Kaido was a man
I mean he was a dragon-man!
Or maybe he was just a dragon…
Title: ''Everyone's Obliterated - Kaido's Furious Blast Breath!''
Chapters Covered: 922
Episode Director: Yusuke Suzuki (***)
Animation Director: Eisaku Inoue (***1/2)
Time: 7:30PM EST
Watch It: www.crunchyroll.com/one-piece
Kaido was a man
I mean he was a dragon-man!
Or maybe he was just a dragon…
…..but he was still KKKKKAAAAAIIIIIIIDDDDDOOOOO!
One Piece Episode 914 Preview
Kaido's Furious Bolo Breath - Episode 913
God Luffy running up to Kaido took up most of the preview. I know its 30 seconds but I'm afraid most of next episode will consist of that.
Since the 3rd or 4th episode in Wano I started watching just the previews and I find funny how even those became dragged recently.
Great episode. The entire episode felt really intense and Kaido's attack at the end just left me in shock to making me wonder how will the alliance is going to defeat him.
The animation when Kaido was flying was so awful I can't even; it's like they used their whole budget for the fire blast scene which was admittedly very well done, but still come on. Next episode looks like it'll feature about 10 minutes of running. Great.
That was a damn good blast breath.
God Luffy running up to Kaido took up most of the preview. I know its 30 seconds but I'm afraid most of next episode will consist of that.
It probably will. Honestly, I won't mind too much if it at all helps 915 be less padded.
Same on the literal static image that they set on a directional path or zoom for most of the episode. The dragon was totally void of any animation for the first half of the episode. The animation at the end was astounding, but it’s a shame they didn’t put much effort into the first half. I would’ve been more forgiving of the static image if it was drawn with more detail, but it didn’t look great to me except for the one zoom shot. Not to mention some of the extremely off-model art this episode. Did you guys see DoFlamingo? Jeebus. A few of these artists need to be seriously straightened out or let go. It’s like they drew Doffy based off a ten year old memory.
Though of course I’m really hyped by that ending, so far this is a let-down. I’d rather a full episode of decent dragon movement than one big budget sequence at the end.
Also, this is what sucks about animating action chapters. I would’ve sworn this episode covered six pages or less. Just checked and it actually covered about twelve, which is more than the norm. I’ve seen episodes that covered seven pages with better pacing. Toei really needs to be okay with sinking a chapter or chapter and a half on the action episodes, then slowing down the rest as usual.
The episode was definitely slower than usual, but there were some good stuff in it too.
I gotta say that the storyboarding and direction was pretty damn good. Yusuke Suzuki has always been one of the weaker directors of the show who hasn't impressed me this far because of his usually flat storyboarding and unsatisfactory direction. This week was a definite improvement for him on every front. Although because of Nagamine's tendency of correcting storyboards, it's not easy to tell to what extent his storyboarding skills really improved.
But on the whole this is his best showing so far, cool lighting, great angles, creative shots etc. I do think there are still some areas where Suzuki falls back on flat shots, but it'd be wrong for me to not acknowledge that this episode wasn't a noticeable step forward for him compared to everything he put to the table before.
On the animation side, there were a lot of stationary shots I agree, but the boro breath was done masterfully and at the end of the day this is what mattered to me the most. We also got the best look at Inoue's art in this episode and there's definitely some shots that are reminiscent of his prime day. That's really nice to see.
Next week's gonna be absolutely fantastic.
The animation when Kaido was flying was so awful I can't even; it's like they used their whole budget for the fire blast scene which was admittedly very well done, but still come on. Next episode looks like it'll feature about 10 minutes of running. Great.
Though of course I’m really hyped by that ending, so far this is a let-down. I’d rather a full episode of decent dragon movement than one big budget sequence at the end.
"bUdGeT"
It's almost 2020 and with all the effort we've made to debunk these myths about this, I can't believe we still have to say this. No amount of budget will make any drawing look better, it's 2D hand drawn animation, not a video game or a live action movie. Money doesn't alter drawing skills.
What really affects animation quality is the health of the schedule and the talent of the animator working on the particular scene. The reason why the boro breath looked better than anything in this episode is because it was given to Tetsuro Nireki, who's a talented action animator, not because the budget was raised on that section.
Enough with this budget nonsense.
It's really easy to sit here to nitpick every small mistake and criticize the staff for making Kaido in his dragon comprised of stills. But keep in mind that it's an incredibly animation unfriendly design and a pain in the ass to draw. And actual animators working on the show said it themselves, therefore you can deny that animation unfriendly designs exist all you want.
Even Tu Yong-ce, who's an incredibly fast animator, really hates drawing Kaido in his dragon form. Moreover under a long running show's schedule, it's even more grueling to draw something like that. That's why I won't knock this episode off for cutting corners with the dragon form.
If some of you (or myself) had to draw Kaido in his dragon form under the same time constraints and working conditions these animators have to deal with, I'd guarantee you'd likely collapse within the first 3 hours.
Btw calling for animators to be fired is flat out disrespectful.
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I don't like to have to rant on this forum again, but some of the comments here show that there's still a lot of ignorance about the japanese animation industry and that people are still incapable of discussing animation like reasonable people.
And look, I'm not saying that some of the complaints are unjustified. They're legitimate and you have all the rights to expect a proper product. It's just that the criticism is mostly coming from the wrong place. Instead of putting the blame the string of companies and shareholders who're behind most of the harmful decisions made about the One Piece anime, people decide to target the mostly overworked produciton staff who have to oblige to what the stakeholders have decided and don't have a saying where the show's going.
Well don’t have a dragon about it.
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Someone decided where to spend the animators-artists’ time. They chose to sink more of that time into the ending sequence. Time is money. Money is budget. If they’re spending three of their seven days working on the end sequence instead of polishing the whole episode, it’s reasonable to say they spend most of their budget on the end sequence.
So, yeah, I disagree with your definition of budget because it absolutely does include and account for time. And I do in fact know and recognize that the animators are on a tight deadline and they can only do what they can do. But I made the point that the episode director should’ve put more polish into the overall episode with the time they spent on the final sequence. And when it comes to the skill of the workers, we by and large get on-model characters, so when a particular artist is drawing characters so significantly off-model as Doffy was this episode, there’s absolutely a problem with that artist and s/he needs to be sorted back on track. Or if they’re incapable of drawing on-model, firing isn’t unreasonable. Plenty of other artists are able to do it fine. When someone is bad at their job, they can reasonably get fired from it. Sorry if that idea offends you somehow, but it’s totally a valid way to run a business: if the workers who are making the product make tons of errors, yikes. That said, hopefully that artist can be sorted out instead, maybe someone can teach him to draw on-model better or something.
One Piece sakuga nut and resident Katsumi Ishizuka fanboy
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SkippyTheRobot
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Z…2JQKXRBkCGSHzw
Worst episode of the arc yet. It might be difficult to draw Kaido, but hey– at least move his mouth when he talks.
K-F|Jango
Just watched it, excellent analysis. I hope next episode provides us with enough sakuga so that you can do a long ass breakdown because your vids are very entertaining
Worst episode of the arc yet. It might be difficult to draw Kaido, but hey– at least move his mouth when he talks.
Think that’s just a general dragon thing.
They don’t do that for Shenron either…
I really have a problem with Kaido's dragon form in the anime. Why his front legs/hands are so close to his head. it makes his neck look very short. That is not how the eastern dragon supposedly looks like.
Same issue I have with a lot of his dragon form fanarts floating around in the internet. At first, I thought maybe it just because of them were drew by westerner or something. But now, seeing Toei draw him the same way, its really weird. I mean, this is the same company that draw and animated DBZ Shenron.
Worst episode of the arc yet. It might be difficult to draw Kaido, but hey– at least move his mouth when he talks.
Did you skip the entire Urashima episode? That's the only way you would think this is the worst episode of the arc.
I really have a problem with Kaido's dragon form in the anime. Why his front legs/hands are so close to his head. it makes his neck look very short. That is not how the eastern dragon supposedly looks like.
Same issue I have with a lot of his dragon form fanarts floating around in the internet. At first, I thought maybe it just because of them were drew by westerner or something. But now, seeing Toei draw him the same way, its really weird. I mean, this is the same company that draw and animated DBZ Shenron.
Now that you mention it, that's the reason why I thought he looked weird in this episode. The distance between arm and head even varies from shot to shot.
I guess I jinxed it last week. This ep was standard One Piece Anime-trash as I know it. Back to highlight chapters I go.
(Also really bitter that they didn't deliver on his drunk-dragon face. I thought that would be easy to capture, especially with voice acting support. Super disappointed.)
Worst episode of the arc yet. It might be difficult to draw Kaido, but hey– at least move his mouth when he talks.
This is your worst episode, really?
! Just waiting for soba transformation that should be good and episode so I can drop this already
The animation was hit or miss, There were some reaction shots from the villagers as Kaido was moving that looked good.
The look on his face while he was preparing his breath weapon was really badly done though.
This is your worst episode, really?
Did you skip the entire Urashima episode? That's the only way you would think this is the worst episode of the arc.
I haven't skipped any of them.
The Urashima chapter was the worst chapter of the arc, the episode wasn't any better.
The problem here is that this episode correlates to an excellent chapter and didn't deliver, so yes, worst episode for me. The animation was dull because obviously they were putting their D team on this since the fight is approaching.
But I wanted more out of Kaido, I don't think it's that bad of a thing to want the mouth to move, Kaido isn't Shenron.
Kaido's mouth not moving was worse for me than the 4 minutes and 37 seconds of Luffy and Urashima almost falling out of the ring.
Reminded me of the early days when the anime would just hold on a screenshot and add dialogue because they didn't want to animate something but tried to play it off as if they were being creative.
My fear is we'll get more Dragon Kaidou scenes later and none of them speaking animated
I'd rather them focusing on animating important stuff than Kaido moving his mouth when he speaks, which would look extra creepy now that i think about it. The only way it would look good is if there was constant character acting on his face like a disney villain. The out of sync speaking sorta fits because his dragon form is supposed to be seen as a mythical deity so im fine with it.
I've seen way too many anime "animate" animals speaking by simply having their mouths hang open while the voice actor speaks and then closing them only when they're finished and it never not looks robotic and awful. So I'm fine with dragon Kaido's mouth being mostly stationary. And also just to address the people unfavorably comparing this to Shenron, keep in mind that Shenron doesn't actually move. For the most part he's almost always been shown from the same few basic stationary angles with a few undulating coils and he's only rarely depicted with the same kind of movement that Kaido demands. I'm positive that an animator who's drawn both dragons will find Kaido to be far more difficult to animate by far.
~Stargazer~, ~Distance~ original stories.
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Crossword is absolutely right, Dragon Kaido is in no way easy to draw and animate so that should be taken into consideration when critiquing the animation of episodes with him in it
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Just watched it, excellent analysis. I hope next episode provides us with enough sakuga so that you can do a long ass breakdown because your vids are very entertaining
Thank you! I'm really looking forward to covering it
Most of the animation in the second half of the episode looked really good to me.
I'm fine with dragon Kaido's mouth not moving while he speaks because it contributes to his otherworldliness.
I've seen way too many anime "animate" animals speaking by simply having their mouths hang open while the voice actor speaks and then closing them only when they're finished and it never not looks robotic and awful. So I'm fine with dragon Kaido's mouth being mostly stationary. And also just to address the people unfavorably comparing this to Shenron, keep in mind that Shenron doesn't actually move. For the most part he's almost always been shown from the same few basic stationary angles with a few undulating coils and he's only rarely depicted with the same kind of movement that Kaido demands. I'm positive that an animator who's drawn both dragons will find Kaido to be far more difficult to animate by far.
Yeah Kaido is way more difficult. Animating all those scales must be a pain in the ass. I wonder what they'll do if the final battle between Luffy and Kaido features extended aerial fighting sequences? Shida is really good at these types of scenes so perhaps we'll see his longest scene yet in one piece
Yea I agree that I have no issue with Kaido's mouth moving, didn't really expect it to either. And I'm almost positive that it'll continue to intentionally be portrayed that way.
If I were an animator, I’d probably be cursing Oda’s ass for every damn scale I’d have to draw.
Wait..
Why some people in youtube comments saying that Kaido's dragon form only have front legs(2 legs total)?
And why in last week episode during Kaido transformation, they show that Kaido's legs turn to dragon tail instead of turn to dragon hindlegs?
First half was meh. Second half was slightly better than meh. Blast Breath was awesome, but couldn't save the episode.
One of the animators on this episode, Henry Thurlow, has tweeted out a series of his in-progress work on the episode if anyone's interested in taking a look. Puts into perspective just how much work has to go into Kaido, even when he's not even moving around much.
It was cool to see Inoue AD an episode solo for the first time since Fishman Island I believe and the art was definitely closer to what it used to be back in the day compared to what he's been putting out lately. I don't know if it was due to being the sole animation director, having more time, or what but it was nice to see and I hope he continues to follow that trajectory regardless if he goes back to pairing up with Hirotaka Ito or not.
Two concerns I had with this episode lies with the sound design. First I'm going to say the same thing I said about Jack back in Zo when he debuted in his mammoth form - I wish they'd added some kind of booming reverb or artificially pitched Kaido's voice down a bit during post-production while he's transformed, because it sounds so weird having the voice actor's regular register coming out of a giant, monstrous beast like that. Second, and this is my bigger concern of the two…
...why is Kaido a helicopter?
