Addendum Post: Japan and Limited Animation

This post is a companion post to Update #4, since I didn't want to write this whole spiel on that page in case you didn't want to read it. It's a mix of what was presented in the lecture by Masaaki Oosumi and my impressions from the lecture, so keep that in mind while you read!



At first, Japanese animators did indeed create full-animations, much in the spirit of works that were inspiring the time. What changed things was the creation of Astro Boy, and the concept of regularly released TV anime series that accompanied it. Full-animation is rather costly and time-consuming, which is okay when a company is creating movies since they can set their own timelines. It's not okay when you're making TV series, which release an episode every week. Early endeavors into animating Astro Boy found that the weekly time constraint made it extraordinarily difficult to fully animate things and make the deadline while retaining the content. So what to do?

The creators of Astro Boy decided to resort to "limited-animation". By limiting the amount of components moving in any given scene, the amount of time needed to animate a mere second of film decreased exponentially. The trade-off of course, was a rather significant dive in quality compared to previous works, but this shift in technique made it possible to air hand-drawn animation on a weekly basis.

The amazing part to me is the progression afterwards. In true Japanese fashion, Japanese animators took this "limited-animation" and built upon it to work around its shortcomings. For instance, Oosumi-sensei showed us a clip from Lupin the 3rd, where Lupin does a car stunt involving leaping the car over a foothill to switch with a doppelganger car driven by his comrade in order to trick his enemies.

The stunt would be difficult to present to the viewer clearly if done in the normal style of limited-animation involving reducing the moving components, so they took another route. At the apex of the leap, the anime presented a series of stills from several different angles to illustrate a brief snapshot of the situation. Done like so, the viewer has a lucid idea of what's going on, and then the animation can resume as it was before, confident in having conveyed its clever trick.

What I like a lot about techniques such as the above is that it takes the 'negative' aspects of limited-animation, and utilizes them in an interesting way that goes beyond the "settling for less" notion that seems to be thought of limited-animation. In my opinion, the use of stills and slow-motion effects that are often utilized in limited-animation are an interesting method of placing emphasis in a scene. When only one thing is moving in the first place, a viewer's eye will probably already wander there, and compounded with properly done stills and such can really make a particular aspect of a scene jump out to a viewer (and, if the animators want to be clever, they can use it as a distraction for a Chekhov's Gun [read tvtropes if you don't know the term and are curious - I dunno how else to describe it other than in tvtropes terms ^^;] sitting in the background). Personally, I believe that these kinds of techniques would not have risen in a world where people only knew full animation.

With the advent of computer-animation, it's actually possible for Japanese animators to do full-animation again, even for weekly TV series. But even with that in mind, in my opinion, they should not make full-animation the standard. I believe that the rather 'focused' style that limited-animation brings to the table is now something characteristic of Japanese animated media. The stills and slow-motion effects mentioned before almost certainly paved the way towards later effects such as delayed effects (like the thing where a samurai does a dashing slash through something, and it gets cut into pieces a second later - there might be a real term for this, but I don't know it), multiple-angle shots, and cut-ins like you see in games (such as Persona, and it's now quite trademark of it).

While cheesy at times, I think used properly, these techniques can really be neat, and I think that they've become an important part of what makes Japanese media so unique and appealing. It is true that limited-animation originally arose as a cheap substitute to Disney's full animation. But instead of trying to emulate full-animation, Japanese animators embraced the unique characteristics of limited-animation and developed it into a style of its own that is, rather than simply being worse than full-animation, is now just an existence of its own. By continuing to use the limited-animation techniques they have been using, Japan has stuck to a big part of what makes their media so charming.

And so ends my summary on Oosumi's lecture. Hope it was at least close to as interesting as the lecture from the man himself!