutting measure. Still, the immense amount of work that goes into an animation is staggering, and given the weekly or monthly deadlines for animation projects this means that you can't expect them to have decent quality animation without an equally decent number of paid staff and large finances.

You can either have an animation that's good quality but short and slow to produce, or a long animation released fast but with so-so quality. The only way you can get an animation that's fast, long, and with good quality animation is if you have a MASSIVE budget to actually pull it off - which few animation titles have managed to get, and is harder to get now with the world economy being what it is.

Hence there's a reason why the super-detailed concept art shown in the trailers will not be the exact art - because the difficulty of animating a sequence means they need to tone down on the art style to make it easier to animate, hence why the "animation art" shown for anime typically has lesser detail than concept or promotional art. And this doesn't take into account stuff like the fact that the character designer normally isn't responsible for animation and stuff, hence the characters in animation are typically drawn by another artist.

TL;DR - Yes, it's NOT THAT SIMPLE.

Oh wow that PV is altho not much to really does indeed get me all giddy about this series.
The music is lovely, got a great feel to it.
The character designs are great here, which is a big indicator for me that this series will do right by me.
I've said else where before that when a series has me choosing or loving something that isn't usually my to preference, it is def doing something right.
That being I'm not usually a fan of the drill hair style but wow the lass that has it is :love: but then that goes for all the characters here.

looking forward to this very much.

@Lowe
thx for the info :)
but hell... I'm never said a word about make animation works is simple matter.

More down to this line.

N don't raise the dead stuff =p

The story reminds me of Love Hina when a main character worked on hot springs hotels.

P.A works = Must watch

Well Canaan and Angel beats have been mentioned but looking at Character design I'm expecting this to look a bit like True Tears

Ugh. I hear this has the Canaan staff again. Masahiro Ando is directing, Mari Okada is writing, Kanami Sekiguchi is the animation character designer. What a waste of talent on moe garbage. Ando, direct another BONES show instead please? :(

Aww, it sounds decent! Reminds me a bit of Aria~~ A soothing anime about a girl working at a hot spring meeting new things and people, who all are aspiring toward their own goals seems pretty relaxing to me; a bit like turning of age you know. Like many other mentioned, the art is pleasing for the eyes too~! I don't think moe is going to be the selling point (not saying moe won't attract a huge crowd of people, but at least I don't think that's what P.A. is going for).

Anyway, cast is here (only females characters at the moment >__<), last name first.

Hana-Saku Iroha
Original Work: P.A. WORKS
Director: Andou Masahiro
Character Draft: Kishida Mel
Character Design: Sekiguchi Kanami
Series Composition: Okada Mari
Animation Production: P.A. WORKS

Matsumae Ohana: Itou Kanae
Tsuruki Minko: Omigawa Chiaki
Oshimizui Nako: Toyosaki Aki
Wakura Yuina: Tomatsu Haruka
Wajima Tomoe: Noto Mamiko (not formally introduced in the PV)

This is totally an all star team for staff and VA. Hot spring ≠ auto fanservice imo. Totally reserving my judgment until I see it. This should have a lot of substance (/me has complete faith in P.A.). And since I totally adore the image song, I am going to link it here too >__<

I wouldn't be so quick to refer to this show as "moe garbage". Like stuopidget, I'm sensing some Aria vibes from this, and with the staff involved this could end up being very very good. Sure, the characters look insanely cute (at least when drawn by Kishida...) but that doesn't mean the show will revolve around moe. Of course, if you also regard Aria as moe garbage, that's another matter...

Aaahaaa~ that's no good, I'm getting my hopes up too much.

I'm sure everyone knew that Itou Kanae was going to do the voice of the lead girl.:D

Yay for Kanami Sekiguchi, at least that confirm the anime chara design not as bad as sora no oto.

What? The animated character designs are shown? Where? I don't see them.

http://www.hanasakuiroha.jp/

new trailer

@Dat trailer...
Thanks god... There's still justice in this world.

<3 your ... "enthusiasm" haha.

That is indeed a cute trailer with all the VAs speaking (hey there is Tomoe!). You can already tell which character will have which type of personality. I can already tell Nakochi will be one of my favorites no doubt =P.