Regarding In-Betweens (Also: Aoshima)

[Attitudefan]

Seeing that Aoshima was the sole key-animator on his episodes for a long period during his time on Dragon Ball. My question is--people who may understand animation can help me on this--would a guy like Aoshima have done all the key, extreme, and breakdown frames? His episodes had some gorgeous animation and it surprises me he would be able to do all this work for a 20 minute episode... that is actually Olympic-like ability to be able to complete work at that quality. It is seemingly strange that he isn't a known name in the industry today if he is really that talented on his own.

How big of a team was able to work under him? Would the in-betweeners been talented enough to do the breakdowns and extremes but get no credit? Why is Aoshima not a big name in the animation industry?

[KBABZ]

I take it you're getting this information from here? http://www.kanzenshuu.com/animation-styles/aoshima/

I can see where the confusion comes from: in several places it says he did key animation, but in others it says he rarely had additional animators to help him.

[Attitudefan]

I take it you're getting this information from here? http://www.kanzenshuu.com/animation-styles/aoshima/

I can see where the confusion comes from: in several places it says he did key animation, but in others it says he rarely had additional animators to help him.

Well yeah, the credits, according to Kanzenshuu say, "Unlike the majority of most animation supervisors, Katsumi Aoshima really had no animation team supporting him. He alone typically provided all of the key animation for the episodes he supervised, which is why on average he only supervised one in every 10 episodes of the series. It was not until Dragon Ball episode 126 that animator Hideko Okimoto from Toei Animation began to help him draw key frames."

How long on average between every 10 episodes? Roughly 1.5-2 months? Even with that time, to do nearly 30 minutes of animation where the average frame is animated on 2s is just a crazy output speed. When watching Dragon Ball, the whole series through, I'd say that it was actually less than 10, where Toei had a rotation of every studio for every 7 episodes up through until Aoshima left (Uchiyama's team, if I remember correctly, did every 3-4 episodes in the rotation of 7). So, Aoshima worked on 20-3 minutes of key-frame/extremes/breakdown animation alone in under 2 months... Godly... That is why I wonder about his in-betweens if they helped? It's crazy that he did most of his work on the series solo.

Look at the Buu arc and that just never happened. I wonder if other serialized series had a solo freelancer doing an output like Aoshima?