A Study of One Piece Animation

[Crossword]

Eh, at least I can get my caps for Takagi this time around. I'm still holding out for Fujita to pull out something as good as 372 again, but it is nice that Shimanuki is finally being allowed to do solo work. Hopefully he'll continue to improve as time goes on.

Ah, Sabaody has been doing pretty well as far as animation goes recently, so I hope the trend continues. Hopefully the animators got some more cash to work with seeing as One Piece is part of Dream 9 now.

[TLC]

Eh, at least I can get my caps for Takagi this time around. I'm still holding out for Fujita to pull out something as good as 372 again, but it is nice that Shimanuki is finally being allowed to do solo work. Hopefully he'll continue to improve as time goes on.

Ah, Sabaody has been doing pretty well as far as animation goes recently, so I hope the trend continues. Hopefully the animators got some more cash to work with seeing as One Piece is part of Dream 9 now.

What's Dream 9 and how would being part of it give One Piece more cash?O_o

[Crossword]

Dream 9 is the name of the Dragonball Kai/One Piece programming block. You can see the logo during the One Piece eyecatches in 395. Since Dragonball is so famous in Japan I wouldn't be surprised if the ratings get a nice bump and Toei eventually pumps more money into the show. It'll be interesting to see what the ratings for this week were.

[XMURADX]

I'm just worried about Fujita...I really hope all of them get higher budget than usual.
Anyway, I'm hoping for Naoki Tate to handle two chapters as the title suggests, cause chapter 503 have epic scene at the end.
And Chapter 504 and 505 are filled with action, makes me wonder if Takagi will also handle 2 chapters, since most of the content of these two chapters can fit in a few minutes of animation, and not to forget less dialogue.

About the ratings...Dragonball beat OP by a couple of points taking the 4th spot with 11.3. OP got the 5th spot with 9.9.

[Kuminator]

Well first off I say Inoue is the best - Not only does he give the women massive tits,
but he adds a shiny quality which I really like.

Secondly, Inoue is the best at matching Oda's style.

Also I don't see why everyone hated Movie 8's Animation.
Movie 8 had the Background detail that went into Movie 6 (Which apparently everyone now loves), and in some scenes it even had Movie 6's Paper-esque animation (Which everyone apparently loves now)

Movie 8 also had Inoue animation in there two & was nice & 3D in some scenes, so I don't see why everyone complained about Movie 8, It had Movie 6 & Inoue Animation combined with 3D shots & yet some people still complained at it, Man,

Maybe it's more like they hated the fact that it was a retelling so they trashed the Animation to make up for it them not getting the new plot that they wanted ...

[Crossword]

All right, here's my beef with Movie 8's art.

First off, it had this very weird bipolar quality to it. One moment, things would look great, and the next, like utter garbage. Watch the scene where Luffy tells Crocodile that Yuba will never succumb to the sands, or the entirety of the 4 fight. The only characters that really had any consistency were the Alabasta ones such as Crocodile, Vivi, Chaka, Koza, etc. The Straw Hats looked awful half the time.

The backgrounds. The CG desert looked cheap enough, but who on earth was in charge of the sky? It was a flat dark blue color without any clouds or anything to it. It looked as if they had simply forgotten to render anything in it.

Third, and most importantly of all, INOUE CAN DO MUCH, MUCH BETTER! It should be shameful that episodes 312 and 377, produced on a much smaller budget than a movie, looked superior to Movie 8 in every way. Better detail, consistancy, everything. Movie 7, boobs and Legoman Zoro aside, was very fun to look at and contained some very beautiful images like the moss cave and the temple atop the turtle's shell. To go from that to crappy CG deserts and empty bluescreen skies is just inexcusable. Now, that's not to say Movie 8 didn't have any good stuff, like Mr. 2's runny mascara and Storm was still executed wonderfully, but the bad so outweighed the good, and that on top of a horribly paced beginning and an overall mediorce adaptation is just a kick to the groin.

[LordMelkor]

Who drew the sequence of Luffy/Zoro vs. the Pacifista in the most recent intro? I thought that looked really nice-- but then again it all was moving very fast.

[Psycho_Kenshiro]

I really enjoyed the animation and art in movie 8. My only complaints would be with the pacing/adaptation, I do like the movie though.

[Crossword]

Who drew the sequence of Luffy/Zoro vs. the Pacifista in the most recent intro? I thought that looked really nice-- but then again it all was moving very fast.

For now I'm leaning towards a cleaned up Yukiko Nakatani. She's done 384 and 394 so far, and her style has changed a fair bit in between (probably in part due to Tate doing some key animation and inbetweening on 384, not to mention that episode using thinner lines and a seemingly different coloring style). Zoro at 0:26, Sanji at 0:39, Law at 1:21, and Luffy at 2:02 look rather Nakatani-ish to me with their jawlines and such, and the shading style matches up fairly closely, though I'm not ready to rule out someone else entirely new. It's certainly not Ishizuka, who's been doing them since Kokoro no Chizu, at any rate.

[goty]

Yeah, Nakatani is the safest bet, although some scenes are quite different from her (or his?) style. For instance, when Zoro and Sanji run towards the Pacifista, Zoro's face looks more like Inoue's than Nakatani's. It's like there's a combination of styles all over the opening sequence.
It's also curious how some people are mixing Sanji with Luffy in this scene, heh. Luffy doesn't do his move until the Px-4 deflects Zoro and Sanji.

[shinpanman]

Parts of the opening looked very Ide to me. Could be Nakatani I suppose, but I feel like she follows Oda a little more closely and has a more sophisticated style.

Well first off I say Inoue is the best - Not only does he give the women massive tits,
but he adds a shiny quality which I really like.

Secondly, Inoue is the best at matching Oda's style.

I'm always saying this but, again, I disagree. Early on, Inoue followed Oda very precisely with the only noticeable difference being more detail in the eyes, but more recently and especially since movie 8, his style has irked me. His facial proportions and, obviously, body proportions are significantly off model in a way that bothers me more than the other animators for some reason. I think he tries to apply too much detail and "realism" to a style that is extremely cartoony and best suited for 2 dimensions. And the shiny quality is probably my biggest gripe of all. For an anime like One Piece where the main cast of characters have realtively simple clothes and facial features, that level of shading and highlighting is just pointless and garish. There's not enough to work with so he really stretches the bounds of what should be highlighted, giving the characters a very plastic-y look, not to mention making it look a lot more like other generic anime styles out there.

I'm favoring Tate and Nakatani right now because they keep some very subtle nuances of Oda's style while adapting it to create fluid movements in animation.

[XMURADX]

The pacifista sequence is Inoue.
Luffy's fight in ID is Takeo Ide.
The supernovas still shots is Naoki Tate or Nakatani.

BTW, I'll see if I can find info about who did the opening.

[Crossword]

Hm, I suppose Zoro does look a bit Inoue in the beginning, but Luffy doesn't really look Inoue at all to me there though. Hm. I think Tate can definitely be ruled out, since his style is visible from a mile away, even with some diluting.

I dunno, now I'm leaning more towards someone completely new whom we haven't seen do an episode yet, maybe whoever took Ishizuka's place, since he used to do the complete openings and hasn't done an episode in a year. This is tough!

[shinpanman]

That's weird, I don't really see any Inoue in it anywhere. The beginning shots (ship shots and Pacifista fight) are hard to place, maybe Ide or Hisada, I get those two confused a lot. The freeze shots look like Yokoyama as weird as that sounds, especially in Nami's case. Surfing scene, again, Ide or Hisada. I agree that the Supernovas look pretty Nakatani. The rest looks like a mix of Nakatani and Ide. Not spotting any Inoue or Tate.

[Crossword]

Okay, after watching it again, NOW I'm starting to lean towards the whole thing being done by Ide. The art is pretty consistent stylistically (bar the palette of the Pacifista fight), and Nami, Zoro, and Sanji match up pretty closely to him at multiple points, plus we all know that Tate has been rubbing off on him lately, so I don't think it's that unlikely.

[XMURADX]

That's not how Zoro is drawn by Ide. The whole style feels new to me too, probably it's supervised by someone new. but the specific action scenes are not done by him.

Unless the animator who is working under Inoue (377-Shishi Sonson), and the new animator under Ide (382- First 5 minutes of filler) are the definitely the ones used to animate the action scenes.
There is more than one animator working under each supervisor, the supervisor's job is to keep the style of all the animators consistent through out the whole episode.

In openings, they bring different animators to work on it, it's not done by the same person.

[Darkstorm]

Indeed. It's some of the most fluid I've seen.

[Darkstorm]

That's weird. I just posted the above, but somehow it became post #97. X_X

--edit

Hmm, crossword too. Some sort of forum error I guess.

[Crossword]

Art and animation, two different things. The art can be mediocre but the animation can be great, as my experience with the work of animation director Masayuki Nomoto attests. The art can be decent but the animation can suck, like the case of Yukari Kobayashi of One Piece episode 302, where I remember the art as being largely passable but the animation blowing huge chunks.

Tate's style works because the less detail and lines allows for far more movement, expression, and fluidity. It's stylistic suck, if you want to put it in those terms. I will admit when he first started evolving his style around G8 into what it is today it did look off because the fluidity wasn't really there yet, and the other artists were still closely following Koizumi's designs (though we seem to be gradually moving away from them at present) but when we got to the Fukuro fight he started to get things together, and we have the unique, funky artstyle that we have today.

EDIT: Uh, what the fuck just happened?

[shinpanman]

Yeah, no offense Kuminator, but I feel it's a very western point of view to think of more detailed art as better drawn than simpler, more streamlined styles. In Japan, the most revered animation studios often use the loosest and most deceptively simple styles, take Ghibli or Gainax for example. It's the movements and subtle aspects of line quality that really give those characters a living quality, and I personally feel that Tate excels at that. Also, I'm not sure if I'm just crazy or something but I feel that he follows Oda's style (the style of the manga) more closely than the majority of the animators who tend to stick more to Koizumi's designs (not to knock Koizumi, he's fantastic). I swear, some of his frames look like Oda drew them himself. The only big difference I notice is the hands and sometimes the posture of the characters.