Stark x fern

I'd read the manga but I really like the VAs on the anime

no.

Straight

BNA is the best Trigger show

said no one ever

dont u rep panty & stocking man get this hogwash outta here

(never watched it)

I do lol. But I got to be different this time around

🔥🔥🔥🔥

The best are the Gridman series to me, and Kill La Kill of course

But yeah my personal favorite is LWA

fun show tho

Himmel down on bended knee

I am obsessed with the character acting in Frieren, I genuinely don't think I can pick up the manga after this

I love angel wings

since the season is wrapping up here's my ratings for what i watched. not gonna rate frieren or apothecary diaries since those still have a ways to go but they're both great so far

overtake 8/10 - surprise of the season for me. i was expecting a show about racing but it ended up being a character drama about the people surrounding the racing and it's so much better for it. the story has been pretty emotional and surprisingly serious. i also really enjoy the animation style. it's not overly flashy or necessarily amazing but there's a fluidity and energy to it that is just very pleasing to look at

under ninja 7/10 - this is a weird one. it jumps between multiple timelines and has lots of names of people or organizations that are brought up without any explanation which can make following the story kinda difficult. the humor is very deadpan and dry, which i find funny but other might not. the animation is nothing special at all and the color palette is a bit drab but i find it's weirdness and humor to be charming

spy x family s2 7/10 - started off pretty poorly imo. still heavily relying on anya reaction faces, meme bait and what seems like filler episodes, but i do think things picked up once they got on the ship. overall the concept is just starting to wear thin for me

jjk s2 6.5/10 - hidden inventory was fantastic and the best part of jjk so far, but shibuya incident has been very disappointing. the writing is so f***ing bad, like to the point where i feel like i could just watch the raw and nothing would change for me. the animation and fights have been great but the problem is i don't give a f*** about what's happening on screen cause none of these characters mean anything to me. i have no reason to be emotionally invested in nearly anything that happens. beyond the initial shock value of seeing a character die, there's nothing. i've never been given a reason why i should care about a character or their relationships with other characters, so when they die it doesn't mean anything to me. almost every character just feels like an action figure being used to show off cool fighting moves and the actual "character" part of their character comes last. without hidden inventory i probably would've given this a 5 or something

undead unluck 6/10 - like frieren and apothecary this still has a ways to go but i dropped it 8 episodes in. overall just very boring to me. it's nicely animated and the colors are pretty but it still feels very bland somehow. the episodes felt much longer than their runtime too. not bad, just kinda generic and underwhelming to me

Animator Spotlight: Keiichiro Watanabe

All gifs in order
Space Dandy (2014)
One Punch Man (2015)
Mob Psycho Season 1 Episode 1 (2016)
Mob Psycho Season 1 Episode 5 (2016)
Flip Flappers Episode 1 (2016)
Flip Flappers Episode 8 (2016)
Mob Psycho 100 Season 2 Episode 5 (2019)
Mob Psycho 100 Season 2 Episode 11 (2019)
Dororo (2019)
The God of High School (2020)
Jujutsu Kaisen Season 1 Episode 2 (2020)

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 1 Episode 19 (2021)
Chainsaw Man Season 1 Episode 4 (2022)
Chainsaw Man Season 1 Episode 7 (2022)
Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 Episode 3 (2023)
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (2023) Last cut Shingo Yamashita

Happy Belated Birthday to Keiichiro Watanabe born November 30th. I have gone down the varied history of webgen animation, and the lineage that sparked a whole new generation of freelance talent. It started long ago with the godfather of webgen animation Satoru Utsunomiya mentoring a young Kenichi Kutsuna, who in term helped a young gif maker Ryo Timo push the boundaries of Flash animation. Several years later Shingo Yamashita, along with mentorship from Norio Matsumoto became the god of Flash animation pushing every single element of the medium’s deformations and limited style to its extremes. Then along came Keiichiro Watanabe, appearing on one of Yama’s OPs. Watanabe feels like the apex of the ShingoYama school and subsequently webgen era of talent. K1ro (as he’s commonly referred to) pushes everything to more of an extreme than Yamashita ever did. Some of his distortions are so unorthodox that things will be reduced to just blobous abstract shapes, going so far into an expressionist approach that it makes him probably one of the strangest action animators working in the anime industry today.

So Kiro like I said before randomly appeared out of nowhere on the 13th OP of Naruto. His first effort was on a short fan made animation where a lot of his efficacy for slow framed action on 3s 4s, and even 5s was already very apparent once he got to the OP he already had a ton of skill in background animation and was working with some of the top dogs of the webgen era

Kiro 0:45-0:48
On here he is versed against the best, Shingo Fujii, Tasurou Kawano, Gosei Oda, Ryu Nakayama, and Shingo Yama himself. He some how manages to completely adapt to this style doing background animation for a few seconds.

As luck would have it Kiro all of a sudden got placed on to Space Dandy, with Gosei Oda likely recognizing the talent he had from the OP and thinking he could be more capable on longer scenes.

Space Dandy as many of you know was a brilliant vehicle for veteran and rising animators to show off their talents, and Kiro was among the many. For his first scene he was placed on a strange creature scene on Episode 4, which is something he’d excel at more later on. Kiro at such a young age into his sakuga career had a ton of idiosyncrasies that made him stand out. His usage of 3s and 4s in this scenes allows him to get a lot of weird and inhuman gestures. He even goes so far to reduce the zombies in the scene to just blobs coming to attack and eat the bounty hunters. Also in this scene, Kiro was interested in utilizing cgi backgrounds, which have been a serious case of contention in his career, but that comes later down the line. Episode 13, following Bones megalith Yutaka Nakamura, and super star webgen animator Kenichi Fujisawa, Kiro had an ample amount of time to close out an impressive giant mecha fight. Lot of elements of his water, and smoke effects are completely stand out given how they look like they were brushed in on Flash, and once again he uses a ton of 3s and 4s this time convey weight, which is not a very common way to animate these scenes. The final episode of the Space Dandy has Kiro doing a way more advance 3D environment with a chase scene, and is wild to view in full Kiro’s limitedness presents so much of his art, that it seems like even at this early stage he had to be on scenes where he had complete control over his cuts.

Given the insanity of his Space Dandy cuts it was only right for Kiro to come on Shingo Natsume’s next project, One-Punch Man

A huge show that garnered the attention of people even outside anime. On One Punch Man Kiro was joined by some of the best new and old animators in the industry. The young staff was particularly interesting as their industry connections brought in even more talent. Norifumi Kugai was among one the younger animators doing insane webgen cuts early on in the show, Bahi JD was a foreign animator seriously impressing with his almost rotoscoped looking cuts. Then you have Kiro, who among the new batch was still the strangest one. On his first fight scene, Kiro seems completely content on doing pretty janky motions on 4s, and then working between twos and threes with little to no smoothness in the spacing. Every movement of the cut feels like raw key frames. The gorilla character in particular, has armor like plating around him that should scrape and flail around, instead Kiro keeps this character together with an almost gelatinous volume that goes completely against what should physically be happening with the character.

Later on Episode 7, Kiro joins Kugai in the meteor sequence

Kiro presumed for 0:03-0:11, confirmed for 0:24-end, excluding character cuts
Kiro really loves simple blobby explosions. He isn’t opting for a ton of realism, and Kugai is also totally on board. Giving the cut a lot of personality despite the somewhat failure that happens in the actual scene.

2016 would be a pretty big year for Kiro as he left a lasting impact on the two shows he worked on, the first was Mob Psycho 100’s first season,

First Mob Psycho 100. This would begin the trend of Kiro gravitating towards show’s revolving arounds spirits and curse exorcisms and characters with psychic or supernatural powers being at the forefront of the show. Kiro appears on the first episode of Mob debuting his abstract, and obtuse morphing animation.

Kiro 3:54-4:17
Opening up with a stellar background shot, I love how Kiro is able to make it look so easy. As for the monster, the way the shapes of it converge through his wriggly and uncanny movement, it is so well done.

Kiro then covers the awakening of Mob’s 100% against his fight versus Teru

Kiro start to 0:30 I think
The shots of Mob standing before attacking Teru are particularly interesting. It is so interesting to look at this scene and think, what is Kiro trying to convey. Is this particles, of smoke? energy? flames? liquid? It is left completely up to interpretation, but it does look cool.

The second show was Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s Flip Flappers

Aware of Kiro from back on Space Dandy Oshiyama much like Natsume, allowed a legion of webgen and freelance talent dominate the series. Kiro was one of the mainstay animators for the show and does not disappoint. His first scene was on Episode 1 great running and background animation, plus wriggly creature arms to boast. Kiro starts to get more dynamic with his camera work on Episode 8. He conventionally didn’t work in too many action cuts early on, but here Kiro excels at fluidly stitching in a still shot to then realizing an Itano Circus like its nothing. Some of the running cuts after this feel somewhat inspired by Norio Matsumoto, with the way the composition has an in and out focus with the direction of where the character is moving in respect to the camera. It adds a sense of depth that we had not seen too much of before. Kiro then animates another Itano Circus on the last episode where his one take shots become more and more progressively nutty. Conveying fast paced action on 2s and 3s can lead to a jittery looking result, and Kiro lets that hang all out here with some of the demon heads having the aforementioned uncanny movement.

Kiro did not do too much in 2017, and 2018, but he was still as interesting as ever due to the composition of his cuts and lack of distinction between each individual effects. Like here on Fate/Apocrypha. Kekkai Sensen also allowed him to show off wacky and mushy character acting, or morphing?