A spring update

[sensei]

I used to do these "update" announcements regularly here, but stopped doing so a while ago. One reason was that for personal business reasons I stopped doing those massive "all at once" updates but instead got used to scanning a little, uploading a little as time went on. But I find that not very fulfilling, particularly as it doesn't give me space to step back and say what a particular set of new items means to me and to my collection. So this year, as it turned out, I got a shipment of new items just as Lent began (when I give up auction browsing for the season, along with peanut butter and fast-food burgers). I thought it would work out if I scanned a little, wrote up descriptions a little, but kept everything on hold until after Easter. Then I put up the newcomers in short order yesterday morning and afternoon.

I always put aside some of the nicer or more interesting scans and make smaller versions to put on my RS home page in the left column as "New Arrivals." And out of habit I've saved both HTML and IMG links to these "wallet-sized" scans. For a couple of years the IMG links have gone unused -- but dang it, I figured I'd do one more survey and comment on an update, if only for the sake of newcomers.

As typical of updates for the past 5 years or so, the new items are overwhelmingly sketches from CGI-era series that I have been following. But I've gotten a taste for pre-1990 "Golden Age" cels, and so the plastic part of my update is usually heavy on these. Many American collectors might recognize the first two of these:


Blinky


Pinky

These are the koala protagonists of a 1984 series titled Fushigi na Koala Blinky that celebrated the arrival of the first animals of this species to Japanese zoos. The event caused nationwide publicity that led to this series, produced by Nippon Animation and another, Koala Boy Kokki, done by Topcraft. Both series were licensed by Saban International and widely distributed in various dubs. American GenXers know them as Noozles and Adventures of the Little Koala.

This set was interesting because the cels had been chosen by the studio to sell as souvenirs. They came in a yellow-paper frame with Nippon's logo on the front, the cel (sigh!) attached to a trimmed down original background with adhesive tape and the whole affair bonded together with circular metal rings. They stunk to high heaven of mildew, but once I'd deconstructed the "frame," aired everything out, and given the cels a bath to remove decades of dust, I found that they were actually in pretty good shape. Each had notes on the top, giving their original contexts by episode and cut, but (having only access to the Saban dub, edited down to make room for more commercials) I could not locate either image. Still, they are fine additions to my collection, as Blinky/Noozles cels are very hard to find.

The next new cel is one that I'd expect no one to recognize:


Wata no Kuni Hoshi: Chibi-Neko is left out with the trash

This comes from a 1984 film produced by Mushi Production (hand-inked trace lines!) based on a manga that was at the time very popular, concerning the adventures of a kitten who (having been raised away from her mother by neglectful students) believes she is a human being in some kind of larval form and will eventually transform into the same shape as the hunky guy who has adopted her. It's totally unknown in North America, though there is a decent fansub that's easy to find, and, so far as I know, I'm the only person who's made it a mission to collect cels from this project. This one comes from the cold opening of the film, showing the poor kitten (depicted as she imagines herself, as a toddler with cat ears) as she vainly begs for some food beside the trash cans where she's been abandoned.

The next cel might ring bells in some people's heads, as it is from a more familiar "Classic Cel-based Series":


Mira’s Companions

That came up randomly in a set that included some sketches and a timing sheet from a now-scattered cut near the end of the final episode (#49) of Magic Knight Rayearth. As I have a gallery devoted to this series-ending adventure, I thought it worth snagging for the sketches. But I was intrigued by this sketch, which is just the bottom layer for a moving set that shows Mira, the bold little tyke who realizes that the Magic Knights function through the power of the Cephironians' faith in them, along with two other supporters. But this back layer just shows the people that (in Milton's words) "also serve who only stand and wait."

Another remnant lot preserved a nice rough sketch from Ep. 46:


MKR: Eagle Vision (Rough by Shinobu Nishioka)

Nishioka did a lot of the animation direction for the Rayearth OAV and was character designer for Devilman Lady and Yumeria.

The sketches included some interesting items from the 2001 Studio Deen anime adaptation of the classic manga Fruits Basket. Sketch sets from this series also didn't fare well: some were broken up and sold douga-by-douga to Takaya-sensei's many fans. But the remnants of these sketch sets sometimes contain very interesting items, particularly the roughs and gengas. The current update includes:


Fruits Basket: Tohru learns Kyo is The Cat (Ep. 2)

(That came with no identification, but I could see that the rough was done in a style similar to the animation director for Ep. 6. The same artist did Ep. 2, so I looked up that installment, found that Tohru wore the outfit in the sketch in the opening scene, and kept watching until it turned up.)


Fruits Basket: Piglet Kagura karate-kicks Kyo (Ep. 4)

(That batch was complete enough to make an enjoyably hard-hitting reanimation.)


Fruits Basket: Tohru with Arisa and Saki (Ep. 6)


Fruits Basket: Shocked Kyo (Ep. 6) (Shigure has just confessed to Tohru and her friends that he makes his living by writing soft pornography novels.)

Another set of newcomers represent the very fine first season of Rozen Maiden done by Studio Nomad in 2004, with Kumi Ishii as chief animation director. This artist did a lot of work revising and at times replacing his episode animation directors' work. This full shuusei shows her real power at making flat sketches look fully three dimensional:


Rozen Maiden: Shinku in a coma (Ep. 7).

And as I've collected from this series, I've found that one of Ishii's most talented junior animation directors was Kimiko Tamai. I've found that her roughs are anything but rough: they are exquisite in their detail and in their energy. And yet Ishii regularly reworked them, often in important details, sometimes totally. This tension between two very fine artists, I suspect, is why the three episodes on which they worked together are artistically the finest in that series. And so, with a run of new sketches from the climax of this episode in hand, I could justify pulling together a new gallery from the Ep. 11 Tamai/Ishii sketchwork:


Rozen Maiden: Suigintou terminates the match with Shinku (Ep. 11)


Shinku spread-eagled in Suigintou’s grip (Ep. 11)


Suigintou triumphant (Ep. 11)


Shinku realizes she’s injured (Ep. 11)

Finally, there was another addition of work from the 2006 J. C. Staff production of Asatte no Houkou, oddly released here as Living for the Day after Tomorrow. That is a wonderfully narrated 12-episode story with art supervised by Ikuko Itou and Shinya Hasegawa, two major forces in classic/modern anime. Some of the new pieces just complemented or filled out scenes I already had sketches from, but these were the most dramatic:


Asatte no Houkou: Tetsu refuses to recognize Karada (Ep. 11)

(Don't have time to give a full explanation, but the Tetsu/Karada affair is the focus of the plot, which runs awry as romance is prone to do because Karada, a prepubescent little girl switches ages with a sexually mature woman.)


Asatte no Houkou: Karada panics (Ep. 12)

(She spends a lot of time running frantically in the series, and the animators manage to capture this in animation that is often very quirky and unexpected.)


Asatte no Houkou: Tetsu gets ready to confess to Karada (Ep. 12)

(Oh, and you have GOT to have a moment when the guy finally "gets it" and does a big "I ... I ... [dang it all ...] I love you!!!" moment. That was fun to reanimate also, even if the confession itself is put in a long shot from the side that breaks up the douga set in the middle.


Asatte no Houkou: Shouko-chan says good-bye to Kotomi (Ep. 12)

One of my favorite moments: Shouko, the older-woman-grown-a-kid-again develops an oddball relationship with Kotomi a minor character who always seems to be there at the precise moment when the plot needs to be kicked ahead. And at the end, Kotomi plays a little trick on the rejuvenated tyke, says goodbye, and boards a train for home. And ... what she does resolves the series plot in an unexpected, but perfect way. (Noooo, I won't explain. You need to watch the series. All the way from Ep. 1 to Ep. 12. More than once.)

Enjoy!

[JWR]

Very nice to see the Rozen Maiden and Fruits Basket sketches. I have been watching the new remake of Fruits Basket which has so far been true to the original. The only thing I really miss with the 2019 version is Ritsuko Okazaki's music from the original

[sensei]

Natsuki Takaya, I gather, gave permission for the new full-story-arc adaptation, provided that none of the animation artists who worked on the 2001 partial adaptation be included. This included the Studio Deen crew, whose minimalist animation approach (lots of A1 END full-face-on frames with pans, zooms, etc., plus frequent use of SD images and "cartoony" moments) provoked criticism even at the time.

This animating style was all the more obvious to me when I went from Rozen Maiden and Asatte no Houkou, which used very elaborate animations, preferring 3/4 facial poses, attention to realism in poses and lots of inbetweening. Examining and analyzing the Furuba material showed a drastic, immediately obvious contrast.. As successful as the Kagura karate-kick is, it's made up entirely of SD images, and from what I can tell from running the scene frame by frame, nearly no use of inbetweening. Quite a contrast from the astonishingly complex animating work done by BONES for Angelic Layer three years before this production.

And many of the other Furuba cuts are still images with mouth layers or flashy backgrounds, in the thrifty style pioneered by Osamu Tezuka, whom rumor claims could create a full 22-minute Astro Boy episode that required fewer than 1000 new cels. (By comparison, the "Fly Capture" cut in CCS ep. 1 required the use of 200 separate cels.)

Thanks for visiting, JWR! It's a bit of a nostalgia move on my part, but, as I say, it helps me stand back from the job and think about what I learned by obtaining this new batch.

[Pixel]

While sketches are generally much easier to maintain (as long as they're not taped anyway), some cels have a way of capturing one's fancy that paper just can't quite match. I suppose the same can be said for some sketches though.

I don't recall having watch any of the titles represented by the cels.

While my experience with all of the series here is very limited, I did catch enough of Asatte no Houkou to pick up on a high degree of appreciation the animation staff had for the project. The line-work is excellent, the backgrounds are quality, with the outdoor backgrounds being particularly rich and colorful.

I didn't really get far enough into it to form an opinion of the romance element.

Visually speaking, the attention to detail is phenomenal. Just as one example, adult Shouko has a large shock of hair that hangs from the otherwise rather clean cut hairstyle framing the front of her head. This shock is carried over to her hairstyle when she is turned back into a child.

However, when she was actually a child chronologically, this shock of hair was not part of her style. At least it wasn't in the portion of the series I watched.

Here is a screen cap of one of her flashbacks to being a child. Sorry, It's a bit bigger than I thought it would be.

shouko_5_flashback.jpg (31.61 KiB) Viewed 2728 times

Here, her hair is cut clean across the top and around. I find the style in front to be humorously reminiscent of the "sugar-bowl" haircut made famous by comedian Moe Howard of The Three Stooges.

Anyway, this is such a subtle difference yet it was taken into account as one of any number of visual cues that would need careful consideration. Perhaps the rather goofy hairstyle depicted here symbolized some of her awkwardness as an actual child?

The hairstyle given to child-form Shouko to me combines elements of her adult style and her original childhood style. With child Karada's bows thrown in for good measure.

It was a very unique approach to have Shouko react calmy, but grimly to her new situation. I would have expected both she and Karada to have a similar reaction, though more alarm coming from Karada as she would likely be much more confused about what had happened exactly.

To this end, I thought the understated vocal performance of Shizuka Itoh was highly suited to the jaded Shouko. While Kotomi's forwardness struck me as a bit uncomfortable, I did like the register which Ami Koshimizu employed for her voice.

It seemed easier to appreciate the post-swap difference in Shouko vs Karada. Something about Karada was rather off-putting.

As for Rozen Maiden, while I don't think I could really get into it at all, I must say that the animation of the lace and fabric really stood out.

What little I saw of them anyway. Perhaps I might not have seen enough of either to offer a properly informed impression. I like to think that in the case of Asatte, the part of the series I watched spoke for the remainder of the series in terms of animation quality.

[sensei]

Sorry for the tardy response to your post. A spate of final papers descended on me as soon as I got the new items up (as I knew would happen).

Yes, I think that Asatte no Houkou is very carefully done, as were a number of other 12-episode "novella" type series. Some series seem to project into season after season, and as each season builds to a climactic battle/confession/discovery, the next proposes yet another quest, and so on into infinity. But many of these 12-ep. series are very carefully "closed" with characters tightly drawn, relationships generating very specific tensions, and the whole working toward a climax and resolution that requires no "second season." (In my opinion, Rozen Maiden was conceived in this way, with the first 12 episodes working tightly and effectively to the climactic moments of Ep. 12. Then came the call for a second season, and all this fell apart, even though I enjoy Rie Tanaka as the voice actress in her original life and in her two unlikely resurrections.)

The main thing is that with some series you learn things by seeing the sketches, as you point out with the discrepancy between the real Shouko child and the rejuvenated Shouko. And I found myself appreciating AnH more by getting the art and looking at it very closely. Plus I began to understand what distinguished really strong animation from "good enough." I got that exact same feeling about Rozen Maiden -- the careful use of details that could only have been appreciated subliminally by a casual watcher. And this time when I moved back to annotating Fruits Basket art, I could see why Takaya-sensei demanded another studio do the full-story-arc remake. Over and over, "just good enough to do." (And Studio Deen did the "rewind" third season of Rozen Maiden as well as the first Furuba adaptation -- always "just OK.")

That constant learning experience was what hooked me on collecting AnH art in particular, and I remember clearly the moment when, quite by accident, I discovered that Ikuko Itou was one of the senior animators. (Animation News Network got this wrong in their database!) First: OMG! Then, "Oh, THAT'S why I find myself looking at that art so long and getting so much out of it. Shinya Hasegawa (senior AD for the even-numbered eps.) is no slouch either, though he has quite a different style.

For the cels, Wata no Kuni Hoshi is certainly worth a watch. It's Mushi Pro at their very best, and there is a good fansub on YouTube under "The Star of Cottonland." Quirky story, but with many cute touches and quite a smattering of scary ones too. A kitten's life is no circus, even when she has an owner and a home to return to.

Thanks again for checking in. I'll try to be more visible now that the semester is done.

[teggacat]

I always enjoy your updates immensely Sensei, this time especially intrigued by the Chibi Neko cel, and that cel section of your gallery has been a favorite of mine since you started adding them, and of course the Rozen Maiden sketches are simply stunning pieces of art

[sensei]

Thanks, Tegga. It's been especially enjoyable to follow up leads I've turned up in collecting and find really interesting and enjoyable works of art behind them. Wata aka "Star of Cottonland" really should be better known among anime fans, especially of the formative works of the 1980s era. And I really enjoy Kimiko Tamai's work for Rozen Maiden: she is an artist who should have gone on to projects that built on her talent and made her more visible. (But anime is increasingly a crowded field, so maybe she's making big bucks as a graphic artist for Toshiba -- who knows?) Thanks for visiting and checking in!