TheDevilsCorpse wrote:JulieYBM wrote:People
want to work on
PreCure.
Go! Princess PreCure has Tanaka Yuuta as its series director. Tanaka is a young director who is a huge fan of the franchise and has been climbing the ranks of the franchise since he began working on it. Studio Live animator Itaoka Nishiki is a big fan of the franchise, too, so much so that
he even draws fan art in his spare time. It's the only series he will work on at this point. Fujii Shingo and Ota Kazuhiro have also been recent mainstays of
Go! Princess PreCure. Before them there was Tanaka Hironori and Ootsuka Takashi.
Tanaka loved the franchise so much he produced an incredible number of scenes for it. Ootsuka directed the franchise's best movies. The list of talent involved with the franchise goes on, all because they like the series or have connections with those deeply involved with it.
Nobody becomes an animator in Japan for the money, they do it for the things they love. In this case it's cute girls and fight scenes.
Dragon Ball isn't just an international hit though, but from what I've seen, it's also one of those series that is almost universally praised by people in this part of the business for being a portion of their inspiration from growing up with it as a kid. Do a lot of these people really not want to work on the franchise, or could the lack of talented staff also be partially attributed to the Yamamuro stigma that has plagued the franchise for over a decade now? I know Kimitoshi Chioka is the series' director, but I imagine Yamamuro is still a figure looming over Super to some extent (not just as character designer), credited or not.
I have no doubt Yamamuro Tadayoshi plays a part in so few talents wanting to participate in the series. We know he pissed off Eguchi Hisashi enough for him to complain about Yamamuro on Twitter with Satou Masaki. We also know Kameda Yoshimichi was aghast when he saw the trailer for the 2013 film at how terrible the character designs looked. "Bring back Maeda Minoru!" Kameda said. Kameda is one of the most talented young animators around today. He did
the key animation for this masterpiece of a fight scene in
One Punch Man Episode #1.
If you look at the movies there are a few good animators involved (2013: Takahashi Yuuya, Kan'no Yoshihiro, Ishigami Hiromi, Shida Naotoshi, Oonishi Ryou, Hamano Yuu'ichi, Shishido Nozomu, Takara Isami; 2015: Urata Yukihiro, Takahashi Yuuya, Ootsuka Ken, Ishizuka Katsumi, Nishino Takeshi, Eguchi Hisashi, Hayashi Yuuki, Watanabe Koudai). Hell,
Dragon Ball Super had Hayashi Yuuki, Watanabe Koudai and Tate Naoki work on the Opening animation but not a single one of us can pick out what they did. Hayashi Yuuki did that cool little fight between those two aliens in Episode #2.
Yamamuro takes what makes animation so fun and completely removes it from an animator's drawings. Hayashi and Watanabe both worked on the 2015 film as assistant animation supervisors but none of their presence can be felt throughout the film at all. When television episodes have better animation than films with the same talented animators working on them you know there is something wrong going on.
Nevertheless, it is also important for us to keep in mind that as much as we might like
Dragon Ball Super it doesn't mean others do. It just means we all have mutually shitty taste. It's also wise to remember the role production assistants play in securing talent. They practically have to kill one another to get a good animator. You mentioned Chioka Kimitoshi, too, which is something to keep in mind. The thing is, none of Chioka's presence can be felt in
Dragon Ball Super. Hunt down his last series,
Hakaba Kitarou (Yamamuro is character designer of it, though). Even just those first two episodes have such a striking mood to them. It's really weird that these two series feel so disjointed, but I suppose that's what happens when a good series director is wrangled (strangled?) into leading a series with two months of pre-production before going to broadcast.
So far
Super has had two bright spots,
Takahashi Yuuya and
Oonishi Ryou's twenty second bursts of good animation. That's it.
I don't know about this. The Funimation dub has already established itself as the go-to English dub of the series so I don't see why there would end up being two separate English dubs for Super. It seems unlikely to me.
