originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/763051...
OK, so, you know Mob Psycho 100? Maybe I don’t even need to say more than that…
Yuzuru Tachikawa! If you’re a sakuga type, perhaps a familiar name… if not, let’s take a moment to rewind the clock to the strange ancient times of 2013, where there was a certain something called the Young Animators Training Project. Which was a project to train young animators. More substantially, as kvin writes here, it was a project designed to address the collapsing training processes of the anime industry… a project which fell rather short of its aims in many ways.
But in its earlier days, it did fund a couple of very interesting, unique short films. One of them was the original Little Witch Academia, which went on to expand into one of Trigger’s flagship series. And the other… was Death Billiards, directed and written by a certain Yuzuru Tachikawa, rising episode director star, at Madhouse.
The premise of Death Billiards, and the later expanded esries Death Parade, is that the dead find their way into bars whose bartenders judge whether they should be reincarnated based on ‘death games’. What’s a death game? Well, standard bar stuff: billiards, darts… the title is in fact very literal. And it slapped. kVin writes:
Death Billiards was nothing short of a passion project for Tachikawa, who wrote, directed, and storyboarded it all. It was his opportunity to make a stance. To prove he wasn’t just a great ally for other creators, or even a suitable second in command, but rather someone deserving of helming his own titles as he pleased. In his second showing as director—the one fan of the 2012 multimedia project Arata-naru Sekai happens to be a friend of mine and he’ll kill me if I don’t mention it—Tachikawa held nothing back. Death Billiards’ exploration of ambiguity and moral failings that had always intrigued Tachikawa stuck with people all around the world too, and its presentation was so stylish that not even Yoh Yoshinari’s dazzling LWA managed to overshadow it. The OVA immediately put Tachikawa on the map, but truth to the told, that’s far from the extent of its success.
And indeed, Tachikawa - and producer Takuya Tsunoki - went on to do many great things, building up a strong gang of animators around them, many of them associated with the young Studio NUT. Of course, their best known project is Mob Psycho 100, a popular comedy-shōnen manga by One (same mangaka as One Punch Man) which plays around with chuunibyou (in the original sense) ideas of psychic powers in, ultimately, a very grounded, affirming way - and to this Tachikawa et al. brought a slightly sketchy, experimental style which led to some pretty crazy action animation. Mob was a crazy hit; later came their long-term passion project DECA-DENCE, a very fun scifi piece about humans trapped in an elaborate physicalised game, rebelling against the system and staging prison breaks, full of slick zero-g action sequences…
Course while we’re talking about NUT, we gotta mention their first work Youjo Senki, perhaps the most outright loathsome anime I’ve ever seen. Not to beat this dead horse. I can only imagine that the staff working on it were like… somehow oblivious to the blatant nazi barely-even-subtext of what they were adapting? (In keeping with the unfortunate ways that otaku culture plays with nazi imagery.) I just can’t square it with any of the other stuff they’ve made, Deca-Dence in particular. Tachikawa at least was only peripherally involved in that hot mess.
We’re not actually here to talk about Mob or Deca-Dence though - they’re both way too long for Animation Night. Instead we’ll be rolling the clock forward to Tachikawa’s most recent project at NUT: an adaptation of Blue Giant, about boys playing jaazzzzzz.
Blue Giant follows Dai, an aspiring saxophonist, as he grows up and toots despite the hostility of the patrons of his local music shop. The film adapts some of the later volumes of the manga, in which Dai has already made some progress in his playing. Dai falls in with two other jazz players: the experienced and arrogant Yukinori and novice drummer Shunji as they form a band. Before long, conflict brews over just how hardcore you should go.
The film is, naturally, a celebration of jazz, full of elaborate scenes of performance, described as being like “a full-blown music video” to really sell you on how moving and awesome jazz movie can be. Jazz and anime can be a great combo (just ask anyone who’s seen Cowboy Bebop or Gundam Thunderbolt) and I am pretty curious to see what they come up with here.
Honestly, while I’ve enjoyed Mob and Deca-Dence, I definitely feel like I’m sleeping a bit on Tachikawa - so tonight I hope to remedy it by checking out where he came from and where he’s currently going, with a night of Death Billiards and Blue Giant! NUT’s animation is always lively and stylish - they’re also the studio where the master of anime-industry animation tutorials, Dong Chang, works - so I think we’ll surely see something cool.
Animation Night 191 will be going live shortly at twitch.tv/canmom, I hope to see you there! And apologies for the late start - without going into too much of what’s happening behind the scenes here, we should (touch wood) soon be able to get back to an earlier schedule, but for now we’re still on witching hours.
Some brief post-watch comments!
Death Billiards honestly really ruled. Intriguing premise, really strong character-acting and direction, lush architecture; I will definitely be planning on watching Parade at some point. The ambiguity does a lot for it - I am still intrigued by the old man’s sinister smile. Madhouse’s characteristic mastery of space was on full display here. A really strong work - I can see why it’s so fondly remembered!
Blue Giant was a convincing love letter to jazz, and overall the music really carries it - but it really suffered from the jarring 3DCG used in the performance scenes. It’s not just that the 3DCG characters move stiffly (it looks like essentially raw mocap), or that the basic cel-shading leads to odd, unclear shapes that lead to clothing folds that seem almost painted onto the characters - these are common enough problems of 3DCG. But even more strange is the weird proportions of the models: heads too small, hands too big, it’s like the characters are suddenly replaced with big clumsy robots every time they do a 3DCG shot (which is often).
It’s a shame, because in other respects, these performance scenes are often really cool - especially as the animation becomes increasingly abstract, like the sequence at the beginning of this post. There are moments of spectacular, top-notch 2D animation in this movie - unfortunately it does not manage to make that into a cohesive whole with the rest. I can understand why they went for 3DCG mocap, since animating a musical performance is hard and there probably aren’t very many animators available who could pull off some of these shots, especially when the camera goes on crazy flights all around the stage - but in the end… honestly a more static 2D shot would probably have worked better in a lot of cases without the resources to really refine these 3DCG shots as they’d need.
The plotting around it is… also generally weaker than the music, honestly: it takes the ‘sports manga plot’ approach to becoming a big jazz musician, but that leads to a number of inelegant beats, like when a main character literally gets truck-kun’d near the end of the story to set up an injury subplot (hard to justify a jazz injury after all…). Our main character is a classic perpetual font of hot-bloodedness and enthusiasm, and thus a very static character, so it falls to the two secondary characters to have emotional arcs - but the main way these arcs go is ‘I face a setback and then I practice and get better’ lol, even if the novice drummer’s struggles are quite relatable.
It is, at least, like most boy-focused anime, kind of subtextually gay as shit, so deserves some credit there. The characters occasionally mention girls existing in this world, but I still kind of doubt it, since only one woman appears in the film for more than a few shots - the older woman who owns the jazz café and provides the boys a practice space, and thus easily slots into the ‘mum’ role.
Still, a fun movie and the music does a lot to carry it. A very compelling case for jazz too, but it also feels like a bit of a step down given how assured Tachikawa’s other works have been.
There’s an interview with Tachikawa on ANN from late last year. Of note is his discussion of the music by composer and pianist Hiromi Uehara:
I had a question about Uehara-san. She’s a legend and has composed multiple songs for the “Jass” Band in the film. What was it like working with her on Blue Giant?
TACHIKAWA: So not only was I the director of the film, but I was also overseeing the director of the music. Between LINE messages, phone calls, and meetings, we were working very closely with each other. I let Hiromi, though, take care of the technical aspects of music. But where I came in was really directing the moments and expressions. So during a piece of music, [I’m responsible for] drawing out or suppressing expression, managing how the cut is, or the timing to be able to hit this emotional note at this moment.
How much of Hiromi’s performances influence Sawabe’s piano performances on screen?
TACHIKAWA: Whenever she was performing for Sawabe, she was performing as Sawabe. So, for example, when Sawabe is playing piano, and he wants to kind of try to help out Tamada with his drumming, in those moments [she’s performing as Sawabe]. There’s a moment when Dai is doing his solo, and Sawabe thinks, “Oh, I don’t want to get in his way.” Hiromi came back with the sheet music and said, “Oh, this was that moment. You wanted me to stay out of Dai’s way.” or “This is the moment that Tamada needed help.” We would go back and forth very specifically over sheet music and build the performance that way.
Musical ‘acting’ is something I find kind of fascinating - especially for a story about the process of learning music, the musicians need to simulate how a novice player would play.
The 3DCG mocap was (as you would guess) primarily a time saving measure because 2D animation is too expensive:
TACHIKAWA: Yeah, we ended up choosing those approaches because we did attempt [only using] 2D, but it ended up taking too much time. So, for example, Tamada’s final solo actually took three to four months [to produce]. So just the time and the effort, it just wasn’t worth doing the entire movie in 2D. That’s why you have the different technologies come in.
Unfortunately that is I think why the mocap didn’t work so well: it’s an afterthought, not something that was really integral to the film from the beginning, so naturally it comes off a bit underbaked. Hopefully if Tachikawa and co use this tech in another film they can work on it some more. You can absolutely do brilliant things with 3DCG mocap animation - just look at The First Slam Dunk - but it takes just as much effort, if not more, as 2D. (I’m looking forward to showing The Pig That Survived Foot and Mouth Disease at some point, a Korean all-mocap film that I found very effective, but its style wouldn’t have worked alongside 2D animation.)
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