Anime inspiration

Another anime inspired post. My fondness for anime is such that I have seen more inspiring things in anime than I have seen in conventional cartoons where the animators try and make something as dramatic and action filled as possible, as efficiently as possible. By this I mean animators who have depicted a battle scene simply by drawing a single fight scene between a few people and did effects to like; spiral the still around, added some fast-flowing action lines in front of it or simple moving the still frame from left to right across the screen. All these kinds of efficient animating effects are ways of making things explode in front of your eyes without having to do so much animating.

In this old anime called ‘Berserk’, which follows the life of this mercenary through a kingdom set in medieval times, is a violent and graphic anime series that does fight scenes and battle scenes very efficiently but without losing any punches or intensity that violent scenes have. Music and sound effects also have a big role to play when capturing the intensity of a fight but I’m just focusing on the animation visuals for now.

Berserk Fight Scenes:

In Death Note, which is a 2007 crime investigation thriller anime trying to catch a killer who can kill just by writing the name of the victim in this book called a Death Note. One scene I chose to talk about in this entry is a scene that explains my point about animating with intensity by showing action lines and moving the still of the frame from one side to the other to achieve the same intensity. This scene is of a tennis match that occurred between the two main characters and it captures the intensity of the match.

Death Note episode 10 tennis match:

All this was highly influential for me when I was beginning to learn the principals of animation and even now and still returning to basics. In animation you must, for time’s sake, find short cuts to your end goals. I will mainly be experimenting all these ideas in Adobe After Effects because it is what I'm familiar with and I think the effects will be very interesting. Plus I want to get better at using this program.