originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/772509...
Hey everyone! Happy year increment.
Animation Night hasn’t been on in a while, for a variety of reasons - some of them good. And I can’t promise it’s going to be back as a truly regular thing, necessarily. This year, I want to focus on making stuff, and spending time w people irl. If I’m blogging a lot, it’s a symptom… The release of short story A Summoning, and the next two to come, is step one on that. As-yet unnamed short film project, presently in the scripting stage, is another.
With that in mind, maybe Animation Night has served its purpose. But I’m not done with Animation Night! And to set things off on the right foot, here are two films about making art for your perusal.
Look Back surely needs no introduction for the sakubuta/weeb slice of my audience but for the rest of ya, let’s set the scene a little. We have here the adaptation of a one-shot manga by our god Tatsuki Fujimoto - yes, he of Chainsaw Man! and Fire Punch, Goodbye Eri… - about two girls Fujino and Kyōmoto, very overtly based on Fujimoto himself, creating manga. A story of all the intense highs and lows that come with making art, gradually escalating until an abrupt turn to tragedy late in the story that is pure Fujimoto. It’s a thoughtful, slightly enigmatic story, the thought of thing that scratches an itch in your brain and leaves you oddly fired up afterwards.
The story of the animated version, recounted as well as always on sakugablog, is also rather dramatic. So, this workaholic madlad Kiyotaka Oshiyama, fed up of how anime usually goes, was the furious driving force behind a really unusual production. It’s one which let the key animation of Oshiyama himself (who animated about half the film) alongside industry legends like Toshiyuki Inoue go through without the usual redrawing step, that is, without the overly-clean stiffness that tends to bring in - an approach that really let them bring out the most incredibly lively and organic animation, the kind that really lets the emotions spill out of the screen.
Like, you know me, my favourite anime is Eizouken, you know how much I love stories about girls making pictures together. But this one is really something special. And, hey, after all the controversies over whether Mappa!Chainsaw Man missed the mark or not and how it ought to have been, we have a Fujimoto adaptation that everyone seems to agree is just perfect. Hooray!
There’s much, much, much more to praise on the technical side: gorgeous colour design, super smart boards with incredibly funny elaborations on Fujino’s 4koma strips, pacing that really gets the feel of a Fujimoto manga - just about everyone in this year’s animation awards had something to add there. And it is also really short, much more like an OVA length than the usual big film. It is just as long as it needs to be: the perfectly tight production.
Which means we’ve got room for another.
So the other film I’ve got to show…
…is not as likely to be on your radar. Nobody’s even gif’d it. I saw this one at the Scotland Loves Anime festival a few months ago, and it only very recently landed on Nyaa. So let me spend a few more words introducing it.
If Look Back is the work of industry veterans at the absolute top of their game, A Few Moments of Cheers is almost aggressively new, but in other ways its story is quite similar to Look Back. The director, Popreq/poprika of the three-person studio Hooray, is basically a baby - someone who established himself making music videos in Blender, such as this:
or this:
Popreq’s style is characterised by bright colour, creative shading effects like the screentone dots you see in the first video, and lively mobile camerawork - really leaning into the unique qualities of 3DCG as a medium.
So much so that someone with money approached him like ‘hey can you make a movie of this’. That movie concerns, get this, a young Blender animator specialising in music videos - but it’s not actually autobiographical per se, it’s just that writer Jukki Hanada pretty much wrote the script around Popreq.
The stylistic debt to Makoto Shinkai is certainly there, with the warm light washing over every surface, the dramatic shots of the sky, etc. etc., but this has its own story to tell; it is about the meeting of people at various points in the brutal cycle of artmaking. Kanata (the 3D artist in question) is a bright young thing full of fire and hope; he becomes aware of his teacher Yu’s talent for singing in a chance encounter on the street, unaware that she’s been so ground down by her unsuccessful efforts as a singer that she’s basically on the edge of giving up - a predicament shared by his friend Daisuke, who has reached a point of unfulfilment with painting.
Kanata becomes convinced he must make a music video for Yu, and his faltering efforts and the fallout of that push him onto an arc of understanding. And much as it’s got that Shinkai melodrama aspect, climactic chase and all, it really does hit some notes about the pain of not making it. So much anime about making art follows the templates of sports anime: the gradual rise in fame and escalating tiers of prestige like stages in a league. It’s welcome to have a film more focused on exploring the emotions of not making it.
The methods of production are also notable. At Scotland Loves Anime there was an extended interview between Jonathan Clements and Popreq which really went into the production nitty gritty… something they promised to put online but I can’t seem to find anywhere. Perhaps something to follow up on later. Popreq refused to be seen on camera (despite Clements claiming he had an exceptionally beautiful bishōnen face lmao) but came across as terribly sincere. I will have to recount from memory…
The film is of course mostly rendered in Blender - in fact, there’s an incredible sequence of Kanata animating in Blender that is one of my favourite parts - but it also brings in some even newer tech: its animation is largely accomplished motion capture, using a variety of tools and software, including ‘Perception Neuron’ used to capture crowd scenes. Popreq himself plays nearly every character with an affordable mocap rig from his home. Only a few sequences, notably the live music performance scenes, used more traditional mocap studio tech. Here and there for more cartoonish scenes, 2D animation is mixed in, fitting in very seamlessly with the lineless 3D.
This single-actor mocap approach puts it in the company of The Pig That Survived Foot and Mouth Disease, the Korean film which I wrote about here. In both films, the tech enables a style of film that just couldn’t be created before. Pig That Survived takes a more naturalistic approach to acting befitting its dark Shakespearean drama, while Cheers tends to go for more comical exaggerated motion - at least for its main boy. But honestly Popreq knocks it out of the park with the acting, conveying much with a subtle head tilt. (It helps, I suppose, to be his own cinematographer as much as main actor.)
I went into AFMOC without expectations (I just thought it looked neat on the programme) and was very pleasantly surprised, and it absolutely exemplifies the spirit of just, making some shit with whatever tools come to hand. So that’s why I wanna bring it to you today, and even put it alongside a masterpiece like Look Back. Between these two films… well, they say what it’s all about, really. Art about the struggles of making art can get a bit wanky, but when it’s done well, it hits like nothing else. And both of these films leave me fired up to make something true. I hope they’ll do the same for you.
Naturally I’m starting stupid late. Animation Night 197 will be going live in just a second at the usual twitch.tv/canmom, movies starting in about 15-20 minutes - we’ll be watching AFMOC and then Look Back! Hope to see you there, and either way, happy new year freaks! I wanna see what you can’t resist making, in whatever medium and idiom calls to you, just like these anime kids.
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