perucho1990 wrote:Does anyone believe that Kale is related to Yamoshi(if that is really the saiyan from the trailer)? Both have green ki
No. One's from Universe 7 and the other is from Universe 6.
Morbidden wrote:Alrighty then. *Takes a breath*
The antagonist / Goku's opponent is not going to be Yamoshi. Yamoshi was just a normal Super Saiyan so it can't be him.
The only person who I can see this new character being is the Progenitor of Saiyan Race.
It's also likely that it is the evil Saiyan that killed Yamoshi. Well, the leader of the group that did. After all, Toriyama said that Yamoshi was outnumbered and eventually became worn out. If Super Saiyan is a x50 multiplier and he still loses? Those other Saiyans must've been quite strong. (For that era, at least.)
perucho1990 wrote:
If Yamoshi is really that saiyan from the trailer, then IMO they should also have his comrades appear in the movie too(there was 5 comrades according to this Toriyama interview).
You can have them fight Gohan,Goten, Trunks, Cabba, the Saiyan Girls.
Yamoshi had a righteous heart. He wouldn't fight Goku like that. (Remember, the trailer said "Earth has Goku" so the mysterious figure is obviously villainous.)
AnimeNation101 wrote:
You dont need a confirmation to know its fake. Look at the armor. The image is missing the green plate in the center that the guy had in the teaser.
Rewatching the trailer, I don't really see this "green plate" inconsistency. The art looks pretty faithful to what little we see of the armor, besides the upper line in the armor being slightly thicker I suppose.
Though to be fair, they look better than the ones we got lol.
Ahh c'mon. I don't see how anyone could've thought those GoDs were real. The Yamoshi pic actually kinda looks like how Toriyama shades/colors his art. Though I suppose the hands look more like Shintani.
Fake or not, still looks pretty cool regardless. Hope Toriyama original design is something on this approach.
Grimlock wrote:
jeffbr92 wrote:I thought the fan base dropped numbering movies ever since Battle of Gods. Addressing the first film of Super as Movie 1 would be just confusing regarding Dead Zone is already addressed as it. I think for the best is still addressing upcoming movies by their abbreviated titles (BoG, RoF...)
I'm not into abbreviations, I've got used to refer to the movies as "Movie 1", "Movie 2" and etc. There will be a proper context when I'm talking about Movie 1 of Dragon Ball Super.
Whatever man, just saying cause you might have some trouble explaining which movie you're referring too lol
Power levels are not just big numbers:
Spoiler:
Power levels establish tension and drama. People who care about them (well, people who care about them in a narrative) don't care about the big numbers or the fancy explosions. If you have character A who's so much above character B, who's the main character, you're gonna be left wondering how in the hell character B, the character we're supposed to care and root for, is going to escape the situation or overcome the odds. It makes us emotionally invested.
If character B doesn't escape the situation in a believable way that's consistent with previous events, then that emotional investment is gone. It was pointless tension, pointless drama made just to suck in the viewer. It has no critical value whatsoever. The audience is left believing that the author can just create whatever scenarios he wants and what happens to the characters is decided by whatever the author wants to happen, regardless of the events that happened in the story. Which, in fairness, is what happens, but the audience wants to be fooled. The audience wants to know that the world they're following has rules. That the world they're invested in isn't going to bend to external factors that are irrelevant to them.
An author can do whatever he wants with the characters, that's not false. But the author should also have the responsibility to make sure it fits in cohesively with the other events in the narrative he has created.
The evil Saiyan in the teaser is giving me Broly vibes...Surely they aren't crazy to put Broly here?!
That would be as crazy as if we had a new DB series and got a Female Brol-Oh shit!
Anyway, I don't think it's Yamoshi because that Saiyan seems evil and Yamoshi had a good heart.
I really want Yamoshi turn out to be the new Saiyan Toriyama drew for the new mobile game. He's everything I wanted Cabba to be - His armour has a cool color scheme, new hair cut (not as original as I want it to be but still slightly different from Adult Gohan/Tarble/Cabba...) and more important, he has muscles! I also like how his tail is black instead of the usual brown.
After disapotting male saiyans like Tarble and Cabba, it's good to see a new male Saiyan design that I like.
Even if he isn't Yamoshi, he has to be someone important. Especially considering the timing with the New Movie, how he has a tail and he's wearing the same armour that Saiyans wore before Freeza appeared. It's confirmed he is a Saiyan from a different era than Goku too.
FortuneSSJ wrote:The evil Saiyan in the teaser is giving me Broly vibes...Surely they aren't crazy to put Broly here?!
That would be as crazy as if we had a new DB series and got a Female Brol-Oh shit!
Anyway, I don't think it's Yamoshi because that Saiyan seems evil and Yamoshi had a good heart.
I really want Yamoshi turn out to be the new Saiyan Toriyama drew for the new mobile game. He's everything I wanted Cabba to be - His armour has a cool color scheme, new hair cut (not as original as I want it to be but still slightly different from Adult Gohan/Tarble/Cabba...) and more important, he has muscles! I also like how his tail is black instead of the usual brown.
After disapotting male saiyans like Tarble and Cabba, it's good to see a new male Saiyan design that I like.
Even if he isn't Yamoshi, he has to be someone important. Especially considering the timing with the New Movie, how he has a tail and he's wearing the same armour that Saiyans wore before Freeza appeared. It's confirmed he is a Saiyan from a different era than Goku too.
So, a time traveling Saiyan NOT named Trunks...
Interesting.
FortuneSSJ wrote:The evil Saiyan in the teaser is giving me Broly vibes...Surely they aren't crazy to put Broly here?!
That would be as crazy as if we had a new DB series and got a Female Brol-Oh shit!
Anyway, I don't think it's Yamoshi because that Saiyan seems evil and Yamoshi had a good heart.
I really want Yamoshi turn out to be the new Saiyan Toriyama drew for the new mobile game. He's everything I wanted Cabba to be - His armour has a cool color scheme, new hair cut (not as original as I want it to be but still slightly different from Adult Gohan/Tarble/Cabba...) and more important, he has muscles! I also like how his tail is black instead of the usual brown.
After disapotting male saiyans like Tarble and Cabba, it's good to see a new male Saiyan design that I like.
Even if he isn't Yamoshi, he has to be someone important. Especially considering the timing with the New Movie, how he has a tail and he's wearing the same armour that Saiyans wore before Freeza appeared. It's confirmed he is a Saiyan from a different era than Goku too.
Hell yes. That new saiyan for the mobile game is how Cabba should have looked.
FortuneSSJ wrote:Anyway, I don't think it's Yamoshi because that Saiyan seems evil and Yamoshi had a good heart.
I really want Yamoshi turn out to be the new Saiyan Toriyama drew for the new mobile game.
I am convinced that is Yamoshi.
And as for Broly I am also very much in agreement with earlier users that this new villanous guy is the progenitor of the Saiyan race and his Super Saiyan form is like Kale's and Broly's, like Vegeta implied it was the original Super Saiyan form.
Maybe they'll even throw in some SS4 in there as well.
Marlowe89 wrote:Fake or not, still looks pretty cool regardless. Hope Toriyama original design is something on this approach.
Looks like a damn good educated guess. A lot better than most of the fanart I see with the excessive tribal paint, giant multicolored hair stuff. I'd take this design too, hopefully Toriyama's looks similar (which I can almost imagine it being). Kind of looks like a mixture of Broly & Goku. Symbolically that could be cool. I pray he doesn't have another recycling of Gohan's hairstyle in the real art.
dbgtFO wrote:And as for Broly I am also very much in agreement with earlier users that this new villanous guy is the progenitor of the Saiyan race and his Super Saiyan form is like Kale's and Broly's, like Vegeta implied it was the original Super Saiyan form.
Maybe they'll even throw in some SS4 in there as well.
That would be a connection I actually like. If they make him the progenitor with Broly-like traits, mixed with SS4 it would be the perfect way to show the diverging lineage.
Zephyr wrote:The fandom's collective fetishizing of "moments" is also ridiculous to me. No, not everyone needs a fucking "shine" moment. If that's all you want, then all you want is fanservice, rather than an actual coherent story. And of course those aren't mutually exclusive; you could have a coherent story with "shine" moments! But if a story is perfectly coherent (and I'm really not seeing any compelling arguments that this one is anything but, despite constantly recurring, really poorly reasoned, attempts to argue otherwise), and you're bemoaning the lack of "shine" moments as a reason for the story's poor quality, then you're letting your thirst for "shine" moments obfuscate your ability to detect basic storytelling when it's right in front of you.
JulieYBM wrote:Budget has nothing to do with it, the amount of time and available animators do. Shintani's new models seem to aimed at being easier draw and without a whole lot of rigid rules so that animators have more wiggle room to play around with. If you look at Yamamuro Tadayoshi's character designs for the Majin Buu arc of Dragon Ball Z and compare them to that gif you posted of Gokuu and Vegeta fighting his designs are actually less detailed.
It seems that for that scene (which we believe he personally key animated) he had the time or the wherewithal to go crazy with the detailed drawings. For the movies he oversaw you'll notice that he became increasingly involved in those movies and less involved with the TV series at the time, which meant he was spending all of his time working on the films during the Majin Buu arc and very little working on the TV series.
Additionally, Yamamuro was heavily recruiting Toei Animation's best in-house animators associated with the franchise at the time to work on Movies #8-13 and the Tenth Anniversary Film to increasingly up the detail of the drawings. This was of course done back in an era where more animators and time were available but also meant that the majority of the focus was on drawing the characters on-model. There's very little in the way of good character acting in the 1990s Dragon Ball productions, certainly nothing like how Gokuu is bouncing up-and-down in the teaser here. The franchise's biggest weakness of the 1990s was how little in the way of good animation there was and how all of it was for the fight scenes.
If my suspicion is correct Film Director Nagamine Tatsuya has seen what Pocket Monster: Sun & Moon has done--broken every rule of the industry and gotten a tremendous amount of animation for a weekly TV series--and now wants that for Dragon Ball. Nagamine's One Piece film had to have tones of details for the character models because that is how Oda Ei'ichirou wants his designs to look but Toriyama is the opposite and that makes Dragon Ball ripe for animation. The less animators have to do the more animators can do more if they want to.
That was the big problem with Yamamuro Tadayoshi's designs and the big problem with Hiro'oka Toshihito's designs for Pocket Monster: XY. Now that Nakano Satoshi and Yasuda Shuuhei are in charge of the animation character designs of Pokemon their designs are so malleable that good animators are hopping onto the series in droves and messing around more than many animators have ever had a chance to with Pokemon.
I had to paragraph break the shit out of this just to make it readable.
I mean... no kidding the best animation in the 80s and 90s run of the series was saved for the fights. It was a weekly TV series, and its main subject matter was martial arts. If I have limited time, staff, and resources to create a show that's mainly about martial artists beating the crap out of one another, then OF COURSE I'm going to pool the bulk of those resources and manpower into the fight scenes, seeing as how that's kind of the main draw and focus of the series; not to mention, frankly, they're the scenes which would most naturally call for the most amount of dynamism in character movement anyway, be it fighting or just general "action" moments as a whole.
I mean would I MIND if there was also tons of resources and manpower dumped into casual scenes of the cast just hanging around Kami's temple or Kame House or wherever and talking about stuff along with the fighting bits? I mean no, of course not: but end of the day that would only be purely an added bonus for an all out fantasy martial arts-focused series like DB. If it ultimately comes down to "low key dialogue scenes" vs "fighting/action" scenes in terms of where the animation resources can most go, the latter option SHOULD be the correct pick at least 90 times out of 100 or so for a series like this one.
If the "big guns" for the animation are really so particularly limited in what or how much they can do (which is a key point that is so often stressed the most in these kinds of threads, particularly within your own posts on the matter), then so long as they go where they count the most for a series like DB (be it fighting or general action moments) then we're basically good.
Goku bouncing up and down in that one clip is obviously part of a prelude to a fight scene (as he seems to be warming up to take on this new mystery Saiya-jin villain), so I would count that as part of what's probably a soon-to-be-coming fight scene. If nothing else, its not much different from various "training" scenes throughout the series, some of which have also boasted some fantastic looking animation as well.
(Not the absolute best example I could've used, but its the one I had quickest available to me, and I'm busy with other stuff as I type this.)
Now if I'm reading you correctly, you're bringing up this other Pokemon series into this in order to illustrate that pouring more animation time and manpower into a weekly TV series (allowing for more consistently fluid animation throughout a whole episode) like DB CAN be possible if we were to scale back on model detail.
For me personally, I think how much I'd be on board with this ENTIRELY depends on the extent to which that rebalancing of animation management is done going forward. So far, just from that one teaser clip, I'm largely ok with this current direction: I'll obviously be better able to judge based on more footage, but for right now with this one microscopic snippet of a clip, I'm honestly not crying over any of this. My concern is more on how far this direction continues to drift as more DB animated projects come down the pipeline.
Do I care about animation fluidity? Absolutely I do. Do I also care about character models? Unquestionably. How much of one am I willing to sacrifice for the other? Therein lies the rub in all this.
I'll be up front and state the obvious: I VASTLY prefer more detailed models. This stems a great, great deal for my love of Gekiga style art in anime and manga: I find that visual approach to be INFINITELY superior and more emotionally impactful than more simplistic models which genuinely appear flat and inexpressive to me. I understand that the "expressiveness" of those more simpler models is supposed to come from their more exaggerated movement: for me, that isn't how I usually relate to a character on screen or page. I don't require or am drawn to over the top exaggeration, as that doesn't elicit more emotion out of me: I come at it from a "less is more" standpoint of subtlety, which is generally achieved and expressed in 2 dimensional art (still on a comic page, or in motion in animation) via subtle details.
And yes I note the irony in my saying that I strongly feel that you can get a "less is more" conveying of emotion from MORE character detail rather than less, but you get my point.
But to better illustrate what I mean: I get WAY infinitely more out of this simple closeup shot of Goku smirking:
Than I ever would with any immaculately animated shot of him spastically bouncing around with rubbery limbs. That kind of thing is flashy and fun (and its great for certain fight scenes too, though again not necessarily all - sometimes you want a bit more grit to certain fights as well): it doesn't however very often get a more subtle, humanistic emotional response.
And you get more subtle expressiveness out of a shot like the above with more, not less, detailed character designs. Because it allows for actual, relateable HUMANITY to shine through during moments like two characters sharing a wordless glance or what have you. And I find there's more to like and appreciate in a character when he/she feels more human and less a cartoon caricature.
That doesn't mean that I DON'T think that that level of exagerrated movement should NEVER be used, and that it somehow NEVER has a place:
(This shot from YYH is wonderful, and I think its successfully achieved without sacrificing all that terribly much in the way of detail on Kurabara's model anyway.)
Just that I don't think that ALL aspects of ALL anime should be SO stringently beholden to having this stylistic quirk be catered to 24/7, to the point that we just say "screw it" with any degree of care towards model detail whatsoever. Exaggerated, off-model, rubbery movement is simply one of MANY tools in an animator's kit: it is NOT the be-all, end-all to which we should be gauging the worth of a given title's animation quality. Sometimes this kind of over the top exaggeration is what a scene or moment calls for: other times you WANT there to be enough room for detail in a character's design to allow for subtlety in expressiveness; some moments call more for a character to reflect a more relateable sense of realism in their emotions more than big, broad, and exaggerated cartoonishness.
This is a BIG part of the median line that so often was used to separate how people looked at Japanese anime vs Western animation, with the former being seen as having the capacity to FAR better oscillate between fantasy exaggeration and grounded realism vs the latter's tendency to simply stick more stringently often to the former.
Now do I worship at this alter of expressive detail SO much that I'd want a DB movie or show that consists of nothing but static stills and pans of beautifully detailed images (as some anime very much consist of)? No, absolutely would I not go in that extreme either, of course. I want there to be a balance to allow for BOTH fluid movement AND detailed, expressive models: but I want that balance tilted at least with ENOUGH of a nod towards giving DB (or anything else really) more detail than the average bit of Shonen fluff, most of which suffers from often looking like simplistic blobs of broad cartoonishness, however fluid the animation can otherwise get some of the time (One Piece is at times, and only at times, an exception to this; but that's mitigated completely by Oda's artstyle being absolute hiddeous dogshit in and of itself).
Which is something that, by and large for the most part, DB has generally always been good about (no matter Yamamuro's problems currently, he WAS at one time one of the absolute BEST animation directors in DB's latter/Boo-era period, and I contend that "too much detail" is a HUGE oversimplification of his more recent/Super-era problems).
What I DON'T want is for that balance to go the other way: where we see more and more detail drained from use in DB's models to give more and more of an increased emphasis on constant, exaggerated, rubbery-limbed movement.
I'm sorry, but these examples that you're giving here?
JulieYBM wrote:
As lovely as the sense of motion is in some of them, if DB's character designs ever at ANY point in its future comes within the same ZIPCODE of resembling these, then I'm just plain and simply NOT even remotely interested. Character models like these are the exact ANTITHESIS of pleasing to my eye, and I get less than nothing out of them other than a desire to vomit and then be someplace far, far away from them.
You can certainly get a fluidity of motion that's either equal to or very close to these without having to sacrifice near enough model detail to come within spitting distance of looking like this kind of shit. DB's managed it plenty of times before, I've been largely perfectly fine with how that balance between character detail and fluidity has been handled up till now, at least in its better animated episodes.
JulieYBM wrote:Speaking of Koukaku Kidoutai: GHOST IN THE SHELL, that movie had a lot of good animators (i.e. the guys known for working on all the big, big movies in Japan), like Iso, Inoue, Yoshinari Kou and Okiura. Additionally, the movie actually used a very, very small number of drawings and shots. At only 85 minutes the movie only uses 683 cuts (they use the English word 'cut' to describe a 'shot'). Your average Japanese animated series is typically only allowed 300 cuts for a single 25 minute episode (400 for important episodes), so Ooishi actually used a lot of smart directing to get around his time restraints. Meanwhile, the less intelligently directed Akira ran for 124 minutes and used 2,212 cuts. Yowza. The typical Japanese animated film only uses 700-1,200 cuts. In the case of Koukaku Kidoutai, though, again, it also had a ton of the world's best working on it, so I think that really played a big factor into the quality of the animation while retaining detail.
I know this is off topic, but since you brought it up: whatever your leanings in animation styles go, citing Akira of all films as having "less intelligent direction" than just about damn near ANYTHING else (even a similarly breathtaking masterwork like Ooshi's Ghost in the Shell) does NOT do any argument you can possibly make on the subject of animation directing any favors whatsoever. For reasons so absurdly obvious, I damn sure hope I don't have to go to the trouble of outlining them.
The fact that Akira contains as many shots as it does is something that would hardly be considered any kind of "negative" to pretty much ANYONE other than the studio that has to manage and finance a project of such a monumental undertaking; its ambitious as all getout, yes, but its also the direct result of Japan's lightning-in-a-bottle bubble economy being what it was in the 80s. That's less a cause to complain than it is to just be thankful something of such incredible artistic ambition was allowed to exist at all.
JulieYBM wrote:Then again, we also have Violet Evergarden and other Kyouto Animation cartoons as of recent having insane amounts of detail.
Anyway, simpler designs are for the best. Well, designs good animators want to work with are the best. Yamamuro and his weird-ass idea of detailed designs were driving everyone off.
I like how you show a perfectly lovely shot that is both well animated and detailed and follow it up immediately with "anyway, simpler designs are for the best". Um... no? Not necessarily? Again, my answer to that is "just HOW much 'simpler' are we talking exactly?"
I'm ok for the design detail taking a hit for the sake of movement only if its within a relatively sane degree of reason: but having DB's character designs be parred SO far back into looking anywhere VAGUELY along the same lines as the next Pokemon or Yotsuba series is a bridge that's way, waaaaaaaaaay too far into the exact opposite wrong-headed extreme that you cite Yamamuro of delving into.
And for all the bitching we've all been doing lately about Yamamuro, the one name from the old days that people seem by far and away the most eager to see return to the series? Minoru Maeda, who himself excellently balanced INCREDIBLY detailed character models with spectacular and fluid movement:
(Again, hastily chosen example.)
So once more, I call complete and utter BS that we need to totally scale back away from character design detail in order to achieve dynamically fluid movement; especially when its hardly as if Yamamuro is somehow the ONLY animation director to have ever attempted (and succeed) with this approach, nor is it accurate to say that its this approach at its base that's at the root of his more recent issues.
But again, hopefully all of this is purely academic spitballing, and wherever DB's future art direction goes (be in in this movie, or further down the line) doesn't render it into something that's wholly unrecognizable or divorced from its own distinctive visual style.
JulieYBM wrote:Detailed designs don't mean 'good'.
True. By that same token though, neither is the reverse the case either: less detailed designs also don't mean "good". This is a matter of personal creative/aesthetic preferences, and I'm drawing a very clear line in the sand in where I stand on this matter just as you have, and I'm further countering that going all-in on less detail ISN'T inherently somehow a requirement to getting more out of movement. This isn't a zero-sum game: its a spectrum than can be tilted and adjusted however a studio or animation director sees fit.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Thu Mar 22, 2018 8:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.
Geraldix wrote:Hear me out boys, the plot will go like this:
> Whis tells Goku about the legend of Yamoshi, the original super saiyan god, who lived thousands of years ago
> Goku says it is a pity he can't fight such an interesting guy. Whis says he could arrange that by sending Goku to the past, with the condition that he won't do anything that can change the past, or grave consequences will occur
I stop reading on that part, after Whis have said on FT arc that time travel was a crime between deities why he would go against that just to please Goku needs? Don't think he would do that.
If you didn't bother reading it to the end, why would you bother replying? Not very constructive behavior, is it? Like I've written, guess I'm in for some beers!
It would make sense if they introduce a monkey looking saiyan based on Sun Wukong
I mean Akira and his stuff introduced a lot of gods based on animals etc and the movie poster with goku holding his stick is a little bit of a hint
Some abilities of Sun Wukong
”72 Transformations”: Allows him to shapeshift into almost any form—however, he is never able to transform his tail. He can also transform each of
the 84,000 hairs on his body into another form, animate or inanimate, and often bites the hairs into pieces to create even more copies.
”Fire Avoidance Charm”: Allows him to survive fire.
Water Avoidance Charm”: Allows him to survive deep water; however, he is unable to fight while using this ability.
Body Freezing Spell: Allows him to immobilize enemies.
”fiery-eyes golden-gaze”: Allows him to identify evil no matter what form it takes; however, it also causes smoke to sting his eyes.
Forte224 wrote:Here's hoping we don't have to wait for a dub version before it comes to other theaters. I think Super has made people more open to the Japanese version and I don't want to wait to see this.
Toei aren't gonna release the film internationally without said countries having their dubs as it will maximize revenue, there maybe subbed showings but they'll happen at the same time as the dubbed one's. They have one crack at this.
JulieYBM wrote:Budget has nothing to do with it, the amount of time and available animators do. Shintani's new models seem to aimed at being easier draw and without a whole lot of rigid rules so that animators have more wiggle room to play around with. If you look at Yamamuro Tadayoshi's character designs for the Majin Buu arc of Dragon Ball Z and compare them to that gif you posted of Gokuu and Vegeta fighting his designs are actually less detailed.
It seems that for that scene (which we believe he personally key animated) he had the time or the wherewithal to go crazy with the detailed drawings. For the movies he oversaw you'll notice that he became increasingly involved in those movies and less involved with the TV series at the time, which meant he was spending all of his time working on the films during the Majin Buu arc and very little working on the TV series.
Additionally, Yamamuro was heavily recruiting Toei Animation's best in-house animators associated with the franchise at the time to work on Movies #8-13 and the Tenth Anniversary Film to increasingly up the detail of the drawings. This was of course done back in an era where more animators and time were available but also meant that the majority of the focus was on drawing the characters on-model. There's very little in the way of good character acting in the 1990s Dragon Ball productions, certainly nothing like how Gokuu is bouncing up-and-down in the teaser here. The franchise's biggest weakness of the 1990s was how little in the way of good animation there was and how all of it was for the fight scenes.
If my suspicion is correct Film Director Nagamine Tatsuya has seen what Pocket Monster: Sun & Moon has done--broken every rule of the industry and gotten a tremendous amount of animation for a weekly TV series--and now wants that for Dragon Ball. Nagamine's One Piece film had to have tones of details for the character models because that is how Oda Ei'ichirou wants his designs to look but Toriyama is the opposite and that makes Dragon Ball ripe for animation. The less animators have to do the more animators can do more if they want to.
That was the big problem with Yamamuro Tadayoshi's designs and the big problem with Hiro'oka Toshihito's designs for Pocket Monster: XY. Now that Nakano Satoshi and Yasuda Shuuhei are in charge of the animation character designs of Pokemon their designs are so malleable that good animators are hopping onto the series in droves and messing around more than many animators have ever had a chance to with Pokemon.
I had to paragraph break the shit out of this just to make it readable.
I mean... no kidding the best animation in the 80s and 90s run of the series was saved for the fights. It was a weekly TV series, and its main subject matter was martial arts. If I have limited time, staff, and resources to create a show that's mainly about martial artists beating the crap out of one another, then OF COURSE I'm going to pool the bulk of those resources and manpower into the fight scenes, seeing as how that's kind of the main draw and focus of the series; not to mention, frankly, they're the scenes which would most naturally call for the most amount of dynamism in character movement anyway, be it fighting or just general "action" moments as a whole.
I mean would I MIND if there was also tons of resources and manpower dumped into casual scenes of the cast just hanging around Kami's temple or Kame House or wherever and talking about stuff along with the fighting bits? I mean no, of course not: but end of the day that would only be purely an added bonus for an all out fantasy martial arts-focused series like DB. If it ultimately comes down to "low key dialogue scenes" vs "fighting/action" scenes in terms of where the animation resources can most go, the latter option SHOULD be the correct pick at least 90 times out of 100 or so for a series like this one.
If the "big guns" for the animation are really so particularly limited in what or how much they can do (which is a key point that is so often stressed the most in these kinds of threads, particularly within your own posts on the matter), then so long as they go where they count the most for a series like DB (be it fighting or general action moments) then we're basically good.
Goku bouncing up and down in that one clip is obviously part of a prelude to a fight scene (as he seems to be warming up to take on this new mystery Saiya-jin villain), so I would count that as part of what's probably a soon-to-be-coming fight scene. If nothing else, its not much different from various "training" scenes throughout the series, some of which have also boasted some fantastic looking animation as well.
(Not the absolute best example I could've used, but its the one I had quickest available to me, and I'm busy with other stuff as I type this.)
Now if I'm reading you correctly, you're bringing up this other Pokemon series into this in order to illustrate that pouring more animation time and manpower into a weekly TV series (allowing for more consistently fluid animation throughout a whole episode) like DB CAN be possible if we were to scale back on model detail.
For me personally, I think how much I'd be on board with this ENTIRELY depends on the extent to which that rebalancing of animation management is done going forward. So far, just from that one teaser clip, I'm largely ok with this current direction: I'll obviously be better able to judge based on more footage, but for right now with this one microscopic snippet of a clip, I'm honestly not crying over any of this. My concern is more on how far this direction continues to drift as more DB animated projects come down the pipeline.
Do I care about animation fluidity? Absolutely I do. Do I also care about character models? Unquestionably. How much of one am I willing to sacrifice for the other? Therein lies the rub in all this.
I'll be up front and state the obvious: I VASTLY prefer more detailed models. This stems a great, great deal for my love of Gekiga style art in anime and manga: I find that visual approach to be INFINITELY superior and more emotionally impactful than more simplistic models which genuinely appear flat and inexpressive to me. I understand that the "expressiveness" of those more simpler models is supposed to come from their more exaggerated movement: for me, that isn't how I usually relate to a character on screen or page. I don't require or am drawn to over the top exaggeration, as that doesn't elicit more emotion out of me: I come at it from a "less is more" standpoint of subtlety, which is generally achieved and expressed in 2 dimensional art (still on a comic page, or in motion in animation) via subtle details.
And yes I note the irony in my saying that I strongly feel that you can get a "less is more" conveying of emotion from MORE character detail rather than less, but you get my point.
But to better illustrate what I mean: I get WAY infinitely more out of this simple closeup shot of Goku smirking:
Than I ever would with any immaculately animated shot of him spastically bouncing around with rubbery limbs. That kind of thing is flashy and fun (and its great for certain fight scenes too, though again not necessarily all - sometimes you want a bit more grit to certain fights as well): it doesn't however very often get a more subtle, humanistic emotional response.
And you get more subtle expressiveness out of a shot like the above with more, not less, detailed character designs. Because it allows for actual, relateable HUMANITY to shine through during moments like two characters sharing a wordless glance or what have you. And I find there's more to like and appreciate in a character when he/she feels more human and less a cartoon caricature.
That doesn't mean that I DON'T think that that level of exagerrated movement should NEVER be used, and that it somehow NEVER has a place:
(This shot from YYH is wonderful, and I think its successfully achieved without sacrificing all that terribly much in the way of detail on Kurabara's model anyway.)
Just that I don't think that ALL aspects of ALL anime should be SO stringently beholden to having this stylistic quirk be catered to 24/7, to the point that we just say "screw it" with any degree of care towards model detail whatsoever. Exaggerated, off-model, rubbery movement is simply one of MANY tools in an animator's kit: it is NOT the be-all, end-all to which we should be gauging the worth of a given title's animation quality. Sometimes this kind of over the top exaggeration is what a scene or moment calls for: other times you WANT there to be enough room for detail in a character's design to allow for subtlety in expressiveness; some moments call more for a character to reflect a more relateable sense of realism in their emotions more than big, broad, and exaggerated cartoonishness.
This is a BIG part of the median line that so often was used to separate how people looked at Japanese anime vs Western animation, with the former being seen as having the capacity to FAR better oscillate between fantasy exaggeration and grounded realism vs the latter's tendency to simply stick more stringently often to the former.
Now do I worship at this alter of expressive detail SO much that I'd want a DB movie or show that consists of nothing but static stills and pans of beautifully detailed images (as some anime very much consist of)? No, absolutely would I not go in that extreme either, of course. I want there to be a balance to allow for BOTH fluid movement AND detailed, expressive models: but I want that balance tilted at least with ENOUGH of a nod towards giving DB (or anything else really) more detail than the average bit of Shonen fluff, most of which suffers from often looking like simplistic blobs of broad cartoonishness, however fluid the animation can otherwise get some of the time (One Piece is at times, and only at times, an exception to this; but that's mitigated completely by Oda's artstyle being absolute hiddeous dogshit in and of itself).
Which is something that, by and large for the most part, DB has generally always been good about (no matter Yamamuro's problems currently, he WAS at one time one of the absolute BEST animation directors in DB's latter/Boo-era period, and I contend that "too much detail" is a HUGE oversimplification of his more recent/Super-era problems).
What I DON'T want is for that balance to go the other way: where we see more and more detail drained from use in DB's models to give more and more of an increased emphasis on constant, exaggerated, rubbery-limbed movement.
I'm sorry, but these examples that you're giving here?
JulieYBM wrote:
As lovely as the sense of motion is in some of them, if DB's character designs ever at ANY point in its future comes within the same ZIPCODE of resembling these, then I'm just plain and simply NOT even remotely interested. Character models like these are the exact ANTITHESIS of pleasing to my eye, and I get less than nothing out of them other than a desire to vomit and then be someplace far, far away from them.
You can certainly get a fluidity of motion that's either equal to or very close to these without having to sacrifice near enough model detail to come within spitting distance of looking like this kind of shit. DB's managed it plenty of times before, I've been largely perfectly fine with how that balance between character detail and fluidity has been handled up till now, at least in its better animated episodes.
JulieYBM wrote:Speaking of Koukaku Kidoutai: GHOST IN THE SHELL, that movie had a lot of good animators (i.e. the guys known for working on all the big, big movies in Japan), like Iso, Inoue, Yoshinari Kou and Okiura. Additionally, the movie actually used a very, very small number of drawings and shots. At only 85 minutes the movie only uses 683 cuts (they use the English word 'cut' to describe a 'shot'). Your average Japanese animated series is typically only allowed 300 cuts for a single 25 minute episode (400 for important episodes), so Ooishi actually used a lot of smart directing to get around his time restraints. Meanwhile, the less intelligently directed Akira ran for 124 minutes and used 2,212 cuts. Yowza. The typical Japanese animated film only uses 700-1,200 cuts. In the case of Koukaku Kidoutai, though, again, it also had a ton of the world's best working on it, so I think that really played a big factor into the quality of the animation while retaining detail.
I know this is off topic, but since you brought it up: whatever your leanings in animation styles go, citing Akira of all films as having "less intelligent direction" than just about damn near ANYTHING else (even a similarly breathtaking masterwork like Ooshi's Ghost in the Shell) does NOT do any argument you can possibly make on the subject of animation directing any favors whatsoever. For reasons so absurdly obvious, I damn sure hope I don't have to go to the trouble of outlining them.
The fact that Akira contains as many shots as it does is something that would hardly be considered any kind of "negative" to pretty much ANYONE other than the studio that has to manage and finance a project of such a monumental undertaking; its ambitious as all getout, yes, but its also the direct result of Japan's lightning-in-a-bottle bubble economy being what it was in the 80s. That's less a cause to complain than it is to just be thankful something of such incredible artistic ambition was allowed to exist at all.
JulieYBM wrote:Then again, we also have Violet Evergarden and other Kyouto Animation cartoons as of recent having insane amounts of detail.
Anyway, simpler designs are for the best. Well, designs good animators want to work with are the best. Yamamuro and his weird-ass idea of detailed designs were driving everyone off.
I like how you show a perfectly lovely shot that is both well animated and detailed and follow it up immediately with "anyway, simpler designs are for the best". Um... no? Not necessarily? Again, my answer to that is "just HOW much 'simpler' are we talking exactly?"
I'm ok for the design detail taking a hit for the sake of movement only if its within a relatively sane degree of reason: but having DB's character designs be parred SO far back into looking anywhere VAGUELY along the same lines as the next Pokemon or Yotsuba series is a bridge that's way, waaaaaaaaaay too far into the exact opposite wrong-headed extreme that you cite Yamamuro of delving into.
And for all the bitching we've all been doing lately about Yamamuro, the one name from the old days that people seem by far and away the most eager to see return to the series? Minoru Maeda, who himself excellently balanced INCREDIBLY detailed character models with spectacular and fluid movement:
(Again, hastily chosen example.)
So once more, I call complete and utter BS that we need to totally scale back away from character design detail in order to achieve dynamically fluid movement; especially when its hardly as if Yamamuro is somehow the ONLY animation director to have ever attempted (and succeed) with this approach, nor is it accurate to say that its this approach at its base that's at the root of his more recent issues.
But again, hopefully all of this is purely academic spitballing, and wherever DB's future art direction goes (be in in this movie, or further down the line) doesn't render it into something that's wholly unrecognizable or divorced from its own distinctive visual style.
JulieYBM wrote:Detailed designs don't mean 'good'.
True. By that same token though, neither is the reverse the case either: less detailed designs also don't mean "good". This is a matter of personal creative/aesthetic preferences, and I'm drawing a very clear line in the sand in where I stand on this matter just as you have, and I'm further countering that going all-in on less detail ISN'T inherently somehow a requirement to getting more out of movement. This isn't a zero-sum game: its a spectrum than can be tilted and adjusted however a studio or animation director sees fit.
Truer words have never been spoken. Its funny how JaconYBM went on and on about simple designs being for the best, yet debunks himself by posting a scene of a hyper-detailed, well animated anime. There are several anime films with more detailed artwork and at least equal levels of animation than the teaser, yet he wants to act like that's impossible lmao. Its as if he merely wants the series to look like One Piece or Pokemon S&M, regardless of animation quality.
Last edited by kn83 on Thu Mar 22, 2018 10:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
Kunzait_83 wrote:And for all the bitching we've all been doing lately about Yamamuro, the one name from the old days that people seem by far and away the most eager to see return to the series? Minoru Maeda, who himself excellently balanced INCREDIBLY detailed character models with spectacular and fluid movement.
Hasn't he retired?
Power levels are not just big numbers:
Spoiler:
Power levels establish tension and drama. People who care about them (well, people who care about them in a narrative) don't care about the big numbers or the fancy explosions. If you have character A who's so much above character B, who's the main character, you're gonna be left wondering how in the hell character B, the character we're supposed to care and root for, is going to escape the situation or overcome the odds. It makes us emotionally invested.
If character B doesn't escape the situation in a believable way that's consistent with previous events, then that emotional investment is gone. It was pointless tension, pointless drama made just to suck in the viewer. It has no critical value whatsoever. The audience is left believing that the author can just create whatever scenarios he wants and what happens to the characters is decided by whatever the author wants to happen, regardless of the events that happened in the story. Which, in fairness, is what happens, but the audience wants to be fooled. The audience wants to know that the world they're following has rules. That the world they're invested in isn't going to bend to external factors that are irrelevant to them.
An author can do whatever he wants with the characters, that's not false. But the author should also have the responsibility to make sure it fits in cohesively with the other events in the narrative he has created.
Kunzait_83 wrote:
I had to paragraph break the shit out of this just to make it readable.
I mean... no kidding the best animation in the 80s and 90s run of the series was saved for the fights. It was a weekly TV series, and its main subject matter was martial arts. If I have limited time, staff, and resources to create a show that's mainly about martial artists beating the crap out of one another, then OF COURSE I'm going to pool the bulk of those resources and manpower into the fight scenes, seeing as how that's kind of the main draw and focus of the series; not to mention, frankly, they're the scenes which would most naturally call for the most amount of dynamism in character movement anyway, be it fighting or just general "action" moments as a whole.
I mean would I MIND if there was also tons of resources and manpower dumped into casual scenes of the cast just hanging around Kami's temple or Kame House or wherever and talking about stuff along with the fighting bits? I mean no, of course not: but end of the day that would only be purely an added bonus for an all out fantasy martial arts-focused series like DB. If it ultimately comes down to "low key dialogue scenes" vs "fighting/action" scenes in terms of where the animation resources can most go, the latter option SHOULD be the correct pick at least 90 times out of 100 or so for a series like this one.
If the "big guns" for the animation are really so particularly limited in what or how much they can do (which is a key point that is so often stressed the most in these kinds of threads, particularly within your own posts on the matter), then so long as they go where they count the most for a series like DB (be it fighting or general action moments) then we're basically good.
Goku bouncing up and down in that one clip is obviously part of a prelude to a fight scene (as he seems to be warming up to take on this new mystery Saiya-jin villain), so I would count that as part of what's probably a soon-to-be-coming fight scene. If nothing else, its not much different from various "training" scenes throughout the series, some of which have also boasted some fantastic looking animation as well.
(Not the absolute best example I could've used, but its the one I had quickest available to me, and I'm busy with other stuff as I type this.)
The lack of character animation in the first three series were probably based on continued ideas set in place by Series Directors Okazaki Minoru & Nishio Daisuke or Character Designer & Chief Animator Maeda Minoru and then continued during the Series Director Yama'uchi Shigeyasu, Nakatsuru Katsuyoshi & Yamamuro Tadayoshi eras about how Dragon Ball worked. Characters were pretty remarkably drawn with detail during the original three series, even during the more horrible Last House and Studio Live episodes. I'm not entirely sure it was a design based upon a lack of time so much as just the idea that the characters had to always look a certain way, even at the cost of production quality. Look at series from the same era, like Yuu Yuu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin. Shinbou Akiyuki and Wakabayashi Atsushi pushed everyone on Yuu Yuu Hakusho to deviate from the models and draw loosely to dictate the movement of characters as much as possible, even outside of their own episodes. I specifically remember in Episode #69 how gloriously and exceedingly liberal Takahashi Motosuke was in pushing his team to pump out casualbackgroundanimation, for instance. Heavily detailed character stills were traded for intricately animated backgrounds so as to move the camera along with the characters and the effect is far more grandiose. I have to wonder if the first three Dragon Ball series were made with the idea that the characters had to remain on model as much as possible to sell merchandise like much of Dragon Ball Super has been.
Now if I'm reading you correctly, you're bringing up this other Pokemon series into this in order to illustrate that pouring more animation time and manpower into a weekly TV series (allowing for more consistently fluid animation throughout a whole episode) like DB CAN be possible if we were to scale back on model detail.
For me personally, I think how much I'd be on board with this ENTIRELY depends on the extent to which that rebalancing of animation management is done going forward. So far, just from that one teaser clip, I'm largely ok with this current direction: I'll obviously be better able to judge based on more footage, but for right now with this one microscopic snippet of a clip, I'm honestly not crying over any of this. My concern is more on how far this direction continues to drift as more DB animated projects come down the pipeline.
Do I care about animation fluidity? Absolutely I do. Do I also care about character models? Unquestionably. How much of one am I willing to sacrifice for the other? Therein lies the rub in all this.
Yes, by streamlining the models you have less rules and when you have less rules the key animators can do anything they want and feel they can pull off in the time they have. This is why the drawings for modern Pokemon are actually much more complex, both in scenes that have heavily movement and scenes that do not. Dragon Ball has never really given its animators too much leeway to just screw around and experiment, certainly not in terms of the lines used to depict characters during high-intensity scenes. Yamamuro and Nakatsuru started going for a cleaner and cleaner look the longer Dragon Ball Z ran on, which is funny considering how rough Toriyama's arc began to become during the Cell Game.
I'll be up front and state the obvious: I VASTLY prefer more detailed models. This stems a great, great deal for my love of Gekiga style art in anime and manga: I find that visual approach to be INFINITELY superior and more emotionally impactful than more simplistic models which genuinely appear flat and inexpressive to me. I understand that the "expressiveness" of those more simpler models is supposed to come from their more exaggerated movement: for me, that isn't how I usually relate to a character on screen or page. I don't require or am drawn to over the top exaggeration, as that doesn't elicit more emotion out of me: I come at it from a "less is more" standpoint of subtlety, which is generally achieved and expressed in 2 dimensional art (still on a comic page, or in motion in animation) via subtle details.
And yes I note the irony in my saying that I strongly feel that you can get a "less is more" conveying of emotion from MORE character detail rather than less, but you get my point.
But to better illustrate what I mean: I get WAY infinitely more out of this simple closeup shot of Goku smirking:
Than I ever would with any immaculately animated shot of him spastically bouncing around with rubbery limbs. That kind of thing is flashy and fun (and its great for certain fight scenes too, though again not necessarily all - sometimes you want a bit more grit to certain fights as well): it doesn't however very often get a more subtle, humanistic emotional response.
And you get more subtle expressiveness out of a shot like the above with more, not less, detailed character designs. Because it allows for actual, relateable HUMANITY to shine through during moments like two characters sharing a wordless glance or what have you. And I find there's more to like and appreciate in a character when he/she feels more human and less a cartoon caricature.
That shot you posted of Gokuu is from Dragon Ball Z Episode #279, an episode sub-contracted to Studio Cockpit, where the majority of the cuts were key animated by Iwane Masa'aki. Why is that important to know? Because Iwane Masa'aki is the fastest known animator and illustrator on the face of the Earth that I can recall. I don't say that lightly. When he isn't forced to draw in a hyper-detailed style Iwane can key animate up to ten episodes a year without sacrificing quality (like Yashima Yoshitaka, Deguchi Toshio or Yokoyama Kenji used to). Iwane can animate martial arts, he can animate mecha/machines, he can animate smoke, water, lightning, fire, wind, comedy and drama. The man is pretty much fucking impossible to stop, so I find it hilarious that you would select a shot from the one guy who is truly unique on this planet.
It's a great cut looking still, even though it doesn't move with the amount of nuance one would hope for considering that it takes place right before the big battle. Nevertheless, the cut is also horrifically off-model, because the character model is much, much simpler than that. But that's the sort of freedom and flexibility proponents of loose character models are fighting for. I don't honestly expect Shida Naotoshi to stay on model with Shintani Naohiro's designs, for example. I expect him to add all the shading he feels like he can pull off in his allotted time, because it's fuckin' Shida Naotoshi.
Fun little aside: Iwane's work on Pokemon also includes gekiga-esque animation, too, something only he can pull off due to his one of a kind speed and sense of timing.
That doesn't mean that I DON'T think that that level of exagerrated movement should NEVER be used, and that it somehow NEVER has a place:
(This shot from YYH is wonderful, and I think its successfully achieved without sacrificing all that terribly much in the way of detail on Kurabara's model anyway.)
Just that I don't think that ALL aspects of ALL anime should be SO stringently beholden to having this stylistic quirk be catered to 24/7, to the point that we just say "screw it" with any degree of care towards model detail whatsoever. Exaggerated, off-model, rubbery movement is simply one of MANY tools in an animator's kit: it is NOT the be-all, end-all to which we should be gauging the worth of a given title's animation quality. Sometimes this kind of over the top exaggeration is what a scene or moment calls for: other times you WANT there to be enough room for detail in a character's design to allow for subtlety in expressiveness; some moments call more for a character to reflect a more relateable sense of realism in their emotions more than big, broad, and exaggerated cartoonishness.
That shot is key animated by Wakabayashi Atsushi, a tremendously big name in the world of television animation. What he achieved as animation supervisor for Shinbou's biggest episodes of Yuu Yuu Hakusho (#58, #66 and #74) is truly impressive and really goes to show how animation is more than just pretty still images, but the film-making form of multiple images timed in succession. Wakabayashi's went on to storyboard, direct, animation supervise and key animate (along with Matsumoto Norio) four masterfully directed and animated episodes of Naruto (#30, #71, #133 and Shippuuden #167) and you can really see here that his career was going places...places way, way further ahead of where Dragon Ball was at the time. Despite being the big action series at Touei Animation at the time I think it's pretty interesting to see how it didn't really receive the sort of production quality or even deployment of talent like other series did. Sailor Moon had most of Touei Animation's young auteurs at the time with Dragon Ball being left only with Yama'uchi Shigeyasu (who I felt didn't really shine nearly as much as a leader as he should have on the project).
None of us are really expecting all 300 cuts per episode to look like what Oonishi Ryou did for this preview (it'd be impossible in general since Oonishi cannot possibly draw that much anyway). But we're certainly expecting more than one piece of character animation every dozen episodes--or in the case of this movie one short scene. The last two Dragon Ball movies have had utterly terrible character expression in its animation. Oonishi Ryou did a small bit for Kami to Kami, but it was short and lacked his usual density. In part, I think that has to do not just with Yamamuro's character models, but the manner in which Yamamuro corrects key animation having some sort of effect on the animation's timing. Oonishi is definitely one of it not the only real 'humanist' movers at Touei Animation right now.
JulieYBM wrote:Speaking of Koukaku Kidoutai: GHOST IN THE SHELL, that movie had a lot of good animators (i.e. the guys known for working on all the big, big movies in Japan), like Iso, Inoue, Yoshinari Kou and Okiura. Additionally, the movie actually used a very, very small number of drawings and shots. At only 85 minutes the movie only uses 683 cuts (they use the English word 'cut' to describe a 'shot'). Your average Japanese animated series is typically only allowed 300 cuts for a single 25 minute episode (400 for important episodes), so Ooishi actually used a lot of smart directing to get around his time restraints. Meanwhile, the less intelligently directed Akira ran for 124 minutes and used 2,212 cuts. Yowza. The typical Japanese animated film only uses 700-1,200 cuts. In the case of Koukaku Kidoutai, though, again, it also had a ton of the world's best working on it, so I think that really played a big factor into the quality of the animation while retaining detail.
I know this is off topic, but since you brought it up: whatever your leanings in animation styles go, citing Akira of all films as having "less intelligent direction" than just about damn near ANYTHING else (even a similarly breathtaking masterwork like Ooshi's Ghost in the Shell) does NOT do any argument you can possibly make on the subject of animation directing any favors whatsoever. For reasons so absurdly obvious, I damn sure hope I don't have to go to the trouble of outlining them.
The fact that Akira contains as many shots as it does is something that would hardly be considered any kind of "negative" to pretty much ANYONE other than the studio that has to manage and finance a project of such a monumental undertaking; its ambitious as all getout, yes, but its also the direct result of Japan's lightning-in-a-bottle bubble economy being what it was in the 80s. That's less a cause to complain than it is to just be thankful something of such incredible artistic ambition was allowed to exist at all.
Ootomo's directing sucked. Bare in mind, I haven't seen the movie in a few years, but the only thing I remembered liking was the voice cast, music, the background stills and the colors. I thought Ootomo lacked the sort of grit necessary of a good director. Shot composition and the rhythm of shots is what makes Japanese film and television as great is it often is. The restrictive conditions of the early Japanese industry forced storyboard artists, episode directors and action animators to depict movement using what lesser critics might call 'corner cutting' techniques but it is these techniques that raise these films to the level of art worthy of our study. Ootomo was given a Disney-level schedule, great animators and a high number of drawings without first having to learn the discipline that great directors learn under the restrictions of television conditions (1-3 months per episode, 3,000-5,000 drawings per twenty minutes, 300 shots or less, bad animators, etc.) and as a result the effort comes off as less than impressive. When I think of intelligently directed animated films I think of The End of Evangelion (which I would consider the greatest film of all time, production issues be damned) and Koe no Katachi. Akira is probably a much, much better comic (I refuse to read it flipped).
JulieYBM wrote:Then again, we also have Violet Evergarden and other Kyouto Animation cartoons as of recent having insane amounts of detail.
Anyway, simpler designs are for the best. Well, designs good animators want to work with are the best. Yamamuro and his weird-ass idea of detailed designs were driving everyone off.
I like how you show a perfectly lovely shot that is both well animated and detailed and follow it up immediately with "anyway, simpler designs are for the best". Um... no? Not necessarily? Again, my answer to that is "just HOW much 'simpler' are we talking exactly?"
I'm ok for the design detail taking a hit for the sake of movement only if its within a relatively sane degree of reason: but having DB's character designs be parred SO far back into looking anywhere VAGUELY along the same lines as the next Pokemon or Yotsuba series is a bridge that's way, waaaaaaaaaay too far into the exact opposite wrong-headed extreme that you cite Yamamuro of delving into.
And for all the bitching we've all been doing lately about Yamamuro, the one name from the old days that people seem by far and away the most eager to see return to the series? Minoru Maeda, who himself excellently balanced INCREDIBLY detailed character models with spectacular and fluid movement:
(Again, hastily chosen example.)
So once more, I call complete and utter BS that we need to totally scale back away from character design detail in order to achieve dynamically fluid movement; especially when its hardly as if Yamamuro is somehow the ONLY animation director to have ever attempted (and succeed) with this approach, nor is it accurate to say that its this approach at its base that's at the root of his more recent issues.
But again, hopefully all of this is purely academic spitballing, and wherever DB's future art direction goes (be in in this movie, or further down the line) doesn't render it into something that's wholly unrecognizable or divorced from its own distinctive visual style.
JulieYBM wrote:Detailed designs don't mean 'good'.
True. By that same token though, neither is the reverse the case either: less detailed designs also don't mean "good". This is a matter of personal creative/aesthetic preferences, and I'm drawing a very clear line in the sand in where I stand on this matter just as you have, and I'm further countering that going all-in on less detail ISN'T inherently somehow a requirement to getting more out of movement. This isn't a zero-sum game: its a spectrum than can be tilted and adjusted however a studio or animation director sees fit.
Kyouto Animation is the big outlier here because they're the only studio that forces their production schedules to actually be sane enough to experiment with designs on the level of Violet Evergarden. Simplistic designs are best in the current reality in which we reside, although any design that is hugely popular with good animators will nevertheless also be for the best. When the Nakano and Yasuda designs for Pokemon were released notable animators all over Twitter began praising them. The designs were popular enough to draw in Kameda Yoshimichi (an animator known for insanely detailed animation) to do a cut for the first Opening. Animators like to draw all sorts of things.
I think the big issue here is that you think of 'designs' as if they're the only thing being followed and the only thing that determines the quality of the drawings. Directors and animation supervisors trust animators to go off-model as much as animators do in the Japanese industry because the character models isn't seen as the rigid rule that it is in the US animation industry. Nishio Tetsuya and Suzuki Hirofumi's designs for Naruto are very simple, for example, but still maintain a lot of variety in how they're portrayed. Tsuru Toshiyuki (or am I thinking of Tanaka Hiroto?) draws Nishio's designs even more realistically than Nishio does and NIshio's a pretty big realist animator.
With regards to Maeda, I don't actually think his designs were all that great. Certainly, I like his early adult Gokuu as an illustration, but when you follow Maeda's practices as an animation supervisor I always found his episodes boring and movies boring. What made Hisada Kazuya's work during the Namek and Artificial Humans arc good was their Kanada-esque movement (something he is painfully incapable of doing anymore). Maeda's characters never really had an interesting sense of timing, they were just pretty, typically flat illustrations. Hell, Maeda only did key animation twice during his tenure as the chief animator of Dragon Ball, so I really have no idea what his work is like. I get the feeling he was selected as the chief animator simply because he could draw similarly to Toriyama and that's it. The best animation character designers are always good animators, as is the case with Shintani Naohiro (my eyes widened when I first saw how delicately he timed that tanuki character standing up).
