I thought the last 2 seasons were the peak and the most grounded the show has been. The first season was actually pretty goofy between the titan runs and funny faces. I think its gotten a lot more serious with the characters starting to fully be affected by the world they're in.

It's renting time

Chizuru really stupid for sticking with Kazuya

I feel so embarrassed for pushing aot so hard a min ago smh, we were so close

Beret szn

DB > DBZ

Animator Spotlight: Toshiyuki Inoue (Part 2)

All gifs in order
A Letter to Momo (2011)
Wolf Children (2012)
Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)
Uchouten Kazoku (2013)
The 2 Queens Trailer (2013)
Giovanni’s Island (2014)
Shirobako (2014)
Nishi Ogikubo (2014)
Miss Hokusai (2015)
Uma Musume Pretty Derby (2016)
Flip Flappers (2016)
Napping Princess (2017)
Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018)
Evangelion 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon A Time (2021)
The Deer King (2021)
Lonely Castle in the Mirror (2022)

The second half of Toshiyuki Inoue’s career is not nearly as prolific as his first half, but it displays a more seasoned approach, and a much higher yield of animation on movies. His work on Maquia and Deer King make for some of the lengthiest amounts of KA by a single animator. He is truly remarkable during this era, and show’s off not only his speed, but his authenticity proving himself as not only Japan’s best, but one of the greatest animators of all time.

In 2008 Inoue did one two cuts on Mamoru Oshii’s The Sky Crawlers, sakugabooru.com/post/show/120368 nothing strong of note, but Tetsuya Nishio’s AD and designs carried the movie.

For obvious reasons, Inoue had no credits in 2009 and 2010 as he was working heavily on A Letter to Momo Hiroyuki Okiura’s second movie released at TIFF in September 2011

A movie that spent seven years in production, due to Okiura writing out the script, and storyboarding. For a second movie 12 years after Jin-Roh, Momo is much more tame. Despite Masashi Ando’s AD, Okiura’s one to one realism is incredibly prevalent in the movement of the animation. Basically everyone from the IG staff is present, with many freelancers present. The four realist masters, Nishio, Honda, Okiura, and Inoue are here, along with a brigade of younger talent. Even Shinya Ohira makes a contribution and his part looks completely different from the rest of the film, with a supernatural presentation. As for Inoue, he did the most animation out of the entire staff. Now its not Inoue’s mind blowing crowd scenes, from Jin-Roh, but the intimate scenes are really powerful. The bridge scenes are Inoue’s most realized full movement cuts sakugabooru.com/post/show/116986
sakugabooru.com/post/show/14264.

Despite working on another film released later in 2012, Inoue would make his first debut on a Mamoru Hosoda film with Wolf Children

Now Hosoda had already built a rigorous staff of animators on his projects, veterans like Hideki Hamasu and Hiroyuki Aoyama, but also a bunch of Toei animators as well. After Summer Wars at Madhouse had wrapped up, Hosoda could not secure funding for the rest of the Wolf Children after a sea change at the company as this movie was made by his own studio Studio Chizu. This film brought along new coming animators with help from others like AD Takaaki Yamashita and Studio 4C animator Tatsuzou Nishita. Inoue feels kind of in the dark here as he’s the oldest member on the staff, but still was the most experienced as shows in his first scenes on the film with the snow day scene.

Inoue 0:54-2:44
This is one of Inoue’s greatest scenes he’s ever worked on. The opening cuts are wonderful with Inoue being incredibly good at running animation. It’s at 1:38 when the things really kick in with hill run. Fairly simple boards, but it’s the amount of life Inoue is able to instill into the frames that makes it seem so wondrous. I love how Ame staggers a little bit with his sliding down the hill, while Yuki effortlessly does a spinning side jump, and Hana just hilariously falls. He’s able to put so much personality into the characters, and it says so much about the three. The final cuts are so wholesome, and cute with the triumphant howls.

The rest of the movie Inoue was in charge of all of the important emotional beats of the film, the cuts he does proceeding the good part of snow day are immediately halted by Ame nearly dying sakugabooru.com/post/show/41950 sakugabooru.com/post/show/41951 very strong character acting. This is made more unfortunate by Ame and Yuki fighting sakugabooru.com/post/show/41975 with one being more insistent on being human and the other being a wolf. Inoue then handles the final scenes of the film with Hana accepting her son Ame’s choice to be a wolf sakugabooru.com/post/show/41988 sakugabooru.com/post/show/41990 a glorious way to cap a great and emotional outing by Hosoda

Now in-between production of A Letter to Momo much of the staff from the movie, was subsequently brought on to work on Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo due to overlapping schedules, and both films being produced around the same time

Khara seemed to have stricken a bout of luck by having the Momo staff on the film, as this is easily the best looking film of the Rebuild trilogy. Most of the film’s greatness can be attributed to Takeshi Honda’s cinematic animation direction, this movie really feeling like the holy grail of his powers. Subsequently, Honda elected Inoue and Akemi Hayashi to be the two other primary ADs. There are a lot of great animators on the film, Hidetsugu Ito, Yoshimichi Kameda, Takashi Hashimoto, a lot of personnel from Momo like Akira Honma, Tomohiro Shinoda, Masashi Ando, the four realists. And of course all of the amazing Gainax/Trigger/Khara staff with Hiroyuki Imaishi, Sushio, Tadashi Hiramatsu, and Shoichi Masuo (who would sadly pass away five years after this film’s release, with this being his last credited work). Even the director Hideaki Anno did one cut sakugabooru.com/post/show/217032 (still animating explosions like its the 80s Daicon)

While taking up a brunt of the mecha scenes, and some of those scenes being reliant on CGI Evas, Inoue had to match that quality by being incredibly smooth in an opening cut animated by Sushio, sakugabooru.com/post/show/117726\. Inoue feels insistent on adding a lot of weight to the evas in their movement but his sources feel less incongruent with the actual size of them (something that Mitsuo Iso mastered in the End of Evangelion) instead Mari’s eva moves like a sprinter runner, but still maintains that heaviness with a lot of force exuded in the legs. Inoue would then come in with the final fighting action cuts, near the end sakugabooru.com/post/show/217045\. Never have we seen Inoue look this exaggerated in a single cut since Gu Gammo Honda’s splashes of AD feel very strong here as this scene resembles more of Ito or Honda’s own KA. Nishio, Masuo, and Inoue handle the final battle on the Wunder, sakugabooru.com/post/show/217046 sakugabooru.com/post/show/217047\. I love the nearly flawless run cycles Inoue is able to keep in whilst being very on model, meanwhile Nishio is just going insane. sakugabooru.com/post/show/118222 Inoue’s last cut has some great weighty running cuts on 1s while having great acting cuts in between, and nice smoke effects towards the end. Although the strongest scene by the Momo crew has to go to Okiura with Kaworu’s sacrifice scene sakugabooru.com/post/show/106527

In 2013, Inoue would be an AD on Episode 3 and a primary animator on Episode 12 of The Eccentric Family or Uchouten Kazoku for the Japanese version.

This was Inoue’s first time at P.A. Works a production company formed by a former Tatsunoko Productions and Production IG animator Kenji Horakawa, and would be significant to Inoue’s career down the line. Kazoku was directed by an Masayuki Yoshihara who knew Inoue through past connections at IG. Inoue’s scenes on Episode 3 are some of his strongest. While his AD isn’t super strong, as he’s confined to limited tv animation, this whole cut is just dripping with his personality sakugabooru.com/post/show/172135\. Perfect water animation, great detail to hair and fabrics, consistency on windspeed, just peak anime. He’d come back again Episode 12 and did a staggering amount of KA with a trolley car sakugabooru.com/post/show/227595.

Inoue also was a primary animator the 2-Queens trailer a project from Oban Star-Racers director Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, made at Sav! The World Productions a French studio. sakugabooru.com/post/show/180593\. The project since then has been scrapped and getting anyone to approach it has been difficult according to Eiffel. It’s a very impressive near solo KA trailer by Inoue, doing some more perverse and violent animation then he’s accustomed to, and getting a lot of mileage out of dozens of character designs

2014, Inoue only contributed to one film, Giovanni’s Island

With very animator friendly character designs and AD by Nobutake Ito, and modest direction by Mizuho Nishikubo the film is very soft on the eyes. Yasunori Miyazawa is very dominant on the film, with Ito coming in second. There is a lot of old goats on the film with rare appearances by Satoru Utsunomiya, and Kazuyoshi Yaginuma. Shinya Ohira, Mitsuo Iso, Kouichi Arai, Tetsuya Nishio, and Inoue make up the brunt of legacy staff on the film. Inoue does a nice little cut here sakugabooru.com/post/show/140719\. And then he proceeds to do one his greatest scenes, with Utsunomiya.

Utsunomiya does everything from 0:07-0:34 then does some dancing cuts after, Inoue takes over at 1:01. This video doesn’t cover the entire scene sakugabooru.com/post/show/11172\. Inoue puts so much expressivity into the individual characters dancing, and the final 20 second moving pan up shot is legendary. Inoue stated there were 3D guides used to help assist the cut, but the initial 3D was very rough, and he had to interpolate many subjects into the shot and give them personality.

He did a brief cut on Haikyuu!! that year too sakugabooru.com/post/show/33506\. And then on Shirobako Inoue does an insane cut with horses sakugabooru.com/post/show/127055

Now for the rest of the year Inoue focused a lot of work onto Japan’s Animator Expo in 2014-2015, announced by Studio Khara and Dwango and arranged by Hideaki Anno. The first Inoue would work on would be Nishi-Ogikubo released late in 2014 the long title version being "20min Walk From Nishi-Ogikubo Station, 2 Bedrooms, Living Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, 2mos Deposit, No Pets Allowed." Directed by Mahiro Maeda and Takeshi Honda

Inoue 3:20-4:07, 4:41-4:52 layout by Okiura, and help from Honma, 4:57-5:11 cut of girl is Inoue Okiura does man standing,
We get the assembling of the anime equivalent of the Avengers with Hiroyuki Okiura, Shinya Ohira, Shinji Hashimoto, Honda, and Inoue all on the cut (seems like Nishio and Iso were left out, I wonder why Iso?), with the younger Akira Honma doing one cut. Everyone here puts on an outstanding, performance with Honda and Inoue’s being nearly indistinguishable in telling them apart. Inoue’s love of character acting really carries here especially at 3:20 and forward. Inoue juxtaposes the sense of perspective when cut between the two characters, I love how massive the objects flung at her feel so weighty and crushing, but to him they are just weightless things to toss at a bug. Also love how limited Inoue is with his animation, committing to animating on 2’s and 3’s with the man then getting very quick movement on 1s. Also insane background animation

In 2015, Inoue worked on five projects. The first would be on Miss Hokusai

With AD and designs by Yoshimi Itazu, this is what I love about Inoue, working on projects by people who studied under him. Directed by Keiichi Hara the film is mainly dominated by Inoue, and Norio Matsumoto. The other staff includes a lot of strong film animators, even a seldom non-Ghibli appearance by Megumi Kagawa. Inoue does primarily a lot of crowd scenes throughout the movie, though his most standout scene is the snow scene with O-Ei’s daughter O-Nao sakugabooru.com/post/show/18870\. I love how the branches move, when the kid throws the snowball with them realistically swaying from the weight of the snow. I also love the portrayal of O-Nao, super strong and sage like animation from Inoue, great way to portray a blind person. According to Inoue when the scene was being produced there was heavy snow in Tokyo, and he tried to see how snow would fall on snow, the result was snow with holes in it.

Inoue’s second project that year would be on The Boy and the Beast his second Hosoda film.

While not as outstanding as his Wolf Children cuts there is still a lot to be liked here. Inoue takes on a scene near the end of the film where Ichirohiko turns into an evil whale, beating the character but not destroying him, sakugabooru.com/post/show/209342\. Inoue then handles a portion of the arena fight, with all the classic anime commentary cutaways you see in tournament style fights like this sakugabooru.com/post/show/209334\. The rest of the staff on the film is pretty great too, Inoue even brought Honda on to animate a really fantastic section earlier in the encounter

The next stop for Inoue at the Animator Expo would be Bubu and Bubulina with a long time return of Takashi Nakamura, his first directed release since Tree of Palme

Inoue 4:02-4:12, 4:24-4:59
The strange children-like dreamworld Nakamura made here is rife with color, and a nice fitting 1920s swing score it was rife with animation potential and his team with Studio Colorido delivered. It’s a visually engaging short that has such a strong backdrop for the animation, and of course Inoue was put in charge of the Bubulina transformation scene. Inoue’s grasp of experience and styles of animation come in handy as Bubulina goes through her wild cartoony spin polluted in heavy 40s Warner Bros smears, she then breaks out into a beautifully choreographed dance. Very strong and colorful compositing assisting Inoue’s genga.

His final bit of animation for the Expo would be the bizarre and pervy Robot on the Road directed by Hiroyuki Okiura

Inoue 4:14-4:19
While this is an incredibly weird, and admittedly dumb short, Okiura puts his team arranged to do very smooth animation as per usual with him, albeit he heavily corrected much of this. Inoue only does one cut, with him nicely accentuating the female body.