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.
My current position on them is utter indifference so i decided to do an animation analysis on Reborn (we'll call it this from now on) to see if i could lighten up a bit and also as an excuse to watch Reborn again. This post will cover the first 101 episodes of Reborn. Here we go.
As you can see in the video i compiled above. There were several instances of good effects animation sprinkled throughout the first half of the show. It started off looking really bad animation wise to the point you couldn't even tell that the character designer was the talented Masayoshi Tanaka whose style adapts Akira Amano's character designs more faithfully than they were adapted in Psycho Pass in my opinion. Seeing as it was a long running series i shouldn't be surprised that the show looked average but in the first 20 episodes it looked downright awful most of the time. The character art was bad, the background bland and it even had a lot of reused animation. After that point however, The show enters it's first serious story arc and while there wasn't a notable improvement in the animation quality per se, the character art and backgrounds started looking good for the first time. Mind you this is also a problem on the DVD versions of the show which are the versions that are on Crunchyroll. From this point the quality of the animation steadily improved and the character art more or less started to look decent.
From episode 34 onwards was the start of the second major story arc which was the Varia Arc. By far the most mature arc in the anime (The manga gets darker after the point that the anime stopped), The Varia arc is a story of betrayal and revenge and it was glorious to re-watch The politics behind the "mafia" in the reborn universe are quite interesting and the second opening is the shows best opening. The Varia who are a group of assassins are the characters that left the biggest impression on me with the striking designs (except Levi) and cool abilities. Each individual characters quirks are fun to watch and their personalities are ones that generally shouldn't work well together but they do quite well. The biggest twist was one that i didn't see coming involved Gola Mosca and was one of the more memorable moments in the show. The comedy also changed up it's style slightly to be less childish and more at the expense of the main character Tsuna which was good because while the supporting cast are OK, the comedy involving them is way more forced. During this arc was also some of the first instances of good animation in the show which mostly was the entire fight between Tsuna and Gola Mosca which ended in the aforementioned plot twist that was splendidly executed. The final fight of the arc started off promisingly but soon devolved into 1 or 2 minute chunks of decent animation per episode with the rest being mostly still images and background players explaining exactly what is going on to an almost annoying degree but fortunetly that doesn't last long. Overall the animation in the arc was still average at best because there was only really a couple of episodes that shined. The rest was decent with a lot of good character art as it progressed.
Then with opening 4 began the future arc which is the arc that lasted the longest and continued till the anime ended. The future arc is parred down into many sub arc with a couple being anime only and quite good as well. From this point on it would seem that Artland managed to acquire quite a few good freelancers to help out on a regular basis and while i don't know who they are mostly because there are no translations of credits after episode 103, i recognize their styles. The effects animation and character art improves further from this point and as you can see in the above video, A sense of dynamism was introduced to the fight scenes that was previously missing from the show so i can only presume that either the story boarders got better or they hired a couple of new ones. A particularly good effects animator also probably joined the staff at this point with his impressive water animation in episode 99. Similar work can be seen from this point onwards so i assume that he stayed on for quite a while after this point and he made the scenes he worked on look really fluid and dynamic. This first part of the future arc which spans episodes 74 -101 is generally classified the training arc. The animation in this arc overall would be slightly above average with the introduction of more dynamic story-boarding and some good effects animation with the character art staying consistent throughout. There isn't much to talk about story-wise for the training arc since it was mostly exposition on how the dynamics of the fights worked in the future and the main characters developing new powers.
From this point onward i will also be giving the series i analyze and updating posts with number grades on a 5 point scale so overall for first half of Reborn i will grade it a 2.5/5. I will explain the grading system in my next post so look forward to it readers *winks*.
My current position on them is utter indifference so i decided to do an animation analysis on Reborn (we'll call it this from now on) to see if i could lighten up a bit and also as an excuse to watch Reborn again. This post will cover the first 101 episodes of Reborn. Here we go.
From episode 34 onwards was the start of the second major story arc which was the Varia Arc. By far the most mature arc in the anime (The manga gets darker after the point that the anime stopped), The Varia arc is a story of betrayal and revenge and it was glorious to re-watch The politics behind the "mafia" in the reborn universe are quite interesting and the second opening is the shows best opening. The Varia who are a group of assassins are the characters that left the biggest impression on me with the striking designs (except Levi) and cool abilities. Each individual characters quirks are fun to watch and their personalities are ones that generally shouldn't work well together but they do quite well. The biggest twist was one that i didn't see coming involved Gola Mosca and was one of the more memorable moments in the show. The comedy also changed up it's style slightly to be less childish and more at the expense of the main character Tsuna which was good because while the supporting cast are OK, the comedy involving them is way more forced. During this arc was also some of the first instances of good animation in the show which mostly was the entire fight between Tsuna and Gola Mosca which ended in the aforementioned plot twist that was splendidly executed. The final fight of the arc started off promisingly but soon devolved into 1 or 2 minute chunks of decent animation per episode with the rest being mostly still images and background players explaining exactly what is going on to an almost annoying degree but fortunetly that doesn't last long. Overall the animation in the arc was still average at best because there was only really a couple of episodes that shined. The rest was decent with a lot of good character art as it progressed.
Then with opening 4 began the future arc which is the arc that lasted the longest and continued till the anime ended. The future arc is parred down into many sub arc with a couple being anime only and quite good as well. From this point on it would seem that Artland managed to acquire quite a few good freelancers to help out on a regular basis and while i don't know who they are mostly because there are no translations of credits after episode 103, i recognize their styles. The effects animation and character art improves further from this point and as you can see in the above video, A sense of dynamism was introduced to the fight scenes that was previously missing from the show so i can only presume that either the story boarders got better or they hired a couple of new ones. A particularly good effects animator also probably joined the staff at this point with his impressive water animation in episode 99. Similar work can be seen from this point onwards so i assume that he stayed on for quite a while after this point and he made the scenes he worked on look really fluid and dynamic. This first part of the future arc which spans episodes 74 -101 is generally classified the training arc. The animation in this arc overall would be slightly above average with the introduction of more dynamic story-boarding and some good effects animation with the character art staying consistent throughout. There isn't much to talk about story-wise for the training arc since it was mostly exposition on how the dynamics of the fights worked in the future and the main characters developing new powers.
From this point onward i will also be giving the series i analyze and updating posts with number grades on a 5 point scale so overall for first half of Reborn i will grade it a 2.5/5. I will explain the grading system in my next post so look forward to it readers *winks*.
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