I thought I'd start this post off with the video I edited together with some animation from the show. As you can see, the show has a lot of really good animation and a lot of animators whose styles are easily recognisable worked on the show. The most recognizable one being Hironori Tanaka who isn't even trying to tone it down a bit and is going crazy. The easiest way to tell Tanaka animated a scene is the stupidly amazing amount of detail he puts into the hair and the very exaggerated movements of the characters. Before i start sayin stuff about the show and its animation however i will say that this show is my #1 anime of all time at the moment and i have rewatched it close to around 12 times since i first saw it. Needless to say this post will involve a lot of gushing so i apologize beforehand.
Ok now let us get into the analysis of the overall visual style of this series. The first thing i would say is very well done to the character designer Ryochimo because you can tell when he was designing the characters, he wanted them to be easy to animate like for example Birdy herself has a very simple character design without any frills or generally cloth on her. All she has on is her armour which means as long as an animator can animate the female form well enough they can animate her. Then there is the designs for the rest of the cast. They generally follow the same principle with simple, easy to animate designs to allow for a lot of freedom of movement and with the hair there isn't a lot of wildly unrealistic styles in use. For the most part during the first season of the show they didn't even use shading on the characters a lot and focused of a lot of fluid movement in the characters in the action scenes which reminded me of some of the better episodes of Naruto Shippuden (such as #85) in which the use minimal shading which frees up the action a lot more because you are not focusing on the details as much.
When it comes to the backgrounds, the main thing i liked about them was that they looked like water colour paintings, to me this gave the show a much softer look than the likes of Blue Exorcist which had extravagant backgrounds. Both styles i like but for a slightly more mature show like Birdy i thought if fit quite well.
Onto what i liked most about the show. The list of KA's (Key Animators) whose work was most memorable is a rather good one. Besides the aforementioned Hironori Tanaka and Ryochimo, we have Shingo Yamashita, Norio Matsumoto and Tomoyuki Niho. The work that these guys produced was the most memorable action sequences in the whole show with Tanaka, Yamashita and Matsumoto being the stand-out talents in the animation department. Starting with Hironori Tanaka, in my next post i will be voicing my opinions on these specific animators work within the show. Look forward to it in a couple of days readers. *wink*
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