Top 10 Favourite Cuts (Animated Sequences) of 2013

This is the start of a new yearly tradition here guys. Every year from now on i'll be listing my top 10 favourite sequences of 2d animation mostly from anime and western cartoons. The list will be only sequences from shows i've watched so since i have yet to see Wakfu, sadly thats not in the running. Rules for this generally are:

• I have to have watched the show.
• The show must have aired this year (only episodes of a continuing show that aired this year also).
• One sequence per show.

Also there will be spoilers for shows that aired this year including Psycho Pass, Hunter X Hunter and a bit of Naruto. And that is it. From there lets move onto the first one that you can see below:

Masahiro Sato, Studio Pierrot and The Legend of Korra

Its been a while huh, well university can be quite taxing so a dudes gotta prioritize work over anything else (he says as he sips tea while watching anime instead of actual work). Nevertheless lets get on with todays subject. So like a lot of people i was somewhat surprised at Studio Pierrot being assigned to work on Book 2 of Korra when Lesean Thomas first tweeted about it. It was more of an optimistic surprise than anything. If any studio should be chosen, they would be more than qualified with their vast experience in the action fantasy genre with Naruto, Bleach, Yu Yu Hakusho just to name a few. As the week went on as we waited for the new episodes every single trailer was fantastic and every piece of footage shows was gorgeous. We saw epic bending battles, glimpse of the past and an inkling of an idea of what this season would involve. Now 6 episodes in that enthusiasm had largely dissipated for a lot of people until we saw the Avatar Wan special. The special was some fine television and one can't help but want more of that style of avatar story than what we've had up to this point. But what was it about episodes 1-6 of book 2 that we found so weird. The feel of these episodes is very different form the Wan Special and even all of book 1 in general. I'll be getting into specifics as to what i though of the change in studio below but for now enjoy this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwwmsJvjcnY

For whatever reason my own video will not allow itself to be embedded here so heres another mad to view. The link for my video is below the one you can actually watch from here. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Modern Korean Animation Studios

Well, while i initially was into the idea of reviewing the animation of each individual segment of the animated Dante's Inferno movie i decided it would make more sense to just do a big post about what i was really wanting to get into which was my thoughts on the current state of the korean animation industry and the studios from there that have really impressed me in recent years. Now i know that a lot of the stuff that we see coming from korea tends to be the animation they produce for other territories which mainly include america, japan and europe but most of those productions don't really tend to look very interesting artistically speaking and examples would be shows like Fairly Odd Parents and Regular show. These kinds of shows i like but they don't really aspire to a greater level of detail and artistry and they don't really need to. I like the styles these shows have but they aren't trying to compete on a global scale as examples of amazing achievement in animation because they rely on strong writing and characters than flashy animation.

009: Recyborg Review

This movie has been one that i have looked forward to for a while since it's Kenji Kamiyama's newest project and after that wait i feel kind of disappointed. I wasn't expecting anything as complex as Stand Alone Complex but i was expecting something fun to watch as it seemed from the trailers to be a fun action movie with a seemingly interesting plot. Anyway before i get more into this here's the customary video showcase of the film's animation.

Scout 2793 Update #1 - Characters

So since my last post on my short, i have so far finished writing 3/4 of the script and storyboarded half of what i have finalised of the script so far. I am still trying to decide how to end the short and i have a vague idea of what it should be based on the message i want to convey so that won't take too long. Besides that i have finished designs for 3 of the major character and have 3 designs left to go. It's now time to introduce you guys to the world the short is set in and the characters that inhabit it.

Fairy Tail Animation Analysis

Yet another animation analysis for you guys today. I apologize for the 2 months without content but life got in the way. Now that i'm back i'll try and get back into the weekly schedule so lots of content is planned for the next month or so. This i will be analysing the animation (or lack thereof) in Fairy Tail  so let's get started with the usual MAD.

Scout 2793 - My Original Animated Short Project

This is going to be the first of many posts on this project but here it is. Rather than nitpicking other people, you guys can nitpick me for a change. I recently started working seriously on my animated short set in Zambia, Africa called "Scout 2793." The short tells the story of an alien scouting robot sent to earth to prepare for it's master's mass invasion and the Superhero he comes into conflict with. The short is mainly set in 3 major locations which are the mothership, the outskirts of a zambian village and finally a large city. For this short i'm animating full character movements for the first time so i've been practicing character animation quite a bit and the robot transforms twice so this will be a lot of trial and error on my part but i'm having fun with it. Other things i've had to practice are my effects animation skills with a major focus on lightning and explosions effects. Storyboarding is going fairly quickly since i learned a lot about this during a filmmaking workshop i did at university so thats not an issue. I hope to have it done before summer's end because last years summer animation project was left unfinished because i wasn't used to flash and i got annoyed doing it. Here is a video of everything i produced for that little project.

Animator Spotlight: Takashi Torii

So this is my first animator spotlight but I'm not gonna make this a regular thing. I just felt i had to share the work of one of my new favourite animators now that i know his name. Here's the video y'all.

Hitman Reborn Animation Analysis Part 2

So it took me a while to get the video for this post done but it's not for the reasons you guys might think. It's not that there was too much good animation, although there was certainly more that the first half of the show. It's because the editing in this half was ridiculously annoying to edit around. To provide context for you, this is around the time the show started catching up to the manga so as you would imagine, they had to pad out the events quite a bit and one method was to have a sequence of nice animation with shots of other characters reacting inter-spliced into that. This means that some well animated scenes i couldn't use because they were too badly spliced between the static shots. This continued to the very last episode and when you watch the show, it's not much of a problem because you're enjoying it but from an editing standpoint, that was annoying as hell. Well enough moaning from me, the video is done for you to enjoy.

On-Model VS Fluidity

After having a couple of lengthy discussions on the subject of staying on model in animation with people who most of the time don't know the difference between animation and the character art, i felt i needed to make a blog post about it mostly to argue my points so i never have to talk about this subject again.

Birdy The Mighty: Decode Animation Analysis Part 4: Tomoyuki Niho

Onto The final part of my Birdy The Mighty: Decode Animation Analysis series.

Oh Tomoyuki Niho, what an interesting style you've got there. Niho's work is some of the stuff that the people that aren't fans of the animation in the final episodes of Birdy hated. The hate for his style isn't justified but i can see where they are coming from. If it didn't clearly show how low a frame-rate he was working with i wouldn't have as much of a problem with it. Other animators who unsurprisingly are more experienced (like Norio Matsumoto) know how to make the low frame rate unnoticeable. I am somewhat ashamed to admit as a supposed analyzer of animation to admit i only just recently learned of the concept of animating on 2's and 3's and so on. Disney movies are animated at 24 frames per second because they obviously have the budget but most anime is generally either animated on 2's (12 frames per second) or 3's(8 frames per second). As soon as i realized this, i watched lots of sakuga on YouTube and realized that the best animators are good at hiding this. Limited animation is an amazing thing when done right. Mitsuo Iso is one of my favorite animators because he makes his work look very high frame rate when it is in fact not.

Hitman Reborn Animation Analysis Part 1

Artland is a studio that has always confused me. They don't really specialize in a specific style like a studio such as Bones does. They are more of a work for hire studio. Seeing as Katekyo Hitman Reborn was the first shonen anime series i followed week to week after i fell off the Naruto and Bleach bandwagon, I felt a need to support and be behind the studio 100% and then Demon King Daimao happened. They have produced classics such as Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Mushishi and yet to keep the lights on they need to dabble in the harem romance which i understand. I use to think of them as a Bones-lite but seeing as most of the shows they produced since Mushishi suffer from poor direction (Hitman Reborn included) i can't really call them that their lowest point so far has been Demon King Daimao (Though Milky Holmes Season 2 ins't far behind) which had such a cool premise but within the first 5 minutes the show basically fell off a cliff story-wise  There were a couple of promising episodes after that but they focused too much on the Tits and Ass and had no time left to tell a proper story so it just fell flat in the end. Its too bad really because the animation stayed consistently above average and the main character got a massive dragon called Peterhausen to command in a rather amusing turn of events.

Mass Effect: Paragon Lost Review

First of all sorry that i didn't manage to get some more posts done quicker but university started back up again with an essay project so that was a top priority so anyway heres my thoughts on Mass Effect: Paragon Lost.

Unlike the other movie that came out of Bioware's co-productions with Funimation, this project is primarily 2D. There's some CG here and there but overall its a 2D effort from Production 1.G. and TO entertainment. The plot of this movie really feels like one of the better episodes of the current "Clone Wars" cartoon and seeing as they share the same writer, that is understandable. It's a pretty simple plot that generally follows one of the most hated characters from Mass Effect 3, James Vega. To be honest, he's not a very interesting character with the only personality he has being because Freddy Prinze Jr. voices him and quite well i might add. He's almost unrecognizable as Vega but back to the topic at hand. The supporting cast represent a cross section of character types we've all seen before and they are all quite fun to watch with the exception of the tech guy who just comes off flat overall. Todd Haberkorn and Eric Vale's characters in particular added a bit of humor that made the whole thing less serious and that was a wise decision otherwise i think i would have fallen asleep if it was serious the whole way through. If you know nothing about the Mass Effect universe this will still be a fun watch but not as much as it would be for someone that's played the games and notices the little details like the guns the characters are using and the like. The ending is something to behold as well because it definitely wouldn't have happened if it was a big budget live action movie because they hate leaving viewers feeling dissatisfied. It's a good thing they decided to end it that way because looking at it from a logical point of view, the direction it took made actual sense. Overall the story was neat but nothing too ambitious. Now lets get on to the animation.