Jonathan Harris Blog

Dynamite Headdy: The Most Videogamey Videogame Ever

2012-02-11T04:48:00.026Z

There are some mediums of entertainment that have become so ingrained into our culture that their names invoke certain descriptive qualities, which can be used to describe other mediums or themselves. We can refer to something we think has the qualities of a film as being "filmic", or something that is like a cartoon as being "cartoony". "Comic book" also applies. I think I have heard the term "videogamey" being used before, possibly in reference to the way a wad of cash would pop up like a power-up after killing a prostitute in Grand Theft Auto 3 (I don't know if it actually does, this is just my spotty memory talking). However, it's not a terribly widespread term, and I don't think I've ever seen somebody elaborate on what exactly constitutes "videogamey" characteristics. So if I'm lucky I'll be treading new ground with this post, as I look at what I believe to be the most videogamey videogame ever made: Dynamite Headdy.

This is one of a pair of one-off (that is, not part of a franchise) games that I loved and played alot during my childhood (the other was Ristar, we might be seeing that in a future post). Like many popular games of the time, it's a cartoony side-scrolling platformer, with the protagonist being Headdy, a puppet with a detachable head that he can shoot off in a paddleball fashion to attack enemies. It's good fun, as the central head-shooting mechanic is pretty gratifying, and there's a wide range of entertaining powerups, great bosses, some neat scenery interaction, and lots of quirky little secrets to find. None of these, however, have much to do with what I feel makes this game so uniquely videogamey. What I'm interested in is the world the game constructs, a world that I feel could not exist in any other medium.

The central conceit for the visuals is that it takes place on stage. Or, at least, an environment that looks like a stage. All the scenery is cobbled together from conspicuous planks of wood, with clearly segmented scrolling backgrounds, dodgy broken props, backstage segments, and even a little maintenance man who pops up from time-to-time (and gives you a Secret Bonus Point if you kill him).

The first boss (Maruyama, Headdy's body-swapping rival) makes his appearance by knocking down the background, only for a new one to be pulled in by little stagehands.

For another boss, a carpet is rolled in.

The ending sequence even shows the whole thing being taken apart.

It's all deliciously quirky and totally distinctive. But what about it is "videogamey"?

A unique trait of sidescrolling games is their perspective, always a flat mid or long shot. Occasional forays into the world of Mode 7 graphics allow a front-on or over-the-shoulder view, but this is the exception: it is not unusual for a whole game to remain at this same angle. This happens to be the same way we view a play, as our seats do not move, and unlike in cinema, there is no moving virtual camera, and we see all the action directly through our own eyes.

But what is so intriguing about the world of Dynamite Headdy is that its nature is not actually certain. We're never quite sure whether we're literally watching a play being acted out on a real (in-universe) stage, or whether we're watching an adventure taking place in a world that just happens, through some weird quirk, to look like one. There are hints both ways. In particular, a moment where Maruyama gate-crashes again and pulls Headdy backstage for another boss fight...

...the "Continue?" screen where Headdy gets booted offstage and has to choose whether to listen to the cheering crowd and go back on or leave through the back door...

...and the secret end boss, either a caricature of the president of Sega at the time or the fat-cat owner of the theatre (depending on whether you're playing the Japanese or English version)...

No image of the latter, sorry!

...all suggest the former to some extent. However, how then do we explain the fact that when Headdy leaves one area on stage right, he enters the next one from stage left? There's certainly not enough time in the brief transition for him to have run around the back and for the scenery to have been swapped, and it's either that or this is a really big theatre!

There are more subtle hints, a few minor quirks that make it seem like if this really is a play, it's just a little too self-conscious, a little too "meta" for its own good. As we see the scenery being taken apart in the ending, there's a little blinking sign that says "ENDING DEMO NOW PLAYING" (mirroring a similiar sign for the opening demo), suggesting that this apparently fourth-wall-breaking action is actually intended to be watched (and aren't "opening demo" and "ending demo" curiously videogamey terms?) The first few instances of scenery destruction and backstage reveals occur at the hands of Maruyama (who is described in the manual as being jealous of Headdy and wanting to steal the star role from him), but one level requires Headdy to manipulate the scenery in very explicitly mechanical ways, moving sections of the floor, revealing the girders that make up the pieces...

...and even causing the entire background to fold upwards, revealing all the cogs and gears and inner workings that keep all the moving parts running.

The stage hands that we occasionally see maintainig the scenery are inconsistent in nature: the ones just above and in the ending appear to be flesh and blood humans, but many others seem to be keywound toys themselves, as if they exist within the boundaries of the play rather than governing it from outside. And while the villain of the piece, Dark Demon, could just be a character within a story, there are veiled suggestions that his powers and intentions extend beyond the scope of the stage itself. The reveal for his castle after defeating the Yayoi, the gatekeeper, involves more explicit scenery destruction.

And after penetrating his castle, a central mechanic involves the use of stage-flipping devices, which are one of the few effects in the game that is not designed after a theatrical mechanism: the entire image simply flips like a card.

Sorry, no "After" screenshot because I'm dumb.

It's as if Dark Demon's powers are truly magical, and are not bound by the limits of the world of the stage. The transition into the final battle is similar, as the environment dissolves away into a starry background, quite removed from anything we've seen before.

And then there's things that are difficult to classify. Like one boss that takes place on a little backstage stage for some reason...

...and the basketball minigame that you have to play to access the secret boss. The fact that, like the boss itself, it takes place in a clearly not-a-theatre environment should put it on the "evidence for the fact that it's all actually a play" list, but then what's with that very obvious "INTERMISSION: SUB GAME" sign? As with the "ENDING DEMO NOW PLAYING" sign, by nature it implies that it's meant to be read, and thus that this scene is meant to be watched. But by whom? The audience? What audience? Certainly not the one in the theatre, because we're not in the theatre. Or are we? Is it us? Or am I just overanalysing a meaningly element of standard videogame signage?

And then I start thinking about how Maruyama is shown during the deconstruction sequence, having a private little happy ending where he gets to use Dark Demon's castle as a new body...

...but then appears in the cast roll, sort of out-of-character and sort of not, and I get a headache (and oh god Dark Demon is there too even though he's evil and I don't know if this is now a play-within-a-play-within-a-play or a world-that-looks-like-a-play-within-a-play or whether I'm just overthinking it or aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah).

If one looks at all this objectively, there's probably more evidence for the "it's a play" camp. However there's just enough inconsitencies to sow doubt about the nature of the game's world into the player's mind. And, most importantly, there is one special factor that allows this ambiguity to hold even with just these few hints, and that is the side-on perspective. Why? Because if the camera were ever to rotate to the side, an explicit decision would have to be made. We would be able to either see the edges of the stage, the audience, and everything else that would come with a real theatre all at once, or the lack thereof, and any illusions would be shattered. And if this world were to attempt to exist as such in anything other than a videogame, the constantly forced flat perspective wouldn't work. The stage-like visuals are great in and of themselves from a design point-of-view, but what makes it truly interesting for me is that ambiguity, the uncertain nature of this weird world that we're looking at, and I don't think it could exist in quite the same way in a cartoon, a film, a comic book, a novel, hell, even an actual play. Anything other than a sidescrolling 2D videogame simply wouldn't work as well, and it's not because it is deficient in narrative or character (as is the case with almost any cartoon adaptation of a videogame series), it's because the strengths and the points of interest aren't played to by the conventions of any other medium in existence.

And that's why I think Dynamite Headdy is the most videogamey videogame ever. Because, in my eyes, it couldn't be anything but a videogame.

Here's a mopping man. From a recent job (that actually got cancelled in the end, but oh well at least I got paid and it kept me busy). It's actually my birthday today. So maybe this first post in a long time is a birthday present to myself? I have alot of things going on in my life right now that I need to sort out, but among them all I actually intend to prioritise this blog a bit more, because on the whole I just need to be getting more shit done. Stay tuned. I really do have more planned.

You were expecting a new year's post? Too bad! It's just a dumb running Sonic!

2012-01-07T13:55:00.003Z

http://dumbrunningsonic.tumblr.com/

Expo

2011-10-31T03:28:00.000Z

I went to the London MCM Expo again yesterday. Not in costume this time, instead I was helping Joe and Blanca move their wares. They shifted a fair bit of stuff, and it all looked like a good bit of fun so I'd sort of like to do something similar in the future. I also bought a couple of their things for myself.

In other news, I promise I'm not dead; I've just been working to the bone on a project that never seems to end and has gone past about three deadlines already. Once it's done I've got many things I wish to do, none of which will get done, but it's the thought that counts.

Two-Way Mirror video: scaling scene

2011-08-28T05:56:00.008+01:00

I recently helped out on a music video directed by Matt Layzell.

I'd like to spotlight a scene that I thought was rather nicely done, the "scaling" part where the universe seems to be shrinking to sub-atomic size around the girl character.

I got to see the rough animation for this scene, which Matt did, and when I saw the final version done by Joe Sparrow I thought he'd finished it really nicely.

He added lots of nice touches like the slickly animated pigtails, and plenty of little cushions and extra in-betweens to smooth out the actions, but there's also lots of specific little "Joe" touches that really add life to it.

Joe really likes to use smears in his animation. At first (at least, the first time I saw him doing it) he kind of overused it, but here he just adds it subtley in the eyes.

He makes use of those funny duck-lips for a couple of little elastic bounces. You only really see them subconsciously, but they're pretty funny. They're also a nice timing contrast with the slower-moving pigtails.

There's even a very subtle bounce on her pupils at one point.

The way he changes their shape is really clever, too. It implies she's paying a bit more attention to what she's looking at. Reminds me of a part in Eva where Shinji's in a cinema, watching with lifeless eyes, then when he sees a couple making out in the front row the highlights come back in.

It's also nice how the ducklips are sometimes drawn in and sometimes not. In some cases Joe was just interpreting the mouth shapes of the rough drawings literally, but he makes good decisions to keep the expressions varied and cute.

And isn't the way he interprets the arms on this bit appealing?

He also does something very neat with the pigtails here.

He allows them to float on 3s, 4s, and even a 5 at one point. It's an aspect of timing that I think I've mentioned before and that doesn't get used enough. Having movements on slower in-betweens makes them feel slower than they actually are, compared to if they were completely on 2s or 1s. Anime tends to have alot of stuff in-betweened on 3s, and sometimes this results in a nice, sedate feel, but mostly it's just because anime production is dirt cheap. These pigtails may or may not have been intentional on Joe's part, but I like them so I'm including them anyway!

(also why did I make 3 gifs before figuring out I could get a cleaner result by just using the image sequence out of Flash instead of the shit Quicktime? Oh well, I'm not remaking them)

This whole scene is also a testament to how great it is to just get extra help when you're really struggling for time on a job. This video was done at a very bad time and went way past deadline, and Matt was pulling his hair out about getting it done. He really hated the idea of bothering other people to help, but in the end he got Joe to do this and a few other scenes. Apart from the obvious alleviation of some of the workload, the fact that Joe was coming into the project fresh, rather than bleary-eyed after seven consecutive all-nighters, just let him do better stuff than I think the rest of us were (that and the fact that he's talented and hard-working). In fact, Matt was so pleased that he used Joe's style as the model for everything else afterwards!

The result is that a good bit of animation got the chance to be turned into a great bit of animation.

Here's some more treats I thieved from Flash files foolishly given to me by genius man Matt Layzell.

"I like this frame" - Matt while drawing this frame.

I hope Matt and Joe don't mind me posting all this stuff. Guess I'll find out soon enough if they don't.

Here's something that I actually did.

This one moves too but it's too wide so you'll have to click it.

I used one of those kaleidoscope paint flash things. Not to do the gifs, though, that was just plain-old obsessive copy-pasting in Photoshop and After Effects until 5 in the morning for no reason other than that I wanted to solve this problem I'd given myself. Yeah.

I recently saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Super 8. Apes was serviceable but not much more. Super 8 was pretty good, as long as you can accept the fact that it is literally E.T. crossed with Cloverfield. The child actors were actually good, which I feel is a rarity these days.

Happy Birthday Joe!

2011-08-09T06:05:00.008+01:00

Today marks the day of birth of my good friend and fellow blogger Josef Sparrow!

He is a big meme-spouting loser just like me so we get on very well. (just kidding, he's actually much cooler than I'll ever be) He's an extremely talented draftsman, designer, animator, and all-round artist. He maintains TWO awesome blogs and actually updates at least one of them on a semi-regular basis at any given time, which is more than can be said for me. Check them both out. He also plays a mean Wario, Dedede, and Ness in Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and Terran in Starcraft 2 (which he might also be good at but I haven't 1v1ed him since he made it to Platinum league).

This completely-not-related-to-birthdays birthday e-card commemorates the love that all Terrans have for walking up to your front door and just bloody sitting there shelling your expansion with searing volleys of white-hot explodey death knowing full-well you can't do a damn thing about it, the bastards.

Here's to 23 years more of YOU, Joe.

[EDIT] Recent events indicate that I should replace the Hatchery with a Nexus and add some Banshees killing Immortals. 1-1-1 ftw.

Sonic CD intro movie

2011-06-03T23:10:00.004+01:00

This is my favourite animated rendition of Sonic the Hedgehog ever.

EMBEDDING DISABLED BY REQUEST :( Click for video

It basically represents everything that Sonic should always have been about, but has never quite achieved in 3D: enjoyment of space. It's essentially a minute-and-a-half of Sonic just running through nicely rendered, but plain environments, and yet somehow it's more entertaining than three different American Saturday morning cartoons and a three-season anime. The fantastically executed animation and appealing model are part of it, but I think more fundamentally it's because of the sheer joy taken in moving the character around an environment.

I've been meaning to write this post for ages, but I kept just getting lost taking screenshots of the video, because it's so overwhelmingly rich and there's so much for me to say about it. It's hard for me to think of a way to structure a post about it, so I think it best to start off slow: let's look just at the first shot in really hardcore detail.

We start off looking just at a background.

It's not quite static: the clouds move slowly to the right. The clouds themselves are tweened, but the shadows are hand animated in a nice wobbly way that implies uneven ground (I feel like I've seen the same thing done in Ghibli movies). Overall the feel is serene.

Suddenly, a cloud of dust streaks in from the right.

It reaches the middle in the space of 15 frames (at 30fps). However, it's another 23 frames before we see a small dot emerge.

This is a great way of implying perspective through timing: when moving perpendicular to our view, movement appears rapid, but parallel, it seems much slower. Distance inscreases the effect. It's a simple principle, but within the first 4 seconds, before we've even indentified the character, the animation has already been used to evoke a sense of space and distance, more than the static background itself is able.

Sonic emerges from the dustcloud...

...and in the space of another 21 frames, runs straight underneath the camera, and actually leaves the frame.

We're 5 seconds in, and we've had the character visible on-screen for exactly 21 frames: less than a second. This is an ongoing theme for this video: it's not afraid to actually omit the character. It may seem nonsensical, but it's used boldly, to give more emphasis to the environment, and in this case to further imply speed. He's running so fast he's outstripped the camera movement.

This shadow as he zips past is nice. It looks like windswept grass, of course, but also a bit like a flame.

The camera catches up to Sonic, tracking him in a really extreme top-down view.

His run-cycle is 6 frames. That's even quicker than the Compaq bird, about as fast as you can realistically get away with without doing very extreme blurs and streaks (but more on that later). The speed of the animation and the intensity of the camera angle constrast really strongly with our starting point. Sonic's size in frame in quite large, too, compared with how small (or invisible) he was a moment ago.

Sonic accelerates, and leaves the frame again.

These little stars that fan out behind him are worth a mention, since they're actually a little recurring motif throughout the whole animation, generally very subtely when Sonic hits a speed boost. They're fitting though because little stars are actually a bit of a motif for all the early Sonic games. They're on the logo for the Sonic 1 title screen.

Sparkly ones appear in the title screen for Sonic 2. They've always surrounded Sonic whenever he's invincible. And they've acted as portals to Special Stages. They imply a bit of magic, and Sonic CD is quite a magical game (though that's another essay). They're quite distinct from the chunky, cartoony stars used in the Mario games.

Anyway, as Sonic runs underneath the camera, it attempts to follow him. This leads to a really wacky move as we see his trail of footprints upside down, and then the camera slowly rights itself.

The camera move itself is really cool, a really intense way to punctuate the sequence. It sort of evokes a roller-coaster, which anybody who's played a Sonic game will know is fitting. The footprints look awesome as well. Since they're close together and scrolling very quickly, they have this rapid visual rythm to them, as if we can hear Sonic's feet hitting the ground.
Sonic appears in frame again here, but very small and only briefly. What we really see is the massive dust cloud that forms in a gourgeous back-and-forth pattern as he boosts away again.

And even this gets left behind, so the last part of the shot is, again, pure landscape, though still moving rapidly.

This is all one continuous cut, and lasts about 11 seconds. We've already had very strong contrasts in timing and framing, extremely cool use of the camera, and some very nice animation. All of these have been used to emphasis a sense of space, and speed. The rest of the opening is a tour-de-force of these techniques, and tons of other little flashes of brilliance.

The shadow flashing across the mountains is incredibly cool. Technically it makes no sense, but it does so many clever things. It turns what should be a very small movement on-screen (see the size of the dust cloud) into a very big one. It lets us see the character without quite seeing him, as if he's just slightly too fast to catch sight of. It also sort of evokes the long, horizontal shadows caused by evening lighting.

The camera's static while that happens, but moves down and left, following the dust cloud as it travels the same direction, and allowing our eyes to catch up to it.

A big plume is kicked up as Sonic turns a corner, which is not just sensible but also a good way to make it clearer. The little playful little juke right afterwards is immensely pleasing. After that he slows for just a couple of frames before zooming off in a straight line.

It's just a nice, tiny little timing to help segment and organise the scene. It separates "two mountains" from...

..."two rainbows". Fuckin' splashes as rainbows, man. Who thinks up stuff like that? Awesome. Only in the 90s. There's some more little sparkly stars there, as well. The camera stays still here for about a second to provide more spacing and contrast. Something I only noticed when going through frame by frame was the very subtle way the dissipating dust cloud is animated.

From the point where Sonic leaves the frame it's aniamted on ones for 6 frames, on twos for 16 frames (8 drawings), and then on threes for 24 frames (6 drawings). Animating on threes is technically a no-no, and anime often does it simply because it's cheap. However, sometimes it has the very pleasant effect of making things feel slower and more sedate. Animating on ones causes a very frenetic, nervous feel. On twos looks normal. On threes is calming. If you want a serene scene with trees gently blowing in the wind, animating it on threes might help the effect. Here it provides another, very subtle and gradual, contrast in timing. Also, note that little bit of red that peels off the top of the second rainbow. It's delicious.

Next we get our first proper mid-shot. I guess the middle of the first scene counts, but that was all a big crazy camera move.

The shrunken thumbnails don't really show it, but there's a little flurry of leaves that subconsciously telegraphs Sonic's arrival. It's sort of like punctuation. There's a couple other devices like that which I'll point out as they crop up.

Sonic zooms into the shot extremely quickly and a bit chaotically (note the stars). I guess this is as good a time as any to point out his running animation. It's based on the animation used when he hits top speed in Sonic CD.

It's sometimes referred to as the "rubber-band" run. It's nonsensical but stylish. Using it in fanart is the official way to show you're a proper tryhard old-skool Sonic fan (or, when used in official materials, it shows that you're pandering to proper tryhard old-skool Sonic fans). He had a version of it in Brawl. Here's a page featuring it from the Archie Sonic comic, drawn by Tracey Yardley.

There's a little added twist to it here, as in some frames it's replaced by this cool-as-hell erratic zig-zaggy lightning-bolt shape.

You can see it in a couple of the earlier frames from this shot, too. In this case it has a three-frame cycle: twisted rubber-band (as in the first Sonic CD screenshot), un-twisted rubber-band (second Sonic CD screenshot), zig-zaggy. Nice. The 8-frame loop of him going round the tree messes that up a bit though.

Isn't this a great composition, by the way? The perspective makes it really yummy.

More stars!
We whip across from this static and very distinctly organised shot to...

...a very rapidly moving, chaotic shot. CONTRASTS, man! CONTRASTS!

Another very clearly organised shot.

Sonic whips in very close to the camera for exactly one frame here. It's really striking. It's also the first time we've got really up close. We start to see more of him like that from here on, though.

This dust that suddenly pops up after he's gone past is another one of those little punctuation marks I mentioned earlier. The rocks falling off the right cliff edge in the earlier set of screens also follow the camera down in a pleasing fashion. Just a little extra guide to help our eyes go in the right direction.

Not much to say about this bit, except that, once again, there's a contrast in timing: Sonic holds the top pose for a bit before curling up and shooting down quickly.

This next part's really delicious, though.

Sonic rolls along (I really like this way of drawing him in a ball, by the way), and whenever he bounces off a rock...

...he pops out of his ball form for just a few frames in order to kick off them.

It's a really lovely visual accent, and the sort of magic that I feel traditional animation is inherently suited to producing.

Sure, you could rig a 3D character for this sort of thing, but why spend hours doing that when you can just fucking draw it! It's spontaneous.
And doesn't he look appealing in these frames? This part reminds me of the fact that every one of these frames was produced by an actual human being, not a computer. Even if you're an apathetic, underpaid member of the Korean animation slave trade you're still a person, not a computer. Even the shoddiest of hand-drawn in-betweens has more personality than goddamn digital motion blur.

This shot is, again, in very nice perspective. Sonic moves closer to the camera, and gets really close before a sudden cut.

This bushy way of drawing Sonic's spines from behind reminds me of Sonic the Comic. This shot is a bit plain, but if you look closely there's a trail behind him that distorts the background slightly.

The closeups have been getting more frequent, and this is the first time we get really close to Sonic's face for any length of time. There's been sort of a gradual transition, starting off with seeing him barely at all, often just as a dust cloud cutting through the landscape, but over time we've moved in closer until we're literally under his nose. It's not an obvious choice to make for an intro movie (you'd expect to start with a good look at the character), but it fits with what I said before about enjoyment of space. It also gives the feel that the camera's been chasing Sonic, and has only just now been able to really catch up to him.

This next part is all one elaborate hand-animated camera move. No background plates or tweening here. Just good old-fashioned elbow grease and skill. (he also traces a nice line down through my screenshots, awesome)

And there's still room for more of those lovely big-small contrasts.

Shift to a front-on view again, with strong animated perspective and very striking use of the rocks as they pass through the camera.

And Sonic finally stops moving for a moment.

This is a good juncture to comment on how well-timed the animation is to the music. So much so that I'm inclined to believe they were produced concurrently in a back-and-forth process, rather than just storyboarding to a set track (this is a fantastic way to work, by the way, if you can do it). From the wooshing sound effect and right-to-left panning snare rush at the beginning as Sonic first enters the frame, to the way that each line of the first verse is timed to a moment in the animation ("TEN TEN" for the two mountains, "NINE NINE" for the two rainbows). This whole rapid tracking shot is accompanied by a distinct part of the track, where soft synth pads come in under the vocals. It's a clear build up to something.

Moar contrasts, as we pull out quickly, only for Sonic to dash in suddenly towards the camera, and the music reaches a climax...

...something a little interesting happens. Right as we have another panning snare-rush, Sonic's animation stops, and he fades out slowly. It's a weird thing to do but it just sort of works. To me it implies he's hitting WARP SPEED.

Doesn't matter though because the next bit is sweet as hell.

Sonic's done the whole skipping/running across water thing in various different games, but it's never been as cool as this. The way his legs suddenly do the rubber-band/zig-zag thing right as he hits it is really ingenious. Combined with the timing it really gives the feeling that he's pushing himself out of the water by running against it really fast. Rather than trivialising the action by having him skim across weightlessly, the effort is emphasised, and that makes it seem so much more powerful.

And look how gourgeous the splashes are! The lack of black outlines makes the water feel really fresh and clear, and even the reflection is animated properly. And even though it's fairly complex animation, it's not like Disney's hyper-detailed realistic water. It's stylised and simplified, but still feels genuinely wet, just through simple techniques and skilled movement.

Have I talked enough about contrasts in framing yet? Also, that shadow is a really neat way to give some volume to a top-down view like that.

Sonic just keeps zipping towards and away from the camera!

This shot really teases us. We don't even get a dust cloud, all we see is some rustling in the trees before a tiny dot races over the hill and suddenly he's in our face again.

The legs are on a different cycle from before, too. Now it's four-frames: two-looped rubber-band, zig-sag, two-looped rubber-band, three-looped rubber-band (third to last screenshot shows what I mean). They really go all over the place but it looks neeeat.

The song continues to build towards the chorus, and we get more and more of the character moving into and out of the shot.

THE

POWER

YOUR

MIND

SHAVE

THE

PLANET

CONQUER

TIIIIII-

-EEEEEEE-

-IIIIIIIIIME.

Did you spot the flash frames of Sonic drilling through the rock first time through? My mate Andy didn't. But even if you don't, they're suitably emphatic for the climax of the song (and the cheesy lyrics even fit!)

The view is once again pulled out here but the movement of the tiny Sonic zipping around this mountain is really slick and satisfying. The bit where he leaps off the little outcrop on the right onto the main body is especially bejujular.

Can you tell I'm running out of synonyms for "good"?

This right here is just some super awesome animation. Really pushing the stylised legs. It's almost a shame it's so brief, stills barely do it justice. I like how after looping so quickly around the rock Sonic does just one extra spin in mid-air. Whenever animating something rotating, it's always a good idea to add just one more spin.

These red sparks are an excellent detail to emphasise how much the chain is straining against the weight of an entire planet (and itself, probably).

Most extreme camera move yet? I like the streaky background as the camera pans around, too.

As Sonic goes into a spin here he flashes out of the compact ball for the odd frame or two and we see his face. Nice little detail!

More stars! It's not always apparent, but they seem to always between circular and triangular arrangements on alternate frames. I don't know why, but it's always fun to discover whatever little systems the animator came up with for what he was doing.

As Sonic rolls down the hill, he does a little hop partway. This adds a point of interest to the action and stops it being all one smooth motion. It also reminds me of a peculiarity in the Game Gear version of Sonic 1 where if you rolled down a hill fast enough, Sonic would do a hop right at the bottom.

The last shot is the icing on the cake. There's three seperate backgrounds, but on continuous sequence of animation.

There's a little splash on the surface of the water...

...and then a barely visible dot shoots up...

Spot the pixel.

It quickly turns into Sonic.

And as his face fills the screen, there's a hidden cut (well, it's actually a cross-fade of about 6 frames, which is a pity because I don't think they needed it!)

Then, as he enters the cloud cover...

...and emerges from it, we get a full sense of scale.

And finally disappears for the last time.

All throughout, while there's constantly rich and interesting animation, there's a strong emphasis on bringing the character into and out of the frame (both in terms of depth and literally being inside or outside our view). The idea is that all the space that exists is free for him to exist in. Unlike the side-scrolling 2D games, he's not limited to a flat plane at a constant distance from the camera: he can literally go anywhere and travel in any direction, whether it's ten miles from us, right up close, in the center of our view, or off the screen.

This is also used structurally, to an extent.

A graph of Sonic's distance from the camera.

For the first 15 seconds he remains at a distance, and any closeups before around 25 seconds are either very brief, or from an obscured viewpoint. As the song builds in tension there are lots of relatively small changes in depth, but after it really kicks in the changes are less frequent, but much more extreme. Note that it's only after the first third that we have any lines going all the way from top-to-bottom or vice-versa. And any part where there isn't an extreme change in framing instead has a distinct action that needs to be seen clearly (skipping across the water, drilling through the rock). There's probably more information to be gleaned from this graph, inaccurate as it is.

This is, to me, what Sonic as a character should be about. All attempts to have him engage with other characters have been, to me, mediocre at best. No extraneous friends, no talking, no drama, just action and space and FUN. My god, doesn't it look like Sonic's having a good time flipping around rocks and rolling over hills and running on water and shit? Why can't any of the 3D games be that satisfying? CAN they be that satisfying? Of course, you couldn't ever make a cartoon or comic series out of Sonic running around, but maybe that's a sign that the whole idea is flawed. Sonic's a videogame character. If it weren't for the constant troubles his games have been having for the past decade, maybe more people would accept that and we'd have less fanart of Sonic pregnant with Shadow's child (I did actually find this on Deviantart but I can't bear to actually post it).

This masterpiece, according to the credits, was directed by Yukio Kaizawa, and the lead animator was Hisashi Eguchi.

Here's a little animation I did sort of inspired by this.

I drew from a few different sources: the way he distorts when he revs up is from Sonic Advance; the little white streak that spins around is from Sonic Spinball; the dust cloud is partially ripped from Sonic 2. I don't feel I quite got the model down right (I was sort of aiming for an in-between of many things), but I still think it looks nice.

Bloated blog post incoming

2011-05-16T18:56:00.016+01:00

Recently, I watched His and Her Circumstances (aka Karekano) and it was great but had a shit ending; at around the same time I watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica and it was shit but had a great ending. They have no relation other than this, but let's compare.

Karekano is a high-school romance story about Yukino Miyazawa, a girl who puts on a "model student" facade, but has this image ruptured when she encounters Souichiro Arima, a boy who's apparently even more perfect than she is. Hijinks, drama, friendship, and romance ensue.

It's great because it has a protagonist who's so appealing, so endearing, and also so flawed and human and relateable that she could almost carry the entire series by herself. She's not some perfect waifu construct with artificial moe traits and token non-flaws like "clumsiness" or "shyness": she's eccentric and quirky but also self-centered, competitive, vain, compulsive, and petty. These flaws make her cute but also a specific personality. The secondary characters who join in are all good, but rather than being overshadowed by such a strong protagonist, they're all made better by the way they bounce off eachother. They're still able to stand on their own, though: there's a couple of episodes that don't feature Yukino at all, and I barely noticed. The pacing is much better than the only other romance series I've watched so far: by episode 5, they're a couple. By episode 19, they've had sex. This means that it actually gets into real, believable issues instead of fucking dancing around them for 26 episodes. Although I can't judge it as an adaptation, having not read the manga yet, it's also clearly got a director's touch , as the images above will hopefully suggest. The character designs switch between very 90s shoujo-manga "sharp-noses-and-chins", and chibi "round-faces-and-big-eyes" styles. One may not particularly like either, but the contrast is consistently pleasing. The first half was directed by Hideaki Anno of Eva fame, the second half partly by Kazuya Tsurumaki of FLCL, and both leave their marks on their episodes. Anybody who's watched either of those works will know the sorts of things to look out for.

The only problem is that, apparently, Masami Tsuda hated the adaptation for whatever reason, and halfway through the series, the budget was slashed. This led to recap-episodes galore, less animation, less visual treats in general (the paper cutouts of episode 19 are a triumphant last gasp), and a total inability to put any sort of conclusion on the end of it. It's not a Gainax end, it's a non-end: as of episode 26 it seems like we're just starting to get into a new arc for a couple of different characters, but things just stop and we're treated to the words "And so the his and her stories continue". I can't really hold it as a serious negative point against the series, it just looks like I'll have to read the manga after all.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is about Madoka Kaname, a high-school girl with a very happy life and loving family, who one days finds herself thrust into a world of magic and monsters.

A cute little fluffy white thing called Kyubey wants her to forge a contract with him and become a magical girl to fight beings called witches. She's accompanied by Sayaka Miki, a schoolmate, Mami Tomoe, a magical girl who offers friendship, and Homura Akemi, a frosty bitch who for some reason is dead set on Madoka not making the contract.

Left to right: Homura, Madoka, Sayaka, Mami.

I already discussed many of the problems of this series, but basically it boils down to shitty pacing and characters that I just couldn't make myself believe. Alot more went on after the point I was up to with my last entry, though, so there's more talk about. Since this series is more plot-driven than character-driven I'll have to spoil stuff and give a plot summary in order to make my points clear, but I'm sure nobody cares. I can't really condense it very well, though, so there's WORDSWORDSWORDS ahead. Feel free to skip.

The first three episodes form an arc of sorts. We're introduced to our four main characters, and we get the setup: girls with magical potential contract with Kyubey by making a wish, which he grants, and in exchange, receive a Soul Gem and become magical girls, tasked with fighting witches. If magical girls are born from wishes, witches are born from curses; one spreads hope, while the other spreads despair. When a witch is killed, it leaves behind a Grief Seed, with which a magical girl can cleanse the darkness that builds up in her Soul Gem as she uses magic. Kyubey is keen for Madoka to contract, saying that she has the potential to become the most powerful magical girl ever. Mami provides not only the exposition for all this, but is also a guiding figure in general.

Madoka wrestles with the fact that because she's got such a damn happy life, she's got nothing to wish for, but ultimately decides that all she wants is to become a magical girl and help people. However, in episode 3, Mami suffers a sudden and violent death at the hands of a witch, and Madoka and Sayaka realise what becoming a magical girl really means: you risk your life.

The next arc is longer, spanning episodes 4 to 9. Madoka, distraught and terrified by Mami's death, decides she can't contract with Kyubey after all. Sayaka, however, has other worries: Kyosuke, a boy she's known for a long time and is in love with, is in hospital after an accident; he used to be a talented violinist, but now it seems unlikely he will ever be able to play again. As he becomes more depressed, Sayaka decides to contract with Kyubey, and uses her wish to heal Kyosuke's hand. Shortly afterwards, however, another magical girl, Kyoko, turns up, frustrated at Sayaka's naivete in destroying witches' familiars before they kill someone, which allows them to mature into useful, Grief Seed-bearing witches.

This extends to severe disagreements over how properly to use one's wish: Kyoko insists that it should only be used for oneself, and using it for someone else leads only to ruin. Sayaka and Kyoko repeatedly come to blows over this, neither willing to back down over their beliefs.

Eventually, Madoka tries to prevent them from fighting by grabbing Sayaka's Soul Gem and throwing it away before she can transform, only for Sayaka to suddenly cease moving. Thus we learn that the Soul Gem literally contains a magical girl's soul, and can only operate her body by proxy within a 100 metre radius. Kyoko and Sayaka are horrified, but Kyubey can't understand why: it's convenient as it allows their bodies to take alot more punishment than usual.

Kyoko gets over it, but Sayaka doesn't: she becomes convinced that Kyosuke will never accept her with a "zombie" body, so she lets another girl take him. Kyoko tries to talk to her, but Sayaka is inconsolable. Eventually, she refuses help to such an degree that she falls into total despair, and thus we learn what becoming a magical girl really means: when a magical girl inevitably loses all hope, her Soul Gem shatters and becomes a Grief Seed, and she turns into a witch.

This, it turns out, is the crucial part of a system devised by Kyubey's race, the Incubators, for generating energy to avert the heat death of the universe (dialogue translations all refer to "entropy", but I'm fairly sure that's a misuse of the term). They found a way to create energy from emotions, but their own race lacks these, so they use pubescent human girls. Energy is generated when a girl "matures" into a witch, and can also be harvested from the used Grief Seed that she will give up when slain.

Kyoko and Madoka make an attempt to save Sayaka, but it's in vain, and Kyoko gives her life to destroy Sayaka and end her suffering. However, this leaves a problem: all these events have been set to the backdrop of the impending Walpurgis Night, a festival of witches that no single magical girl can take on. Now the only one left in the city is Homura. Unless, that is, Madoka contracts. But Homura can't allow that. And in episode 10, we finally find out why.

Homura was originally a shy, bespectacled girl, who transferred to Madoka's school after a long hospital term. She got made fun of for being useless, and Madoka was the only person who was nice to her.

Soon after, she was attacked by a witch, but found herself saved by two magical girls: Madoka and Mami. They told her about magical girls and witches. However, a month later, they both died to Walpugis Night. Distraught, Homura contracted with Kyubey, wishing to redo her meeting with Madoka, and to be somebody who protects her, instead of being protected. Thus, she became a magical girl, and gained time control powers: she is able to rewind time to when she left the hospital, just before transferring and meeting Madoka. The second time around didn't go much better, however, as instead of dying to Walpurgis Night, Madoka's Soul Gem became overloaded, and she turned into a witch. So Homura went back again. In fact, she went back multiple times, but somehow, each time Madoka's fate only became more dire, as did, for some reason, her potential as a magical girl and a witch. In the penultimate loop, she had the power to destroy the entire earth in a matter of days once transformed. Thus, it's out of the question for Homura to allow her to contract with Kyubey in this timeline.

I'll end that long-winded summary here for now in order to give some actual thoughts. My problems with the series mainly stem from the second arc, effectively the "Sayaka" arc. A fair bit is developed in this part, but the overall driving force is Sayaka's gradual descent into despair. The problem for me is that this, in itself, is not believable, or at the very least it fails to garner sympathy. It's at least partly because Kyosuke, who motivates the entire series of events, is a really shit, unappealing character. All we really see is him lying in bed, at best moping about how he can't play violin any more, at worst, being a total dick to the girl looking after him. He doesn't have any sort of personality that we, as the audience, could possibly like, and any actions he takes can only make us like him even less. We're simply told that Sayaka loves him, and this isn't good enough when a visual medium is meant to show, not tell. So when Sayaka starts destroying herself over him, I don't feel sympathy for her: I think that either she's fucking stupid, or this is a poorly written story.

Some of the actions Sayaka takes are also downright inexplicable even given the circumstances. "He can't love me because I'm a zombie" is melodramatic crap, but I can at least believe there's some motivation behind it: turning down Grief Seeds that she's been given specifically to clean her Soul Gem before it reaches its limit is just... nonsensical. Of course, a self-destructive character doesn't need to have a sane reason for what they do (my graduation film is practically about that fact), but somehow the writing was just insufficient to make me take Sayaka seriously. Maybe I just didn't feel it was consistent with what we knew about her as a character beforehand. It's a complicated problem and is basically rooted in suspension-of-disbelief, which is highly subjective, but that's my view on the matter.

There are other, lesser issues along these lines, such as Kyoko suddenly deciding she's lesbo for Sayaka and killing herself along with her, and the stuff that I talked about last time, but this is my main beef. Even though it only lies with one character, this is a character who drives a good 7-episode arc of a 12 episode series. The first two episodes weren't horrible, the third episode was decent, the 10th episode (the Homura-reveal episode) was actually pretty fucking good. Everything in between just felt slow, unconvincing, and artificial to me.

The ending though. My god, the fucking ending. For the most part, I was only sticking with this series because I wanted to know how the hell it was going to end. The fact that the last two episodes were delayed only added more frustration. Amazingly, though, when they finally arrived, I was actually satisfied.

Episode 11 was essentially a formality. We got the exposition that Madoka's steadily increasing power was, in fact, caused by Homura's constant rewinds: since the energy generated by a magical girl is proportional to the misfortune she's destined to carry, the interwoven fate lines of multiple alternate universes all being wound around Madoka gave her incredible magical potential. Other than this though, it's basically build up to seeing Homura fail to stop Walpurgis Night, and very nearly give in to despair when she realises that if she rewinds again, she'll only make things even worse.

Episode 12 is where the busines happens: Madoka makes her wish.

And it's a clever one: "I want to erase every witch before they are born! Every witch from every world, from the past and the future. With my own hands."

In a flash, we see Madoka transformed, finally, into her magical girl attire, and fire a single arrow into the sky.

This triggers a sequence where magical girls throughout history, about to succumb to grief and transform, see a smiling girl in a pretty pink dress appear out of the sky and draw the darkness out of their Soul Gems, allowing them to simply disappear peacefully.

Eventually the giant witchlike creature at the centre of Walpurgis Night is destroyed too, and Homura finds herself on the moon. She hears Kyubey's voice telling her that the laws of the universe are being reworked to account for Madoka's wish. Then a giant, swirling comet appears in the sky: it's Madoka's Soul Gem. It quickly swells up on the massive amounts of despair being absorbed from every point in time, enough to destroy a whole universe, until it shatters, and the worst witch ever is born.

However, Madoka reappears out of nowhere, repeating that her wish was to destroy all witches. This includes her own. So she declares that she has no reason to despair, draws her bow again, and destroys it.

The paradox this creates results in reality being totally rewritten: Madoka no longer exists as a person, but as an omnipresent force. Basically the hope of magical girls. Or magical girl Jesus. We get alot of Madoka and Homura naked and in space and talking about how they won't forget eachother and blah blah blah

Basically Madoka gives Homuhomu her hair ribbons and disappears, while Homuhomu goes back to a world where she's the only person who remembers Madoka. In this world, magical girls and the Incubators still exist, but instead of the whole witches thing, creatures called demons appear from the directionless, shapeless sorrow of humanity in general, and these give up little black cubes that the Incubators use to harvest energy and avert the heath death of the universe. Then there's a confusing epilogue that nobody understands where Homura has some distinctly witchy-looking powers, but hasn't given up hope, and is still fighting demons. The end.

So why did I like this ending so much? Essentially, it was a satisfactory resolution to the ongoing themes of the series, and it actually felt consistent with the main character, unlike the whole Sayaka farce.

Although I couldn't fit it into my plot summary, one of the ideas developed throughout the series is that hope and despair balance out. Although a magical girl has a wish granted for her transformation, it will ultimately create an equally powerful curse: for every person she saves, another is damned. It's pretty trite, but this ending was satisfying because of the way it challenged that idea, essentially defying the internal rules of the story's own universe, and resolved it while remaining consistent with the personality of the character doing it, Madoka.

What do I mean by that? Well, the problems I've seen brought up with this ending are many and various, but mostly boil down to "Why didn't she wish for something better?" Suffering still exists! For example, "I wish the Incubators didn't exist"; "I wish the Incubators never came to earth"; "I wish entropy didn't exist"; "I wish suffering didn't exist." The thing is, none of these would be in Madoka's nature, and this was made apparent throughout all 12 episodes. Even if they're a bunch of emotionless self-serving bastards, it's clear that she's just too nice to wish for the non-existance of an entire race. And although she shys away from doing it for a long time,she also states that she loves the idea of being able to become a magical girl, not only having a wish granted but also being given the power to help people. Overall, she loves the world as it is, she just felt that magical girls got a raw deal, having to turn into the very things they fought, and be doomed to curse everything that exists until they get destroyed. That was the only part she wanted to fix. Yeah, it's silly and naive to rewrite the laws of nature just so a bunch of girls in frilly outfits get to die peacefully, but Madoka's a silly and naive little girl, so it makes sense for her to make a wish like that.

Essentially, the ending succeeded where the middle failed for me: it made me believe that the focal character would do what she did. It was also just fucking awesome. I can't really justify it in terms of serious "good writing" or "good storytelling" or whatever, because it's fucking silly: I just enjoyed it. So even though there were about 3 good episodes to 9 mediocre-to-shitty ones, and the whole show is still blatant otaku-fodder with terrible character designs that belong in a different genre, it managed an ending that satisfied me, and satisfying endings are something that anime just doesn't tend to do. Lots of fans are clamouring for a second season, especially given that weird epilogue, but I feel that, on a thematic level, this series has concluded.

It kind of feels weird that I wrote only a little about Karekano, which I loved, and loads about Madoka, which I mostly didn't love at all. I guess it's because I was able to sum up pretty much all my thoughts about the latter in the above writing, whereas my thoughts on the former just wouldn't fit in a single post, so a very brief summary was necessary.

To go back to actually comparing them, I guess they're the result of two very different situations and approaches. Karekano had loads of talent working on it (direction, animation, writing of the source material), but, ultimately, a shortage of money. Madoka had, as far as I'm concerned, very little talent working on it (one-trick pony director, hack writer, shit animators, terrible character designer, though I guess Gekidan Inu Curry did the visuals for the witches and they're quite good), but huge amounts of money (remember how I've talked about Shaft's inability to do expensive animation that actually looks good). The fact that the ending was good might as well be luck, though. I've been told that Gen Urobuchi is actually a good writer, but if this is what all his work's like I'm not expecting much.

My token creative effort is unrelated this time. It's also old: the Jeopardy theme in Notessimo!

I do have something actually good that I've been working on, but that's saved for the next entry. I'll be good, I promise. I don't like doing these "summarise all my thoughts on an entire series" entries these days, the way I write turns all shitty when I do, so the next one will be more directed.

By the way, if you like that stupid nyan-cat thing that's been going around, you suck. Because it's a shitty second generation meme. This is the original. And I don't care how much of a basement dwelling loser anyone thinks I am for caring or even knowing.

Redline

2011-05-01T12:32:00.007+01:00

I just got back from the Anime All-nighter at the Apollo cinema in Piccadilly. There were a bunch of films shown, but the only one I went for was Redline, Takeshi Koike's directorial debut. I'm late to the party, as I missed every other showing in the UK, but here's my thoughts in brief.

It was pretty awesome. The character designs are wacky as fuck, but apparently every good japanese animator ever worked on this at some point, so they generally move pretty confidently (though not quite at the level of Mok from Rock & Rule). The whole thing is covered in the thick black shadows that are Koike's signature (see also Trava: Fist Planet and The Animatrix: World Record), but it also achieves a great variety in atmosphere thanks to fantastic colour work. And the action is amazing.

Designs in these images not representative of most of those seen in the actual movie. These are just the ones that exist online.

However, if I had to fault it, I'd say that the pacing kind of falls apart in the second half. It's not that there's any problem with the story, which is wilfully silly and over-the-top, but it felt like things took too long to pick back up after the incredibly intense beginning. And once they did, it lacked focus due to lots of characters and an inability to keep them unified in purpose.

Here's a plot summary to aid further discussion: "Sweet" JP is a racer participating in the Yellowline race, a qualifier for the Redline, but he's prevented from winning by his dealings with the mafia. However, it turns out that this latest Redline is to be held on the planet Roboworld, whose government is so unhappy about it that they intend to use military force against the contestants. As a result, two of the qualifiers back out, allowing JP to enter after all based on popular vote. In the meantime, he has to get a new set of wheels since his last was trashed in the previous race, as well as contend with the Roboworld army's intense hostility.

The Yellowline sequence is utterly fantastic. The sheer energy injected into the animation is practically tangible, with an amazing climax when JP overloads his car on nitro, and we see his already ridiculous quiff distorted fish-eye style, along with the rest of his body and vehicle. This segment alone tops almost anything I've seen in animation for years. It is near literally mindblowing.

The middle is, naturally, slower: it's where the plot is developed, and we become more familiar with JP and the other main characters, as well as getting to see all the other zany faces who will be competing in the Redline. This break in the pacing is necessary and natural, as we need a rest after the opening, and the excitement needs to be gradually built up for the finale. However, it simply lasts too long: I eventually found myself wishing we could just get to the race.

That race, the Redline, takes up the latter section of the film, and should have been the most intense and focused part. However, I actually felt it didn't quite live up to the opening either in terms of sheer vitality, or skilled direction. With 8 participants (technically some of them are pairs, but they can be counted as one character each for practical purposes), all of whom are distinct characters who beg for screen-time, there's alot to deal with. However, the government element, trying to blow up all the racers, is given too great a share. It would've worked better as maybe a single character or even just a faceless plot device, but instead there are at least three separate people from the government faction who take away focus from the ones we really want to see. And there was even a frustrating period within the final segment where I wished we could get back to the race... because, as the army's interference reaches its peak, and a Tetsuo-esque foetus-shaped bioweapon runs rampant, the race is brought to a temporary halt.

This is actually a plot element that always really irks me in racing movies: actually stopping the race itself for all participants. A climax is most satisfying when it feels like every moment up to that point was vital to the outcome: that if the protagonist had been an inch slower, had faltered in his resolve for one microsecond more, his skin-of-the-teeth victory wouldn't have been possible. Bringing the entire thing to a halt feels like we're starting the whole thing over from a blank slate, effectively robbing everything that came before of any meaning or significance.

To give an overall picture, here's how the pacing felt to me

and here's how I wanted it to feel.

I'm being harsh, of course. For all my criticism, it's still an amazing film. Koike is a genuinely visionary director and animator, and even if I felt the pace dragged sometimes, every drawing was clearly packed with raw love for the medium. I don't think anything quite like this will be made again for a long, long time, and there's a high chance I'll make it the first Blu-ray I ever buy. If nothing else, it's an incredibly intense sensory experience that anybody who likes animation should undergo. However, at the end of the day, there were ways I felt it could've been better.

Here's a crappy Flash doodle of JP, our hero. In days gone by I could've had hair like this, but alas, it is no longer to be.

It's redundant though because the official poster does the same distorted quiff thing, only better.

Lolzzzzz

Now that I think of it, it's interesting that the same event also aired the summary movie for Eden of the East, as well as the first of the two sequel movies. I watched this series back when it aired, but it didn't occur to me at the time just how hollow it actually is. It's one of those apparently western-influenced Production I.G. works that "deals with" alot of "modern issues": it's chock full of NEETs, terrorists, frustrated women, post-war trauma, post-depression ennui, post-9/11 apathy, vague ideas about young people taking responsibility for the world, and other such platitudes. However, I don't believe for a moment that the director actually gives a shit about any of those things. If he does, he's a fucking terrible writer, because the whole thing is convoluted in a way that would make Tsugumi Ohba have an aneurysm. All the supposeldy meaningful themes are whitewashed over the dialogue and story in such an excessive and slapdash manner that it's impossible to say what the series is actually supposed to be "about". It also has one of the worst lead characters ever.

STUPID BITCH

SERIOUSLY, FUCK YOU

Meanwhile, Redline is about cars going REALLY FUCKING FAST, but is so honest and unpretentious about it that even if you criticised it more than I did up there, you'd have to be a truly miserable person to actually dislike it for it.

EotE also constrasts nicely with Akira, which was the first film shown in the all-nighter, since Akira actually was about its themes, rather than using theme as a shallow excuse to be aired in the noitaminA block.

I HAVE MORE PLANNED. STAY TUNED.

Happy Birthday to my sister!

2011-04-18T04:03:00.002+01:00

Today my dear sister Kirsty turns 23. She is in performance arts and works with the BAC and I am really really proud of her because she is always doing amazing things and doesn't seem to know how to stop being productive.

You should go and read her blog, Ignore the Forecast, and read about the Peter Pan bedroom she made at the Evening Standard. She was also on BBC news with it but I don't think it's on the iPlayer anymore. She also made a thing called The Tree of Lost things on which you hang little memos detailing things you've lost, which was very nice. I always find it a little difficult to explain to people what she does, and sometimes I'm not even sure myself (she's the kind of person you can play the "guess my job" game with for a very long time), but whatever it is she's doing she can do it for as long as she wants because she's my lovely sister and I love her.

<3 <3 <3

Compaq bird

2011-03-16T00:44:00.008Z

Sod the "I haven't posted in ages, here's a bunch of miscellany" style post, let's have a good look at something cool!

So recently I was looking on Youtube for a car commerical I once saw that used Aphex Twin's Gwely Mernans to good effect (it had the car being chased by a wave coming up from the road). I never did find that particular ad, but the "aphex twin commercial" search term did turn up this little gem by Studio AKA.

This ad features some of the boldest transitions and camera moves I've ever seen, and is a great example of how much you can get away with in animation.

The whole thing has a really frantic pace to it. It's the sort of that that gets jarring when it's used in a 10-minute or longer cartoon, but for a 50-second commercial spot it's perfect. The entire thing is animated on ones, with a constant boil, but it's a necessary thing for the pacing to work, rather than simply being a case of "expensive rather than good" animation.

The bird character's design is extremely simple, but he's still immensely appealing, just because of his super jaunty 8-frame walk cycle (4 frames per step).

The consistency of this frenetic 4-frame rythm is nicely counterbalanced by contrasts in the timing of the camera moves throughout.

As we move away from his field and see the rubbish bin the view moves relatively slowly and smoothly.

Then he does a little 3-frame take...

and we start accelerating more rapidly in towards the bin...

and when he gets to it, he suddenly leaps inside in the space of about 9 frames.

After he rifles through the bin, we whip round quickly again...

before we get a slower move following his movement through the pipe.

There's a constant rythm of slow vs fast (well, fast vs not-so-fast), which breaks up and frames the smaller rythm of the bird's walk. So despite the fact that it's consistently high speed, there's still variation within that speed; it's not like a rubbish Flash cartoon where every single motion happens in the space of 5 frames to disguise the symbol changes (and I speak from experience on this).

The quicker camera moves are, as I said, really bold, almost downright abusive. They're the sort of thing that works even if you don't consciously register it.

How long does it take a bird to leave a building?

Five frames.

Enter another one?

5 frames. And look at how utterly nonsensical those middle frames are! Yet, in motion, it looks totally smooth!

And these two camera moves are still handled very differently. The first one comes very abruptly and suddenly, but the second has a significant, gradual ease in, and while it doesn't ease out, the way the revolving door slows down gives the illusion that it does.

There's also a variety in framing distances and angles. Before the first of those two transitions, we have a static mid shot.

In between, an extreme long shot.

And after the second, something in-between...

which does a very stylish transition into a close-up (note how those stairs don't actually make sense).

This variety in framing is interesting in and of itself, but it also facilitates the variety in timing. The extreme long shot lets the camera pan very slowly, while this turning move into a close-up makes for a very pleasing ease in and out.
Also, even though there's lots of (very clever) cheating going on, it's not just a way to compensate for lack of skill on the part of the animators. Stuff like that move up the stairs, or the slow moves towards the bin and the plant pot are just flat-out hard to do.

Another "screenshotting every frame" move, because I still don't think you've scrolled enough yet.

A really subtle ease into a violent whip pan. And the bird doesn't even miss a beat in his walk cycle.

My favourite transition actually comes fairly early on, when he enters the bathroom. I watched it a few times, knowing something weird was going on, but when I went through it frame-by-frame to figure it out my mind was utterly blown.

The first frame.

The last frame.

How do we get the window from in front of the bath to behind it within the space of 5 frames?

By VIOLATING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AND OF CINEMA. No elaborate spin around, the window literally just slides backwards to where it needs to be. It's both a horrendous cheat and completely genius problem-solving; at the same time an utter violation and a brilliant circumvention of the 180 degree rule. And you never even see it unless you're looking for it.

The shot that follows is also probably my favourite single shot in the whole spot. It's such a lovely angle, and getting to see the bird's walk bob from side-to-side is a real treat.

And seeing something walking along under a carpet is always fun.

A clever abuse of perspective comes in the latter part, with this very straight side-on shot.

He spies a building-top in the distance...

and then treats it as if it's sitting on the same plane as he is.

Then he does the same thing with the building in the foreground that he's walking on.

It's also worth noting the exaggerated ways he jitters and wiggles about, usually as a way to telegraph an impending camera move.

What's so great about all this complete nonsense is that it couldn't be done any other way. You couldn't do this shit in 3D or live-action. It's a spontaneous, fluid joy that can only be brought about by sequences of drawings.

After this, something very clever begins to happen: changes are made to the fundamental rules that we've grown accustomed to, which is a way to signal that we're getting to the end.

The bird moves into a drain...

and, simultaneously, the colours invert, and we see something that's not been hand animated: the rings that imply the pipe (I am 99% sure they exist as actual 3D, judging by the way the linework gets thicker as they move towards the camera). The fact that this is timed with the voice-over fits perfectly, another example of how this whole ad is very cleverly paced, when it would've been so easy to do it badly. Now that I think about it, a similar device was actually used at the very beginning, when the bird does that 3-frame take before angling towards the rubbish bin in the distance: it signals the first time we start moving in three dimensions.

When the bird enters the water, we get an even more fundamental change: his walk cycle slows down, and even becomes inconsistent. He manages one step of 4 frames...

then slows down to 6...

before settling on 8.

This change of the one fundamental rythm that's underlaid the whole animation is a sure sign that something significant is about to happen. And, after three steps of that 8 frame walk, happen something does.

And then comes the first full cut we've had in the whole thing.

Followed by the most abrupt cut of all.

I really hope this is how the end card actually went out on television. It shows a hilarious disregard for the safe frame.

And, to come back to how I even found this crazy thing in the first place, the music fits all this perfectly. Donkey Rhubarb is from that sort of earlyish period in Richard D. James's work where he was putting out alot of structurally simple dance music, emphasising not so much melody, harmony or rythm as pure timbre. The wirey, steel-drum-like instrument that underlies the whole track is immediately distinctive and appealing, and matches the spare, angular designs. The clattering rate at which it plays is appropriate for the mental pace of the animation. The vibraphone-like lead that comes in at 00:15 implies expansive space with its long, reverbing decay, and perfectly accentuates the long journey our protagonist the bird is taking. When he finds the worm, the contrast of the classical piece that totally interrupts the proceedings is brilliant, as is the second interruption of the cymbal crash when the end card comes up.

All that talk of bold camera moves reminds me of a little episode from my 3rd year of uni, when me and a couple of other animators ended up, along with some graphic design students, being stuck with having to make a stupid viral film for Channel 4 at a time when we really didn't have any time.

(actually, now that I look at the credits, I remember that there was actually only one other animator! She doesn't seem to have a site of her own, but she has a director's page on Sherbet's website)

This whole project was a big mess of basically everybody just moving things about as quickly as we could in a mad dash to get the whole thing done. Some parts didn't need everybody, and at the bit where the paperclips unfold and stab the paint tubes (1:06) I end up moving the paint tubes, and directing a couple of the graphic designers animating the paperclips. They had a very hard time believing in how much I was telling them to move the paperclips for each frame. I had to do alot of insisting, and in the end it could actually still be faster than it was. But this isn't to discredit them at all: it's the sort of thing you simply can't know unless you've actually got the experience. That was, of course, a very small case: I consider myself neither experienced nor confident. The sort of confidence you'd need to do the camera moves in this commercial can only have come from years of experience. I bet the guys who directed this have been at this animation thing for ages.

So Jonno, where's your token creative effort for this post? I was going to do a drawing of Cirno from the Touhou games, because I've been rather obsessed with the music from those games lately. But then I remembered that she already has a literally infinite amount of fanart, I've still not figured out how to interpret anime characters to make them interesting, I hate drawing characters in isolation anyway, and it's also a scary business to actually get that far into the pink bishoujo ghetto that is Touhou's character designs, and just got cold feet and couldn't do anything. But then there was a "draw an anime character you like as a reaction image" thread on /a/, and I remembered that I've been watching and enjoying His and Her Circumstances lately, so I figured I'd just do that instead.

I'M SORRY IT'S STUPID OKAY. And I didn't keep the original. Might add it in later if I find it.

I'll probably write something about this series once I've watched it all and read at least some of the manga. Then I've only got to watch Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, and I'll have seen everything important that Gainax has done. After that, I'll have to decide whether I really want to watch shit like Hanamaru Kindergarten and (ugh) He Is My Master just because Gainax did it.

I think this post might have the most images in a vertical line ever. Sorry. I almost wanted to just screencap every frame of the thing. At least it's better than me whining about how much of a loser I am, right? ;_;

Radio silence

2011-02-13T06:02:00.006Z

You know something's weird when your mum gives you a Christmas present based on a side-interest you've only mentioned on your blog, and your dad calls you up and tells you you haven't updated it much recently (love you both, though, and I'm sorry I swear so much on here, I promise it's not your fault).

Yesterday I turned 25. This in itself is not a particularly relevant event, but I guess it made me feel like I should at least write something on here.

Life has felt very slow for me for the past couple of years. I've been living in the same house since I moved out of uni, and I feel like neither my career, skill-set, nor personal life have progressed in any meaningful way (not helped by how many of my friends seem to be getting married and/or having children). Over time I've come to realise that these two factors probably linked.
(Note: the following will be a familiar spiel by now to people I talk to often, sorry I'm boring)

While I initially moved into this house with people from my year at uni, over time they've all left for better things (marriage for at least two of them, christ alive!) to be replaced by randoms. Now, I have no issue with any of them, they're all lovely people, but got nothing in common with any of them. I'm happy to hold a conversation with somebody in this situation, but I find it hard to motivate myself to go out of my way to do so. Essentially, I really don't go out with the people I live with, so I stay in alot.

Another upshot of this, I've realised, is that I'm never motivated to do personal work in my own time. This is something I've spent years agonising over: I felt that I must be lazy and useless, and knowing that everybody I know is always doing incredibly awesome personal work just as a matter of course made me feel even more inadequate. More recently, however, a bit of logic started kicking in and it occurred to me that I can't really be inherently lazy, because whenever I have gainful employment, I happily work as hard as I'm asked and even harder. The same actually applied at uni: I'd work during term time, but during the holidays I'd just be lonely, idle, and depressed. Ultimately, I think it's just in my nature that I'm not very self-motivated: I need a surrounding of like-minded, hard-working, and talented people to push me along. It wasn't always this way, as when I was at school I would happily spend hours drawing pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog or Worms or Megaman or whatever videogame characters took my fancy (mostly Sonic), and I was a complete loner back then as well, but for better or worse this seems to be how I am now.

Having decided this helps me feel a bit less shitty and inadequate, but I don't really know what to actually do from here. Logic would state that I should move out and find a place with fellow animators. However, I haven't got a damn clue how to actually accomplish this. I certainly have friends who qualify on the "animator" front, but unless one of them just happens to be moving out of their current home at a convenient time it doesn't matter. In fact, there seems to be this sudden inclination amongst my friends (and apparently everybody, including David O' Reilly) to move to Berlin, but the reasons don't really appeal to me (I'm financially stable, somehow, so the cheaper rent is practically a non-issue, and there's no animation scene or industry there at all). (note that this is all a bit of an exaggeration: only one person has actually moved to Berlin, but one was considering it for a while, and it seems to be the general consensus that it's the place to be right now).

I suppose I could put an ad on Moveflat (not Bumtree), but the idea of actually meeting new people and having to live with them scares the hell out of me. However, maybe something that scares me is exactly what I need to do.

There's also a part of my brain wondering what would happen if I went the opposite route and moved into a place completely by myself and got a cat or something. I would like a cat very much.

Image is from "Tonnura-san", an amusing little manga that's become a bit of a cult hit after only two chapters thanks to THAT FUCKING CAT. LOOK AT HIM.

Without any current option to solve things with a change of environment, it seems I need to wage my battles inwardly for now, so to speak. I'm currently occupied with some work, but after this I've been telling myself, and other people, and now the small crowd that reads this blog, that I will give my showreel and website a much needed update. I've been entertaining an idea to incorporate a fairly substantial animation project into the website itself, one that I think will actually be fun for me to do, which I think will probably be far more important than any work that this initiative actually finds me. Last night, I had an amusing conversation with one of my "oh-my-god-I-literally-haven't-seen-you-in-almost-two-years" friends, Alice Dupre, about how actually trying to get work in this industry never gets you work unless you are literally annoying a studio with phone calls to the point that they give you some just so you stop bothering them. It's always recommendations from friends and people you've worked for before. So this will not be an initiative on the "advancing my career" front so much as the "making myself happy" front. Hopefully.

I'm not sure what I intended to say when I sat down to write this post, but I certainly didn't mean for it to become a giant wall of tl;dr. Again, sorry I'm boring. So, what have I been doing in between my current job and the last one?

I've been watching a lot of competitive Starcraft 2. I decided to plop down the $10 or so for a season ticket for season 4 of the Global Starcraft 2 League held in Korea (which allows full access to the livestream and VODs with english commentary, though I can only watch the latter due to timezones). It was honestly worth the price of admission. More recently I also bought the $5 ticket for the Team League, which, despite being much shorter, was actually even better, due in part to the higher emotional stakes involved in playing for your team (leading to much increased drama), but also a much improved map pool, as well as the expected improvement in the standard of play (as the metagame is still relatively young and evolving rapidly). I've never, ever been a sportsman, but I guess I can now understand why watching football/rugby/whatever is fun for people. I do also, of course, actually play the game as well, which is fun too.

Silly images follow.

I usually talk about anime so I guess I should talk about anime in this post a bit as well. I haven't actually been watching much lately though. Last season I let /a/ convince me that Invasion! Squid Girl! was something special so I started that. Unfortunately I should've just listened to my gut instincts as it turned out to just be another run-of-the-mill comedy manga adaptation so I sort of gave up after 4 episodes. However, I cannot bring myself to actually drop even a terrible series if it's only 13 episodes, so I forced myself to sit through all of it. Oh well. I've seen worse. Thing is, I've still got other decidedly mediocre series from earlier seasons that I got bored with and will eventually have to finish, including Hanamaru Kindergarten and Arakawa Under the Bridge. Damn my compulsiveness.

Sorry Squid Girl. You are occasionally cute but just not cute enough.

For this season, the only thing I'm following is Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The only real reason I decided to do so was because it's by SHAFT, who made Pani Poni Dash, Hidamari Sketch, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, and other series of perhaps variable quality, but great distinctiveness and occasional real artistry and charm. More importantly, it's actually an original anime, rather than being an adaptation of a manga or light novel, which is remarkable because I've only known SHAFT to ever do adaptations because they're poor as hell (I think they've done maybe one original project before, but I cba to look it up). I didn't actually have high expectations for it, I just wanted to see how it would turn out.

As it happens, it's sort of living up to those low expectations. I actually like some of the underlying themes and ideas, and I'm curious just to see where the story's going, but there are so many massive problems of execution that I can't really forgive it for. It's written by Gen Urobuchi, whose work I'm not familiar with, but apparently he's known for basically making horrible things happen to all his characters. That's certainly the case for this series, as SHAFT were attempting to troll everybody by making it seem like a healing anime before airing, then dropped a big fat bomb a short way in, from which point things have gotten progressively darker and more depressing.

Even though I expect nobody reading this to actually watch the show, especially given my appraisal of it below, I still can't bring myself to give true spoilers. Instead you get to read me skirting around details for several paragraphs.

However, I really take issue with some aspects of the storytelling, mosty the presence of what seems to be a common issue in anime where characters never ask obvious questions or take obvious actions, for no other reason than that the "story" requires them not to do so. For example, Homura (black-haired girl on the left in the top image) is completely intent on preventing Madoka (pink, second from left) from becoming a magical girl. However, Madoka has literally never even questioned her as to why this is. I'm fine with us, as the audience, not knowing, but it seriously undermines the believability of the character when she won't even try to find out something so important (and given some of the actions Homura's taken to achieve this goal, it's clearly extremely important).

Another example: a certain way in, someone dies. It's traumatic for all involved. However, the mechanic by which one becomes a magical girl in this series happens to be that you have to make a wish, which will be granted. At the end of that episode, I was thinking, "Okay, the obvious course of action here is for somebody to make their wish to have her revived and then become a magical girl, but this death was clearly far too important to be solved so easily, so how are they going to deal with this possibility in the next episode?" The answer was, "They're just fucking not". The possibility of wishing for the revival of this character was literally never, ever even mentioned or considered by the characters. That's just fucking shitty. This issue has been brought up in discussions on /a/ and the general defense I've seen used is that, having now witnessed first hand how being a magical girl really does involve risking a horrible and gory death, nobody involved wants to actually become one out of sheer fear. This to me is just a fanwanked cop-out. While that fear was given focus, no measures were taken to make me, as the viewer, believe that it actually overrides the grief at the loss of an important friend. So I don't find it believable.

I have a feeling this tendency in anime writing might reflect a real social tendency of japanese people in general. Two of the people I lived with in this house initially are japanese, and, while I never actually witnessed it, apparently they had alot of arguments. One of them told me that it was because the other didn't talk directly about problems, instead taking a more roundabout route, and that this was a stereotypically Japanese thing. Indeed, literally that exact issue is the explicit focus of several anime series I've seen, whether it's played for drama or comedy (Kimi ni Todoke, Mitsudomoe, and others). I don't always mind it in that context, but when it's just used as an excuse for avoiding problems in your storytelling, it's shitty.

I'm not a fan of the character designs either. Incidentally, they're by Ume Aoki, who is the mangaka for Hidamari Sketch, but as much as I've lauded that series, the character designs were never one of the things I liked about it. Anime is a land of blandness and flat, poorly constructed faces as it is, but Aoki's designs take this to an extreme. And for some reason, I feel like the animators working on Madoka con't deal with them as well as those who worked on the second season of Hidamari . They were still flat in that, but somehow I just felt like they were drawn and moved more confidently. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, though.

Is there a difference other than the size of the eyes or is it just me? Somehow the latter two faces just look fuller to my eyes.

I actually think SHAFT series in general have gone downhill visually after Bakemonogatari, which makes no sense as they made LODS OF EMONE off that. I often get the imperssion they just don't know how to spend it effectively, where before they came up with some very elegant tricks that almost took advantage of their budgetary constraints. Now we have shit like this all the time.

Static cuts and tweened graphics may be cheap, but I'd take those over this any day.

I think this specifically was a more severe problem in Arakawa and the third season of Hidamari, but we still have these unnecessary, awkward hand-animated camera moves that look very expensive, but that the animators clearly just don't have the skill to actually execute well.

(All this reminds me that I really should go back and talk about what I thought really made Hidamari's first two seasons clever, which wasn't actually the visual tricks I've always waxed lyrical about, but more the pacing and season structure. Another time, though)

I've got a huge stockpile of anime I want to watch and manga I need to read, but somehow I just keep getting caught up in one mediocre show with each consecutive season. Maybe I should just take a season or two off from current series and dedicate my "anime time" to getting through some things that might actually be good, like Outlaw Star or Space Pirate Captain Harlock or Kare Kano or Dennou Coil or Princess Tutu or The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer or Goodnight Punpun or any of the million other things on my list.

Oh, I could also finally watch Venture Bros.

I finished one of my Notessimo projects. Here it is, for the curious.

More to come?

Joe Sparrow commented last night that I've been posting less since I instated the "I will include something creative with every post" rule, which is true. I intend to stick with it, though. I can't really summon the energy to produce something specifically for this post, so here's a little something from a job I'm currently working on.

[EDIT] Eeeeeh, I don't usually censor myself, but I edited out some vitriol. I just don't think I want to be hateful and angry right now.

Jolly Christmas and a Ronery New Year

2010-12-31T20:33:00.001Z

Sappy New Year from SHIDDY IMAGE on Vimeo.

May all you girls bear many handsome sons, and all you boys establish alpha dominance amongst your tribes (to whatever extent is reasonable).

2010-12-01T02:56:00.000Z

I just finished watching Kaiba. It was sad and difficult and confusing, but I very much liked it. It's too complicated to do any justice with a brief crappy post like this, so all I'll say is that it definitely fits the bill of "anime you should watch if you like interesting things". Or if you like animation, or are just burnt out on stupid pandering crap.

It was nice to watch in the midst of Panty & Stocking, since it's pretty much the perfect antithesis. P&S is loud, abrasive, schlocky raw entertainment and it knows it, with angular characters even going to the extremes of inverted-curves design. Kaiba is subtle, low-key, DEEP as fuck, with characters that look all soft and pudgy.

I realise now that I didn't take any screenshots and I can't be bothered to get any right now to post. Fuck it, it's from 2008 anyway, you can find plenty about if you look. I'll probably rewatch it at some point and take millions of screenshots, though.

I suddenly realise that Neiro's waggly hair probably looks really strange up there. I can't even tell anymore. I knew I shouldn't ahve tried to to an animated doodle starting at midnight when I've got work tomorrow. La dee da.

I am beset upon to watch Venture Brothers instead of this animu bullshit. I shall get on that when I am not stupidly busy.

Miscellany

2010-11-04T02:51:00.016Z

I've been a bit bored lately. Did some work on a pitch for the lovely fellows at Treat and we won it so as of next week or so I will be a busy bee on some christmas ads. Other than that I have been doing alot of not much.

A nice timewaster I have found, which follows on from my former (and still to a small extent current) timekiller of doing Mario Paint Composer covers, is Notessimo, which is sort of like a more advanced, Flash based version. It has loads more instruments, lets you set volume and panning for individual notes, and has layers. I've been working on-and-off on a cover of "The Extreme", the final boss theme from Final Fantasy VIII. I don't remember that one being a particularly good game, but it's an incredibly awesome piece of music, and the equivalents from VI and VII have already been done (they're even on the Featured page!), so I thought, "Why not?" This is where I'm at right now.

Link in case the flash embed fails.

My attention span is rather short so while I will hopefully finish this (I'm fairly pleased with how it's going so I'd definitely like to), I don't know if I'll do many more in future. It's so much more complicated and time-consuming than Mario Paint! That said, I did also start Sandopolis Zone Act 2 from Sonic 3 & Knuckles concurrently (I alternated between the two before I got into a good groove with The Extreme), so here's the current progress on that, which I'm also rather pleased with.

Link.

I also went the London MCM Expo on Sunday. When I was invited by my lovely, almost saintly friend Emily I was thinking "Jesus has it really already been a year?" Then she told me it's every six months. Thank goodness! Anyway, as promised I went dressed as Tetsuo, but I tragically COMPLETELY FORGOT TO TAKE ANY PHOTOS, so you will have to take my word for it (and Emily's and Joe's if they comment on here, since they both bore witness). I decided not to do the whole "red cape white vest" thing we see him do in the movie, because: A. It's goofy; B. It's been done alot. So I kind of amalgamated a couple of different looks from various parts of the manga (he changes appearance about 5 times), and wore a utility vest over nothing, which he wears in volume 6, but also kept the robotic arm that he has earlier on. You'll know roughly what I mean if you've watched the movie, but in the manga it's more organic, so I achieved it by painting it all over my right arm, and customising one of those skeleton gloves to look mechanical. It worked surprisingly well, even if the paint got somewhat rubbed off on the way in (because it was FREEZING COLD so I had to wear a jumper over it *sadface*). For the full look, I should also have gone barefoot and bleached my hair, but I learned too late that bleaching one's hair does not happen in an afternoon.

I know it's lame to do a whole paragraph talking about stuff like that with no visual guide but that's how I roll.

I also got to play Kirby's Epic Yarn, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and the Wii version of Goldeneye. Of the first, I thought it was adorable and definitely fun with two people, though hopefully it continues to offer new things so the original novelty factor doesn't wear off (also I think it's kinda dark how you kill enemies by just... unravelling them, and I find this rather appropriate). Of the second, I thought it was a bit gimmicky and didn't seem to have much real substance (also I've never been all too keen on the idea of having to waggle to do a basic thing like roll). Of the third, I remained totally unsure of the point. Goldeneye was fun on the N64 because if you had an N64 you weren't playing the probably superior FPS's on the PC, and also because it was the first game of the sort where you could really expect to have four people playing it together in the same room. Repeating it now just seems redundant (also, inverted y-axis master race was here, all you non-inverted peasants should go back to trading hats or something).

I kind of wish I'd brought more than just a tenner, because then maybe I would have bought some of the neat things I saw there. It's all well and good going home and doing a £50 manga binge on Amazon, but you can't get stuff like doujinshi on Amazon. I saw an Aria one (don't know if it was hentai or not, lolzzz), I should've bought it and maybe checked out more from that stall. I also tried to get Emily to buy a K-On futanari doujinshi for a friend of hers who had requested porn. IT WOULD'VE BEEN WORTH £14. I also saw a stall run by Yamino, the artist of Sister Claire, one of the only webcomics out of all the ones I read that I would not feel embarassed for other people to see. I actually feel really terrible for saying hi and then not buying anything. I'M SORRY YAMINO. If you're at the next one I promise I'll give you some money (if you update more, he says, well aware of the inherent hypocrisy).

The whole "at least one creative thing per blog post" thing seems to have merely caused me to post even less rather than draw more. However, I plan to stick by it, and I'm not counting those Notesimmo works above, so here are two drawings I did today.

If you don't get it, be thankful, it is literally the lamest and most forced meme ever. I currently have "doubles" and "check em" filtered and will keep things that way for the forseeable future and I still can't seem to completely avoid it.

Yes, more of that same creature from Alien Nine. Though it's more than just a dumb practice doodle this time (this is a lie, I literally thought this up on the toilet). Those drills take fucking ages to draw, I've no idea how Hitoshi Tomizawa ever did a weekly manga with those things everywhere. Must've had lots of assistants (or just worked literally all day every day, as I hear most manga artists do). It's also really hard to keep a good composition going with those things involved. I am pleased with how appealing Kumi looks, though.

Oh yeah, I'm still watching Panty and Stocking. It is by far the most difficult to place thing I've watched it ages. On the one hand I feel it's actually got uglier since the first episode, and the awesome animation and visual moments haven't really been coming consistently or at all (I even got into a massive argument with some people on /a/ about it, as I'm prone to do, which also led to a nervous little moment when someone recognised me through a filename and linked this blog on there, and I was worried this little corner of the internet where I can talk shit with impunity would be compromised). On the other hand, the humour and characters are sporadically improving and there's been some actual genuinely funny moments. Overall, as my friend Joe said, it's interesting, and that's one of the best things you can say about most anime these days. I'm not going to end up rating it as highly as a masterpiece like, say, FLCL (oh, I can hear the trolls already), or even just a really overall great series like Gurren Lagann, but I'll definitely remember it more than I will Mitsudomoe or whatever other flavour-of-the-month nonsense I've watched lately.

P.S. I'm in the Stocking camp. I know everybody's in the Stocking camp. I don't care.

This moment from episode 4 is probably the hardest I've laughed at an anime in literally years.

Oh yeah, I also watched Forrest Gump recently, which is a good film, as well as the first few episodes of Seinfeld, which is also, as it turns out, quite good.

Sorry I never replied to that link you sent on Facebook, Joe!

2010-10-02T06:05:00.005+01:00

Sooner than I thought it would be, the first episode of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt aired. As I'd kind of feared, judging from the progression of the promotional artwork that was released since the first piece we saw a while ago, it's taken on a much more angular, abrasive, cluttered look than I'd first hoped. Lots of it is just REALLY fucking ugly. Like, a modern ugly western cartoon style that's been copied by a japanese artist with the typical "detail-everywhere-lines-everywhere-composition-doesn't-matter-just-fill-it-all-in-with-shit" mentality that's one of the main things I dislike about anime and manga visually.

But lots of it is also REALLY FUCKING AWESOME. Because it's being made by people who, despite some weird notions of what constitutes """""good design"""" (note the quadruple quotation marks on that), are probably some of the best animators around at the moment, and the project is driven by their sheer love for what they do, and not the desire to churn out just another bland, loveless, pandering product like 95% of what the anime industry produces these days.

Idealogically it is basically FLCL 2.0. And how anybody can say this as a negative really baffles me (but then again many anime fans seem to genuinely just not like animation).

To hell with write ups and detailed analysis, random screenshot time.

I like the use of text, the colours in most of it, the random art style changes, and the many ridiculously cool camera moves, both hand-drawn AND CGI! I can't possibly capture those in still images but they are really stunning. Dynamic camera moves in action scenes are one thing Japanese animators are often really good at (along with moving lots of little bits independantly but also together), but there's massive full-on swooping scenery moves as well! The fact that they used CG intelligently and near seamlessly along with it was a pleasant surprise.

It's also funny to see just how much of a westaboo Yoh Yoshinari really is. As it turns out, the show uses the two-part format common to 90s and onward western cartoons, and it even has appropriately-styled title-cards, including the front-lined artist credits that John K. brought back to the format with Ren & Stimpy.

It's like I'm really watching Cartoon Network!

By the way, I (obviously) haven't been updating much lately. The reason for this is that I started feeling like I was turning into something I really don't want to be seen as: a critic. Not that I don't want to write about things, but I've basically hit a lifetime low of actually producing work. I've had lots of employment recently, but to be honest pretty much none of it will be going in my showreel, or even getting shown to anyone ever. And in between, I've just been feeling very depressed and demotivated. Basically I've been writing all high-and-mighty and feeling like I've got no right to since I've not exactly been producing stellar work that proves I know what I'm talking about in the meantime. And, honestly, I don't: as far as I'm concerned I'm still a student, despite having been practicing professionally for over two years now. However, I don't want to stop writing this blog, however underqualified I might be to do so, because, at this point, denying myself something I genuinely enjoy is probably the worst thing I can do.

Thus, from now on, I plan to impose a new rule on myself: with each entry I will include something visual to go with the writing, that I have produced. A sketch, a doodle, a design, an animation loop, ANYTHING. Literally no matter how shit it is. Even if I have to open MS Paint and scrawl a penis in 2 minutes before hitting the "Publish Post" button. I think my biggest limiting factor right now is that I am too scared of my drawings being shit, so I need to get away from that.

This entry falls under this ruling too, so here's some unspectacular sketches of one of the really weird alien design's from Hitoshi Tomizawa's wonderful Alien Nine manga (also an anime by J.C. Staff, though sadly it doesn't cover enough of the story to include this creature).

Oh, and since it's related, here's a shit MS Paint doodle for a "draw a scene from an anime for others to guess" thread on /a/.

It's pretty accurate.

Oh, also, I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Toy Story 3 recently. Both were good, better than I was expecting. Scott Pilgrim was just too much raw fun for me to maintain whatever reservations I had about it beforehand, and I would totally have gone to see it again. Toy Story 3 was the first Pixar movie since The Incredibles that I didn't think had something really, critically wrong with it. Might talk about it more later. Also Up is STILL SHIT.