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.
So as you can see in the video, this shit is good. As much as i would like to say that there was not really any good animation in Fairy Tail, the truth is that there was plenty. By plenty i mean more so that there was a good amount during season one but after that who the fuck knows what happened. The good animators stayed on generally but their work became more sparse and as you would guess there would be large stretches of very badly animated episodes with an occasional good scene. The animators who i noticed most during the shows 3+ year run were Toshiharu Sugie, Katsunori Kikuchi and my personal favourite of the 3, Hirokazu Hisayuki. The best animator in the technical sense however is without a doubt Toshiharu Sugie. He was to Fairy Tail what Hidehiko Sawada currently is to Hunter X Hunter. He worked on a lot of the best fights in Fairy Tail before the quality started to vary. During the first year of Fairy Tail, we got a lot of work from Sugie as well as some interesting work from the aforementioned Katsunori Kikuchi, an episode featuring Kenichi Fujisawa's work and the more stylized work of Hirokazu Hisayuki as both an animation director and animator. Of all these fine gentlemen, Sugie worked on the most amount of episodes clocking in at 28 of 175 episodes if i remember correctly as well as all the openings with the exception of #2. His work is very easily recognizable and some (me) might say that his style is somewhat similar to Nozomu Abe. Abe and Sugie depict explosions and rubble very similarly though they employ slightly different smoke effects. While Sugie is talented, Abe is the better of the two but that is irrelevant. So, his work only really first stood out to me in OP #4 which is very Sugie-heavy. After that point he basically has at least one cut in every opening. The most memorable scene a lot of people seem to know of his was in episode #39 when Erza was fighting Jellal. Everyone i've talked to seems to agree that it was a very well done scene and the best animated scene in all of Fairy Tail and i would tend to agree if not for the fact that episodes 47 and 48 both have some very good sequences of Natsu and Gajeel fighting Laxus. Those two i would say are the best directed episodes of the whole show and each animation director did a fantastic job letting their style shine through while delivering some nice, fluid animation. Ok back to Sugie. Watching the video above will give you a good idea of what his style looks like because it is very unique within Fairy Tail but when he works on other shows it is slightly harder to pin down because it's more detailed. In FT his style is a more simplified version of his normal style because he probably wants to produce that work a lot quicker since it's weekly and long running. On Blood-C he (much like Takashi Torri) got to showcase his skills as he animated segments of the main fight in episode #9. The segments he worked on are in the above video and it looks very similar in terms of the style of movement that he does in Fairy Tail's later episodes such as episode 144 which featured a sequence that looked very much like one of his Blood-C segments.
Katsunori Kikuchi is the animator i briefly talked about on my first ever post so i'll make this quick. I really like the sheer impact his animation gives. When two characters clash, the shockwaves he animates make you see the full strength that the character has and makes the encounters look more intense which is most evident in the fight with Erza and Ikaruga but is also present in the fight against Hades. It's not the smoothest style but to me the intensity and dynamism alone makes it a style to admire.
Hirokazu Hisayuki on the other hand is a different story. His style looks so different to the actual character designs and yet oddly is more faithful to the manga in a way. The characters look more angular and less bulky which is consistent with the manga but his episodes also have the benefit of having a larger budget it would seem. He also actually did key animation for them so the fights are nice and fluid. His style actually reminds me of Naoki Tate's more recent one piece work which is less detailed but more fluid though Hisayuki has a more on-model personal style that doesn't distort the characters as much as Tate tends to do these days. In the end for me Hisayuki was my favourite of all the animators that worked on the show because his style was the best looking in my opinion. The last animator i will talk about is Ken'ichi Fujisawa. Most have seen his work on Naruto and One Piece but for episode 2 of fairy tail you can see the style he used there was very much in the vain of the Naruto episodes he worked on. All his traits are there even including the was he animates the ground when a character is moving at incredible speeds. His work on the episode was quite good and i never understood why people never noticed it. Maybe it's the fact that he simplifies the designs a bit too much but i thought his work looked very nice and is some of the better episodes outside the big 3. To conclude these guys did great jobs during the shows run and their work is something to be praised.
To be honest, the first season of Fairy Tail (1-48) wasn't as bad as i remember it animation-wise. It's only after that point when they realized it was popular and that they wanted to keep it going that issues started to occur. While Sugie stayed on the show, there were a lot of very badly animated episodes for long stretches of time while fans waited for Sugie or the other 3 animators i mentioned to show up again and while these core group never disappointed every other team was just bad to average It's a shame really seeing as A-1 and Satelight are both good studios but i guess even these two giants teamin up doesn't mean the show was gonna be immune to what all long-running shonen suffers from. It was only just more pronounced here. Overall i would give the show a 2.5 out of 5 as the sheer volume of stiff animation and bad character art outweighs all the good stuff in general and that can't be ignored. It is nice when you finally get to the good stuff though which is why i can't be too harsh on this.
So as you can see in the video, this shit is good. As much as i would like to say that there was not really any good animation in Fairy Tail, the truth is that there was plenty. By plenty i mean more so that there was a good amount during season one but after that who the fuck knows what happened. The good animators stayed on generally but their work became more sparse and as you would guess there would be large stretches of very badly animated episodes with an occasional good scene. The animators who i noticed most during the shows 3+ year run were Toshiharu Sugie, Katsunori Kikuchi and my personal favourite of the 3, Hirokazu Hisayuki. The best animator in the technical sense however is without a doubt Toshiharu Sugie. He was to Fairy Tail what Hidehiko Sawada currently is to Hunter X Hunter. He worked on a lot of the best fights in Fairy Tail before the quality started to vary. During the first year of Fairy Tail, we got a lot of work from Sugie as well as some interesting work from the aforementioned Katsunori Kikuchi, an episode featuring Kenichi Fujisawa's work and the more stylized work of Hirokazu Hisayuki as both an animation director and animator. Of all these fine gentlemen, Sugie worked on the most amount of episodes clocking in at 28 of 175 episodes if i remember correctly as well as all the openings with the exception of #2. His work is very easily recognizable and some (me) might say that his style is somewhat similar to Nozomu Abe. Abe and Sugie depict explosions and rubble very similarly though they employ slightly different smoke effects. While Sugie is talented, Abe is the better of the two but that is irrelevant. So, his work only really first stood out to me in OP #4 which is very Sugie-heavy. After that point he basically has at least one cut in every opening. The most memorable scene a lot of people seem to know of his was in episode #39 when Erza was fighting Jellal. Everyone i've talked to seems to agree that it was a very well done scene and the best animated scene in all of Fairy Tail and i would tend to agree if not for the fact that episodes 47 and 48 both have some very good sequences of Natsu and Gajeel fighting Laxus. Those two i would say are the best directed episodes of the whole show and each animation director did a fantastic job letting their style shine through while delivering some nice, fluid animation. Ok back to Sugie. Watching the video above will give you a good idea of what his style looks like because it is very unique within Fairy Tail but when he works on other shows it is slightly harder to pin down because it's more detailed. In FT his style is a more simplified version of his normal style because he probably wants to produce that work a lot quicker since it's weekly and long running. On Blood-C he (much like Takashi Torri) got to showcase his skills as he animated segments of the main fight in episode #9. The segments he worked on are in the above video and it looks very similar in terms of the style of movement that he does in Fairy Tail's later episodes such as episode 144 which featured a sequence that looked very much like one of his Blood-C segments.
Katsunori Kikuchi is the animator i briefly talked about on my first ever post so i'll make this quick. I really like the sheer impact his animation gives. When two characters clash, the shockwaves he animates make you see the full strength that the character has and makes the encounters look more intense which is most evident in the fight with Erza and Ikaruga but is also present in the fight against Hades. It's not the smoothest style but to me the intensity and dynamism alone makes it a style to admire.
Hirokazu Hisayuki on the other hand is a different story. His style looks so different to the actual character designs and yet oddly is more faithful to the manga in a way. The characters look more angular and less bulky which is consistent with the manga but his episodes also have the benefit of having a larger budget it would seem. He also actually did key animation for them so the fights are nice and fluid. His style actually reminds me of Naoki Tate's more recent one piece work which is less detailed but more fluid though Hisayuki has a more on-model personal style that doesn't distort the characters as much as Tate tends to do these days. In the end for me Hisayuki was my favourite of all the animators that worked on the show because his style was the best looking in my opinion. The last animator i will talk about is Ken'ichi Fujisawa. Most have seen his work on Naruto and One Piece but for episode 2 of fairy tail you can see the style he used there was very much in the vain of the Naruto episodes he worked on. All his traits are there even including the was he animates the ground when a character is moving at incredible speeds. His work on the episode was quite good and i never understood why people never noticed it. Maybe it's the fact that he simplifies the designs a bit too much but i thought his work looked very nice and is some of the better episodes outside the big 3. To conclude these guys did great jobs during the shows run and their work is something to be praised.
To be honest, the first season of Fairy Tail (1-48) wasn't as bad as i remember it animation-wise. It's only after that point when they realized it was popular and that they wanted to keep it going that issues started to occur. While Sugie stayed on the show, there were a lot of very badly animated episodes for long stretches of time while fans waited for Sugie or the other 3 animators i mentioned to show up again and while these core group never disappointed every other team was just bad to average It's a shame really seeing as A-1 and Satelight are both good studios but i guess even these two giants teamin up doesn't mean the show was gonna be immune to what all long-running shonen suffers from. It was only just more pronounced here. Overall i would give the show a 2.5 out of 5 as the sheer volume of stiff animation and bad character art outweighs all the good stuff in general and that can't be ignored. It is nice when you finally get to the good stuff though which is why i can't be too harsh on this.
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