So, remember how I mentioned in the past that I was planning to work on a new animation director comparison chart for the anime? Well I'm happy to say that I am finally ready to present it! It's not completely perfect, required some guesswork, and is necessarily incomplete in places thanks to the crew being separated for such a long time at this point, but I believe it's good enough at the moment to serve its purpose as an all-in-one-place visual reference. There are two things to know first though:
1. I decided to use the start of the current arc as my cutoff point, so only the ADs who have worked on the show from episode 783-on are represented.
2. I have not included any who've only served as co-ADs, meaning that I've omitted Inoue and Yasuko Fukumoto (Fukumoto doesn't really have enough material to work with anyway). If either of them end up helming an episode solo, then I will update appropriately.
Actual size (sadly since the original is over 20MB imgur knocks it down to a jpeg; the original doesn't have those ugly artifacts I assure you):
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Some of my own observations and notes:
- Ichikawa's Zoro and Usopp were taken from the Heart of Gold special instead of the TV series since in episode 767 they were either making faces or too far in the background to be usable. Finding good non-Ichikawa shots of Sanji during Totland has been a pain in the ass and a lot like hunting a unicorn thanks to how heavily he's been micro-managing the character.
- Likewise, Takagi's Franky is from the Nevlandia special since I got sick and tired of failing to find a usable Franky in his post-timeskip episodes.
- Go home Deguchi, you're drunk.
- I never paid much attention to Isochi's Brook before this. It's kind of scary.
- Ito started adding the line shading that mark him as mini-Ichikawa right before episode 767.
- I miss Takara. I can understand if some found his style ugly, but it had character and lent itself to animation superbly well. I hope he's just taking a leave of absence like Kitazaki did and isn't gone for good like Nakatani and Kawamura seem to be.
- It feels to me that Matsuda is being positioned as Hisada's understudy, and I deliberately chose similar Luffy shots for each of them to illustrate that.
- Out of all the ones here, Kimitaka Ito's shots are the ones that I'm the least confident in actually being his because I don't have a good grasp on his style and his few episodes haven't featured many good shots to study. I basically just poured over his two uploads on the sakugabooru for reference. I'm definitely replacing that Luffy when a better shot comes along.
- I said earlier in the thread that I never got a handle on Kitazaki's style, but now I can see he has a pretty distinctive blocky style of shading. He reminds me of a weaker Kawamura.
- There was a more familiar representation of Koizumi's Luffy in episode 808 but his face was so covered in scuff marks that I passed on it. I can change it if others feel I should.
- Fujisaki's Nami looks very KyoAni to me there. It's in the positioning of the eyes and mouth. There was a shot of Carrot in his solo debut episode that was kind of similar but not as strongly.
I plan to post this on reddit too (hence my reddit handle at the bottom there) but if anyone wants to post this on twitter or Oro Jackson or wherever they're free to do so as long as my credit at the bottom isn't removed or altered.
