Wednesday 30 January 2013

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

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

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



This is also something i noticed when i was watching The Legend of Korra because i noticed dips in frame-rate but didn't realize it was them changing up the number of frames used in scenes to suite the amount of movement that would be going on. This also made me realize why it looked more like anime than other shows besides the character designs  Most US shows are animated in full 24 frames if i remember correctly or they keep a consistent frame rate throughout without any changes. That on top of the slavish devotion to being on model is what puts me off a lot of american produced shows because they keep saying 2D is dead when they in fact aren't being experimental with the medium or using different techniques to try and actively make it better than it already is. This is most evident in The Simpsons because as it has gone on, the animation has slowly become more and more obsessed with being on model to the detriment of the fluidity of movement. It might as well not even be animated any more because they aren't trying anything new with the technique which is why some people think that there isn't anything more you can do with 2D animation.


Back on topic though, as you can see in the video above at 1:53, There is also an opposite extreme which is what brings me back to Mr Tomoyuki Niho. Where to start. First of all i'm going to say that i really like the effects animation that he does which i have no problems with but in terms of his character animation work, i'm not so enthusiastic. It looks choppy as all hell and the characters look way too simplified and blocky. There is a way to stray slightly off model and make it look good as is evident in Shingo Yamashita's work on the show but with Niho it doesn't feel like it was done for the sake of being interesting or experimental. It just feels like he couldn't be bothered to put in as much detail as the rest of the staff where putting in. The worst example of this is when the the first fight Between Nataru and Moss transitions from he highly detailed work of Hironori Tanaka to Niho and it's incredibly jarring to say the least. It's especially disappointing because i like his effects animation a lot but the characters move so choppily that you can't take what is supposed to be a serious fight seriously. Basically everything else is literally fine except the weird movements of the characters. And that is the end of My Birdy the Mighty: Decode Animation Analysis series. Overall the series gets a 4.5/5 in terms of the overall animation quality. It's one of those shows that you will remember long after you finish watching them and you get extremely sad that they ended. For anyone looking for a really fun and satisfying show to watch i would highly recommend this one. The story and animation are all good and it just might make you become a sakuga enthusiast as it has many because the top notch production values.

Next time i will be finishing off my 2 part Hitman Reborn Animation Analysis with the second half of the show so look forward to it readers *wink*.

No comments:

Post a Comment