You'll still be here this weekend

Was cool shoutout Tranq for pointing me in the direction

Final episode aired for Japan. It's almost time guys. Gonna watch tonight hopefully

undead unluck is kinda ass. most recent ep was literally 15 minutes of exposition lol

Animator Spotlight: Atsuko Tanaka

All gifs in order
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
Jarinko Chie (1981)
Sherlock Hound (1985)
Lupin III: The Fuma Conspiracy (1987)
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
Porco Rosso (1992) Presumed
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Spirited Away (2001)
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Ponyo (2008)
Arietty (2010)
The Wind Rises (2013)
Space Dandy (2014)
Mary and The Witch’s Flower (2017)
Mirai (2018)

Happy Belated Birthday to Atsuko Tanaka born yesterday (not to be confused with the voice actress of Mokoto Kusanagi for Ghost in the Shell). Among the staff that have been credited for Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary filmography, Tanaka stands as one of the most iconic animators in the roster. From Castle of Cagliostro, to the present day on How Do You Live?, Tanaka has been a recurring member within the animation lineup for over 40 years, one of the longest known companions of Miyazaki, only rivaled by TMS animator Kazuhide Tomonaga. Tanaka’s animation unlike most other Ghibli animators has a freeing sense of versatility, where even a single frame of her drawing can tell a thousand words. She is consistently known for her long dialogue scenes with characters doing things, like eating food, or other unordained tasks. What makes her stand out is the ease and flow of her drawings, while being on model, there is less stunted character acting that can be apparent in some other animators. Whether its crowd scenes, food, vehicle animation, fighting, or just character acting, Tanaka has always met the quota, and is one of the best animators to grace Studio Ghibli, and beyond.

Tanaka got her start working at Tokyo Designer Gakuin College, a decent design school that is still around to this day. She graduated from the animation part and afterwards joined Shin-Ei Animation where she’d spend a few years working as an in-betweener, she then joined Telecom where Yasuo Otsuka, Kazuhide Tomonaga, Makiko Futaki, and Masako Shinohara thrived. Of those four Miyazaki was the most important as he had recently made his debut on Future Boy Conan

Miyazaki was opted onto the big screen, and with little time Telecom pulled a miracle producing Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro

Directed, storyboarded and written by Miyazaki this movie is one of the most impressive auteur debuts ever. A film singlehandedly responsible for making the titular Lupin less of a snotty-pervy thief and instead a rogue hero with a romantic quirk. Miyazaki’s skills from the early 70s Lupin tv show had translated perfectly into filmed, marking his most ambitious spectacle up to that point. From the story to the writing, its all fun and games until you get to the animation which was finished in a shocking seven months. Shocking turnover in crunch-time that according to staff was some of the scariest times you could be around him. Miyazaki had only a quarter of the boards done in July when production started, so he had to finish on the fly while it was being made. “I have so many bitter memories and regrets about that movie” - Miyazaki

For animation staff, Yasuo Otsuka was the primary animation director, being the man that literally help foster frame modulation as an industry standard! Akiko Shimada and Keiko Hara were on check duty, along with Masako Shinohara who checked over drawings of Clarisse, to where Otsuka admitted he had trouble drawing a “pretty woman”. Kazuhide Tomonaga was among the top animators at the time, ranking up with Yoshinori Kanada, and his involvement was pivotal. Other top KAs included Tsukasa Tannai, Nobuo Tomizawa, and Shoujiro Yamauguchi all three top animators from Future Boy Conan.

“We didn’t go home all through the night, sometimes without dinner…by the end they were dying of exhaustion” - Miyazaki.

Miyazaki was pretty monstrous during the production given their tight schedule. His corrections were so minor that they’d go for 10-12 pages at least, lending his perfectionist eye to every aspect of the production. Tanaka stated that Miyazaki was still correcting her cels and she couldn’t keep them even after production had wrapped. Tanaka herself had become a shining light of Telecom, at the time she was so headstrong, that her talents led to the most iconic cuts of on the series, and probably the greatest anime scenes of all time. Her first effort was in the opening where she did one cut, then the spaghetti scene a really quick scene that planted the seeds of her delicious food animation for the future. The next scene skyrocketed her to being a star, with the rooftop jump sequence

Tanaka 1:44-2:01
A super fast show of speed with a lot of Miyazaki’s cartoonishly silly traits, it is a difficult layout to do. The spacing and timing of Tanaka’s drawings holds no bounds here with each leap of Lupin being synced up with Yuji Ohno’s anachronistic sound design. A god tier piece of animation history

Tanaka would then lend her hand to Lupin III: Part 2 the second iteration of the original series that ran from 1977-1980.

Tanaka had joined the team on the back half of the show, credited and confirmed for episode 77, 84, 145, 151, and 155. 77 and 84 were before she worked with Miyazaki and you can tell her traits had been influenced by his and Otsuka’s work, but her approach felt more modern and flowing. Post-Cagliostro Tanaka had become and entirely new beast, doing staggeringly long cuts of animation. 145 turned Tanaka into a total food fanatic drawing really impressive stirfry?. She had managed to gain an affinity to balance food, character comedy, and action all in one single scene. 155 has Tanaka animating a scene with doppelgängers of the Jigen, Goemon, and Lupin, and she does a great job illustrating the distinction in characters and mannerisms.

Tanaka would join Miyazaki’s best friend and mentor Isao Takahata on one of his early films Jarinko Chie in 1981
A fun spirited little film, with the pastel love only crafted by Takahata, Tanaka was dealing with a sizable degree of cuts with around 5 minutes of constantly moving cuts. Tanaka’s food loving feels more on than ever before, dealing with fantastic eating and drinking scenes. Her most intrepid aspect is the friendly blend she’s able to instill into otherwise less exciting scenes. This part with a man crying is a great display of unrealistic waterworks anime tears with how they apply with realistic physics, as the tears hit the fryer and evaporate into the air

After a few years of unknown work on Telecom, the same TMS team was hired onto Sherlock Hound a 26 episode affair running from 1984 to 1985.

Directed by Miyazaki, the show is a fun, anthropomorphic romp on the classic novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. Lots of staff from Lupin were brought back including Tomonaga, Otsuka, Futaki, Tannai, Shinohara and others. Yoshifumi Kondo was another fantastic animator credited from the Lupin and Conan teams credited. New animators hopping on included Masaaki Endo and Kitaro Kousaka two fantastic Telecom adjacents that assisted his work on Nausicaa. Tanaka herself was the second most identified animator next to Tatsuo Yaganino

This is likely the series where Otsuka stated “Tanaka was born to draw anime” as she does some of the most stellar cuts on the whole show. Of the episodes Miyazaki directed, Tanaka appeared on three; 3, 5, and 10. 3 is a decent start with comical frame modulation, and Tanaka’s first time animating Miyazaki’s steampunk machinery and 5 is where she proves goes above and beyond.

Tanaka 18:29-19:34, 19:46-21:10 ENJOY THIS REALLY LOW QUALITY ENGLISH DUB BWAHAHA posted on TMS’s official account lol
better quality
Coming right before Tomonaga’s sequence, Tanaka goes sicko mode with Miyazaki’s boards. She simultaneously able to juggle a lot of the physical and technological properties of his machinery, yet also completely manage lively and energetic spacing with the character acting. I love the cuts of Polly running up to Moriarty and biting him, its super energetic boarding that demands the eyeful skill of a great key animator and Tanaka kills it. She does more animation on 10, and 11 but those cuts don’t nearly match up to the scale of 5.

The next TMS series Tanaka placed herself on would be Lupin III: The Fuma Conspiracy

As the years went on Lupin was amassing a series of several movies. This would be the fourth one after the disaster that was Legend of the Gold of Babylon. Here after the TMS crew had been doing western productions on Ducktales and a Ghostbusters cartoon, making them more in a western mindset. It’s quite the romp with a lot idealized Lupin chase sequences turned up to 11. Masayuki Oozeki who has been a director for hire, for years in even doing tv anime to this day, directed the film, and his touches didn’t have much to do as the whole film was carried by the animation staff. Kazuhide Tomonaga was in charge of character designs, and on AD duty. The film marked the arrival of newer Telecom recruits including Atsuko Fukushima (who made her debut on Space Adventure Cobra), Hitoshi Ueda, Teiichi Takiguchi, Kenji Hachizaki, Toshihiko Masuda, and Hiroyuki Aoyama. All of these six animators were so stellar on this film that they’d be Telecom commissioned animators on Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira the next year.

Tanaka among the staff was the stand out animator. For the first time she was given permission to storyboard her own scene giving way to one of the most exciting of the many Lupin chase sequences, the spa town mountain chase.

Tanaka 1:01-3:08
A thrilling two minute KA effort by Tanaka. She is able to pack so many fun little details into every single cut. For one, I love the details of items or objects the people at the spa are doing, such as holding tea, or fans etc. That level of detail was achieved thanks to the animators being able to visit Gifu Prefecture were locations there were used as references, since it was set in Japan. There is one scene where the cop cars bust through the sliding doors through a dinner table, and just by the debris of bowls, chairs, baskets, and water coolers you can envision exactly how the table was laid out before they got demolished. I love the cut of the naked women in the outdoor soaking pool, where one lady kicks Zenigata’s car so hard it gets unstuck from the pool after crashing. Other cars burst in even splashing the women out of the water. It is stupendous physical comedy. Even with the tricky layouts Tanaka made magic happen again!

Later in the film things take a darker turn, as Tanaka lends her skills to her first ever fight scene.

Tanaka 0:12-0:44, 1:03-1:12, 1:21-1:32, 1:48-2:02 other animators do the non battle portions
This is a vastly stark contrast to her earlier scenes. While the earlier segment was more heavily reliant on her Miyazaki routes, here she hones in on a more realistic approach, opting for 80s style battle sakuga. She doesn’t feel Kanada inspired here instead opting for the realism school using a lot of clarity of volume through each blade clashing, making the fight feel more weighty. This is one of the earliest examples of more fluid movement and gestures on 2s being applied into fight animation.

The next two years Tanaka dedicated herself to two smash hit films, Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)


I lump these two films together due to Tanaka only doing one to two scenes on each film. These were the second and third film for the newly founded Studio Ghibli, with Takahata, Miyazaki, and producer Toshio Suzuki. The crunch time between the two films was unbelievable as the Telecom staff such as Futaki, Endo, and Shinji Otsuka also had to juggle time on Akira as well making work sleepless. For Totoro, Tanaka lent her hands to standard Ghibli character acting, but her best scene was on the meeting of Mei and Totoro where she by scratching his nose forces out a big sneeze.

On Kiki Tanaka does one of her greatest scenes, absolutely annihilating Miyazaki’s boards. Kiki’s invigorating scene to get her broom to fly has some dangerous layout work by Miyazaki. He has Kiki go into a slow burn until she musters up the wind around her to the eventually get into flight. Kiki then flys upward towards a building using her momentum from the the launch to kick off each one then getting upward above the seaside town. There are dynamic shots like her flying towards the camera, and also falling towards an outdoor restaurant darting through the crowd and then zooming out. She then struggles to correct herself near the end. Exceptional animation.

As a Telecom employee, Tanaka had a lot of animation covered on the western side as the company was regularly commissioned by Warner Brothers. She’d do animation on Little Nemo Adventure in Slumberland (which is technically an anime) and Fox’s Peter Pan and Friends where she was an animation director. A documentary by Takahata called The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals was a short documentary that Tanaka and Futaki lended their hands to, doing a short 40 second sequence.

After Telecom commissions, Tanaka hopped on to Porco Rosso doing the final dogfight between Porco and the Baron. Tanaka continually proved she was made to decimate Miyazaki’s layouts, not only is her crowd shots stellar, but she also does insane 3D-esque animation with the planes that makes the animation feel very alive and real.

Coming off the heels of Animaniacs and Sonic The Hedgehog AD work, Tanaka did her second Takahata film with Pom Poko

A bit of a bizarre film if you’re unfamiliar with Japanese folklore, the movie centers around Tanuki trying to get their land back from humans. In the middle of the film the tanuki stage a ghost parade to trick the humans into thinking the town is haunted and evil. Tanaka and Kazuhide Tomonaga were primarily in charge of the yokai and oni scenes.

In 1997, Hayao Miyazaki released his most ambitious and difficult film to date Princess Mononoke

A sweeping anime epic, that pins the natural and industrial world against each other with the decorations of spirits and animism. Despite the hiatus between Porco Rosso and this film clocked in at about five years, there was still a massive haul in animation to be made. Everything from animation department to background paintings, and 3D effects was a long and winding process.

“Ghibli could’ve been bankrupted by Princess Mononoke…I was prepared to let them work without sleep for days” - Miyazaki

The production went on for about two years with Miyazaki having the story in mind since 1980, and studying the natural world for a better part of a year and a half before production started. At 2.3 million yen (roughly 23 million dollars) the film had to employ staff of course from Telecom and Oh Production!. Out of the 144,000 cels in the film Miyazaki touched up 80,000 lending his persistent eye all over the film. For character designs Yoshifumi Kondo one of Miyazaki’s oldest colleagues was on board, and the other designer went to Masashi Ando an much younger animator who recently got a start as an AD for the Miyazaki directed “On Your Mark” video two years prior when he was only 26 years old. Kitaro Kousaka was the other one, probably the more versatile of the bunch.

The KA staff would mark the end of an era (kind of), as animators like Shinji Otsuka, Masaaki Endo, and especially Yoshinori Kanada all would depart from Ghibli. In the case of Otsuka he’d return later on Howl’s Moving Castle. Lot of regulars on the film including Toshio Kawaguchi, Makiko Futaki, Megumi Kagawa, Masako Shinohara, Katsuya Kondo, Atsuko Ohtani, and new staff such as the three Kenichis, Kenichi Yoshida, Kenichi Konishi, and Kenchi Yamada, Hideaki Yoshio, Takeshi Inamura, Ikuo Kuwana, and Eiji Yamamori.

Tanaka herself was not the craziest animator here, but out of all the staff she had the longest turnover period first starting off animating for about six months going to about 8 months. Tanaka did a whopping total 10 minutes of key animation. Basically unheard of Tanaka exhausts every single ounce of herself to give way to incredible key animation. I feel like each movie, Miyazaki had Tanaka do something new. Her first cut is a show of force between Lady Eboshi’s forces with their guns against Asano’s soldiers, a local daimyo. It’s a bit more of a brutal and violent sequence for Ghibli as the smoke clears the townsmen and archaic soldiers fall to the hands of technological terror. I love the shots of Eboshi firing on the two commanding samurai. Later on the boar forces attack both Eboshi and Jigo’s people leading to a show of effects both from Tanaka and Yamada. The finale with the killing of the forest spirit was handled by senior staff including Kondo, Otsuka, and Tanaka, she animates the great scene where Eboshi steals its head as its cell-like inner body attacks everything around it. There are a lot of little details like the kodama falling slowly into the ground, and the spirit reforming together slowly but surely. Dealing with complicated shading is always tricky, but given the story it was right Miyazaki opted to add more shading even to the creatures. The shot of the wolf head attacking Eboshi is pretty brutal, and its just another instance of fantastic supervisions and in-betweening assistance.

After Tanaka finished her tenure on Mononoke she returned back onto American Cartoons directing, supervising and animating on shows like Superman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures


Running from 1996-2000 (STAS) and 1997-1999 (TNBA) respectively, this was a new era of Bruce Timm’s character art. Departing from the more inconsistent era of the original Batman The Animated Series run the art style had finally improved due to outsourced work from TMS staff. Many of the staff were actually hired on to direct and animate episodes of each show respectively like Kazuhide Tomonaga, Hiroyuki Aoyama, Kenji Hachizaki, and of course Tanaka herself. Tanaka was credited as an AD for one Superman episode.

For “World’s Finest” the three part episode teaming up Batman and Superman together Tanaka was on the KA staff, and Tomonaga did a majority of the storyboarding. It isn’t exactly known what Tanaka did, but I wouldn’t be shocked if she did these cuts at the very least supervise them. This episode may or may not have had Ghibli staff credited to animation cuts, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they were brought on to do a tad bit after Mononoke finished up.

Several months after “World’s Finest” Tanaka directed her episode of “The New Batman Adventures” entitled “Growing Pains”

A really fantastic episode of the series that has animation that really just lends itself. Thanks to Tanaka’s connects she’s able to get a rag tag team of animators from Mononoke. She smartly places Hideaki Yoshio one of the younger guys as the AD, and is able to get Ai Kagawa, Mariko Matsuo Masako Shinohara, Atsuko Otani, Eiji Yamamori, and Takeshi Inamura. That’s all Ghibli animators and four of them are women.

The first half of the episode is nice, with Robin heroically saving this girl named Annie, a lot of nice flowy action that I wouldn’t be surprised that Yamamori touched up. There isn’t a ton of sakuga throughout the middle portion, but its important to mention the design of Annie.

The design seems to be Tanaka’s original and I imagine Timm and co were very happy having a more anime-esque character appear in the show.

The last five minutes of this episode is where things really explode. There is a ton of effects animation done around when Clayface finally makes his grand appearance. I can imagine where Otani and Inamura kick in since the effect animation is much more in their style, closely resembling the writhing mass of the forest spirit they finished about a year prior. The final moments feature insane morphing animation, and while not containing clean in-betweens its still impressive for an American tv series.

From here on out I am only going to mention Tanaka’s Ghibli work, as the latter half of her Telecom work is unidentified.

In 2001, Spirited Away was released

Ghibli’s second completely digital, coming after Takahata’s My Neighbor the Yamadas. One of the most enchanting Alice in Wonderland esque tales ever imagined, Spirited Away sees Miyazaki’s imagination firing on all cylinders. The wildest creatures, animals and designs appear feeling more unhinged than ever before. This film brought forth the arrival of new staff members as Shinya Ohira fills the void of Miyazaki not having idiosyncratic animators after Yoshinori Kanada’s departure. Kagawa, Kousaka, and Ando on animation direction, with a lot of new talent including Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Takaaki Yamashita (who went uncredited).

Tanaka’s role for the film was to be the Yubaba specialist solely animating scenes involving her. Tanaka was doing long uninterrupted cuts, sometimes lasting for 3 minutes. She has about 7 minutes of pure key animation, really getting her money’s worth. Something so impressive about Tanaka is the variety she’s able to spice up into her scenes. Each scene has Yubaba in different positions of authority, the first in power, the second embarrassed, and the third insulted. She brings out so many facets to an otherwise generalized character, with Yubaba looking so vastly dissimilar personality wise in each cut she appears in.