Watanabe Koudai was an animation supervisor and key animator for
Dragon Ball Z: Fukkatsu no F, but his stuff was heavily filtered through Yamamuro or he was asked to not draw in his usual style.
raulvalente wrote:There's one thing I don't understand. Is it the financial aspect that keeps Toei from expanding the production crew? By that I mean hiring more animation supervisors to make the rotation between episodes be less sufocating. Like... bringing Yamamuro, Iseki or Seizo to the table, or, I don't know, another crew of competent animators so that each team has a reasonable amount of time to work on an episode. At least for U6 arc the episodes shouldn't be this rushed.
As Sodhi has mentioned, it's not really 'money'. The production crew care enough to spend extra money on additional sakuga kantoku (animation supervisors). A single sakkan is paid about $3,000 US dollars for an episode. Hiring extra sakkan doesn't always mean that the money is being split between those three, either, so we're talking about spending potentially $9,000 for three animation supervisors, assuming that is the deal that was worked out.
Animators are hard to come by right now, too. Many, many series, films, special, commercials or cut scenes are created yearly in Japan. The production assistants have probably exhausted their available contacts with freelancers and small studios that take sub-contracting work are stretched thin simply trying to finish their prior commitments. If the production crew doesn't know for far in advance their series is going to run it makes it even harder to schedule ahead.
My guess is that Iseki and Toma are off either working on other projects or simply are well off enough that they can pick and choose their projects.
What
Dragon Ball Super needs most badly right now is to sacrifice some episodes. Let Yashima Yoshitaka solo key animate his next few episodes and try to reassign the key animators he has helping him on another episode. Having Yashima scribble out some episodes will produce bad episodes but it might be what helps save other episodes. If possible Tate Naoki needs to be allowed nine weeks to work on a single episode instead of five-to-seven. Nine will give him enough time to really polish his work, especially if his episodes are given a higher number of in-between drawings.
Another thing
Dragon Ball Super needs to do is bring back long recaps. Five or seven minutes for a recap will help refine the look of the rest of the episode.
Dragon Ball Super has been doing something Toei Animation has mostly refused to do over its long history: allow storyboards to be drawn by someone other than the episode director. Typically, the rule is that the storyboard must be drawn by the episode director, but
Dragon Ball Super has broken from this tradition far more than any other Toei cartoon by having many, many episodes drawn first by a veteran animator or director then seen through to complete episode by a younger director. If the idea isn't to try to get ahead of schedule it is at least to train new directors.
Far too often those who discuss animation in
Dragon Ball ignore half the facts in their analysis of the production. That needs to stop if we're going to get high-quality discussion out of this series.
