Forum - View topicWhat Makes Kyoto Animation So Special?
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ChrissyC
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Wow, really well written piece on the studio Kyoani.
I even went as far to take notes on this case study you released. I really enjoyed this piece and all of the effort you wrote about on the expansive jobs performed by Kyoani. Last edited by ChrissyC on Wed Dec 02, 2015 9:05 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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There's also something to be said for knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and sticking to what you're good at rather than wasting time and money taking foolish risks on properties you might not be able to do justice. You're a Sunrise fan, so I assume you like mech shows. Would you really want KyoAni trying to make a mech show, when they haven't done one since Full Metal Panic over a decade ago, and probably don't have a lot of people on their staff with experience in mech design, mech animation, or science fiction writing? Remember, they keep almost everything in-house, so it's not like they're going to go out and assemble a freelance team to do it, like another studio would. That's part of why studios like A-1 or JC Staff can work in so many different genres, because the freelancers will fill in most of the needs they can't cover with their in-house staff and they can outsource to cover the rest. And that's also why, as Nick pointed out, it's a mistake in most cases to view studios as monolithic creative entities since so often the key members of the creative teams behind any particular series are freelancers rather than full-time employees of the studio. Certainly there are some smaller studios with executive animation directors who make their influence felt across most of that studio's work, like Shinbo at Shaft or Shin Oonuma at Silver Link or Shoji Kawamori at Satelight, but the bigger the studio and the more diverse their portfolios, the less you're going to see that consistency of style and vision. Sunrise itself is structured with something like nine separate sub-studios, so they can have one sub-studio and set of employees totally focused on making Gundam, another one totally focused on Love Love, another one churning out Aikatsu every week, and so on, but pretty much the only thing the Aikatsu team and the Gundam team will share in common is working for Sunrise. They also have 224 in-house staff, plus however many freelancers under contract at any given time. That's about twice as large as KyoAni, who had about 120 in-house staff last I heard. |
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king 47
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To each their own, of course. I can tell you that Hyouka got better as the show progressed, but that's my opinion. Chitanda's somewhat annoying behavior gets reduced as the show goes on and she begins to understand people around her more. Oreiki also starts to come out of his shell with time. Ibara and satoshi too. The relations evolve, but it doesn't try to become so much. And the animation and music quality remain top notch. I do agree that the majority of their shows are boring (Haven't seen Hibiki yet). |
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Alabaster Spectrum
Posts: 528 |
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Nope hence why I said specializing is a sort of two way street. From what I remember hearing the team that handled FMP:TSR said they'd never want to do a mecha series again cause it was the hardest thing they've ever done and not really worth it financially in the long run. They just simply did not seem to enjoy doing that one. They however clearly do very much enjoy making low key school club anime with lots of cute girls via a tandem of the Lantis system and their own. Sunrise actually does sort of have a goal which is to produce original animation content and franchises from scratch and promote their character brands internationally. They're like a step above Kyoani in the sense that there isn't even a go between light novel they acquire the rights too and then assume control of the property, they conceive everything largely in house yet curiously whenever an example of that business model comes up rather than the studio that has been dedicated to it since it's very inception who else but Kyoani comes up as the apparent sole example of do it yourself franchise building. I almost have to laugh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpfAa7SFgfU It's very jargon filled and self promoting but the video essentially gives the gist better than I could. |
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Via_01
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That's... not how character development works friend. Explaining things about characters is not character development: it's just adding information, and in the cases you pointed out, information that was probably meaningless for character development. Also, by "classics club" they mean "classic literature club", so they are a literature club, though I guess most of them weren't too into it in the first place. In any case, I too consider Kyoto Animation to be my favorite studio, simply because it's one of the few studios with a consistent staff and style. I'd be wary about talking about Madhouse, for example, because I tend to get wildly different results from them, caused by the wildly different teams that tend to work on their projects. I like how KyoAni's detailed animation style and often impeccable direction can be considered to also be part of the "writing" of a show: appropiate body language can tell you more about a character than mere words and actions, and a simple camera angle can set a better emotional mood than people just shouting their lungs out. KyoAni succeeds in making all their elements work cohesively, and that's something I highly respect. |
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15519 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Good article on what I think makes one of the best studios what it is. I am a big fan of it, it has some of my favourite anime. I have some curious relationships with a few of the titles, I love some that are unpopular with a large group of people, while others leave me fairly cold and are pretty popular, like Hyouka and Tamako Market. I will stick up for what I love, and will have to accept that tastes are a matter and there are some that just resonate with different people
One I really enjoy for many of the reasons mentioned in this article, and has a strange hate for it, is Beyond The Boundary. Firstly I advocate that the story did matter, there were some interesting reveals in it that made you rethink the messages that were hidden in body language and other details. One of my favourite scenes in the series is just a tiny conversation between the characters, it is after a big event and although Mirai is acting standoffish. although the entire story is really being told through body language such as how Mirai's eye moves. The body language is actually a really big part of the characters. |
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GaryNhk
Posts: 68 |
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Things have to be explained about a character to have the grow and develop by the end of a show or they won't be a while rounded character. If they are the same as they where in episode 1 to 22 than those characters are poorly develop. Also I had to fan sub this show because its not out for out legally anywhere "coalgirls" and they are usually very good at their subs. They never called it a classic literature club just classic club. I thought it was classic as in history club. They never talk about books other than the history of the club itself. So it wasn't well explain what they really do in it. |
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maximilianjenus
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they did, that was explained in the school festival arc.
agreed, attack on titan is a good example, as wit was itself a capable studio, but with aot they bit mroe than they could chew and no matter how much money they kept on throwing at it, they were unable to dig themselves our of the hole they had fallen in (for the ones that don't rememebr wit had produciton problems after 7 episodes or so of aot and started contracting people left adn right, but teh issues remained until the end). |
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Via_01
Posts: 551 |
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I won't continue explaining beyond this, because it's probably going to get tiring, but yes, you don't need to know absolutely everything about a character so they can grow. Oreki and co. are relatively normal kids, and knowing what are Oreki's parents doing through the entirety of the show probably isn't important. Not even Chitanda's parents appear, and they are mentioned solely for the sake of a couple of mysteries. What matters is, again, actual character development. The show begins with Oreki unwilling to do anything that may cost him extra energy. The presence of Chitanda in his life forces him to start solving these "mysteries", and soon he feels "restless", as he begins to wish for a rose-colored life, a life where there's something interesting or fun, something he has yet to find. And by the last chapter, we feel that he might have found such a thing in Chitanda: he's offered a job that's definitely going to task him with a lot of physical effort, and during his free day nonetheless, but he still goes to hold the umbrella, without even commenting about how much of a pain it's going to be. So yeah, it's about how the character changes, not about his background info. Oh, and the "koten" in "koten-bu" (classics club) roughly translates to literary classics, which can be shortened to just "classics". We DO see them talking about mystery books a few times, but they all joined for reasons other than an actual interest in the classics, so other than the anthology they probably didn't do much else (it was a hangout place of sorts). |
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amagee
 Posts: 333 Location: Orlando, FL |
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They call the club a "Koten-bu" which means "classical literature club". I'm not sure about how carefully Coalgirls does their subtitling but I bet they may have been calling it merely the "classics club" because it's pretty common in English to refer to classical literature as "the classics" in common parlance. Given that high school students do most of the talking, I wouldn't suppose a more full, formal translation each time fit the bill as well. |
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Keichitsu0305
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For myself, I enjoy KyoAni for it attention to detail in character animation, camera angles, comedic timing, and stellar use of digital special effects. Even after watching only six episodes of Haruhi, the show holds up visually and I could tell right away that the staff wanted to leave a unique mark on the series. Haven't seen K-On but simply looking at clips of the show and you instantly can tell the show apart from other slice of life shows. Same goes for The Secind Raid, Tamako Market, Chunibyou, Free!, Sound! and Hyouka; they look distinctly different from any other mecha, romantic comedy, sports, music, or mystery anime out of there.
By having an in-house staff, I think that makes a gigantic difference in how an animation studio is able to create a unique, well crafted product that fans will draw to over and over again. Ghibli "was" the only other example but, they were mostly a film production which is a huge comparison to make. BONES, I.G, and Madhouse will always be the top studios for their diverse generes, wide variety of styles and moods, and what different writers/animators/directors can bring to the table. KyoAni is great at what they do, I just wished some of their light novel adaptions (aka Beyond the Boundary) were as strong as their nuanced animation and digital effects. |
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GaryNhk
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Last i'll talk about it too. We are told that his motto is to not waste energy. We are not shown why or told why he choose to live this way. That 2 mins in episode 1 by the end of that episode till the 22 we see him always go out of his way to do things he doesn't have to because Chitanda or his sister or any other girl asking him to do something. Never in the story he saids no he gives in each time. Joining the club was the start and the job with the living dolls was the end. Episode 1 to episode 22 he went out his way do do things when women ask him thats not changing in my opinion. If it gave a reason why he believed in the motto of not wasting energy and over came that by the group with an over arcing plot of filling in or finding your true path in life. Would of been better it was just dull. There was an episode where the try to fig out why after school did they call someone to the main office. Its a pretty show but KyoAni has better shows this isn't the masterpiece fans claim it to be |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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It's true that Sunrise has always been very good at putting out original productions, and that's something I've always appreciated about them (though let it be noted that they're perfectly capable of making successful adaptations like Gintama, too). Sunrise produced Escaflowne, which is the series that made me an anime fan and is still my favorite to this day, and for that alone I'll always have good things to say about them. They also have an advantage that most other studios don't have, though: a huge parent company in Bandai backing them up. It's a lot easier to take the financial risks of trying to develop and promote an original series for a studio that has a huge multimedia company backing it up and able to help them market and merchandise it, versus a small independent studio that's scraping by just trying to survive from project to project, like the late, lamented Manglobe. I'm not pointing that out to diminish what Sunrise has accomplished, either - on the contrary, I applaud them for taking full advantage of the resources that they have available. I wish some other studios that have or should have the financial clout to produce more original works would take advantage of that too (like A-1, for instance, who produces an occasional original like Aldnoah.Zero or Anohana, but otherwise mostly plays it safe and sticks to adaptations). That's the beauty of the system, though...every studio is going to have its own business plan based on its own staffing and resources and goals, whether that's the prolific quantity of shows churned out by A-1, or KyoAni's recent focus on adapting homegrown properties from their own light novel imprint, or Studio Pierrot's history of producing long-running shonen franchises. As long as whatever model they follow is working for them and keeping them in business, that's the most important thing. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16941 |
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KyoAni has been one of my favorite studios ever since I watched Air years ago. For me it's not the characters, stories, and animation itself per se. By that I mean the fluidity of the animation itself. For me what sets them apart are the small things. The attention to detail as already mentioned. It's about the backgrounds, the scenery, the music, the way the leaves rustle when the wind blows, the seagulls in the back ground, the way the waves hit the shore, etc.
It's those small things you don't really notice on their own unless you're thinking about them/looking for them. Those "background" elements however add up. All those small little bits form a big whole and add another layer to the show. The same theory applies to normal movies or tv shows for me. I've always felt those elements are what can make a good movie great, or make an anime series not just good but rather and experience. You might not notice those elements normally but if they were not present the show would be entirely different. Perhaps still good, but not as good. Like them or dislike them KyoAni are quite adept at adding in those little background elements that set their shows apart. |
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noobster
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KyoAni is(was) one of the best animation studio indeed. Most classics were from them such FMP, Haruhi, Clannad, etc. But it all changed when they expeimented and introduced "moe-shit" a. k. a. light anime or daily life Lucky Star. Their art style even changed.
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