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The Space Dandy Interview: Part II - Bahi JD

I went straight into key animation and skipped inbetweening. If someone wants to take the same path as me, I think they also need to go into key animation right at the beginning. That can be a little difficult, so they have to prepare a lot first. You need to start off with strong artistic skills, and impress them with your work. I was rejected many times at the beginning because my work was not strong enough. That was when I was 17

Drawing on 1s is very rare in anime though. But understandably so since it's considerably more expensive. Drawing on 3s (8 fps) seems to be more standard practice. Production I.G. animated Sengoku Basara on 3s for example. However, it's very obvious Studio Pierrot goes below that for low budget, non-canonical scenes in Naruto/Bleach (but 2s on canonical/high budget scenes).

configspace wrote:

Drawing on 1s is very rare in anime though. But understandably so since it's considerably more expensive. Drawing on 3s (8 fps) seems to be more standard practice. Production I.G. animated Sengoku Basara on 3s for example. However, it's very obvious Studio Pierrot goes below that for low budget, non-canonical scenes in Naruto/Bleach (but 2s on canonical/high budget scenes).

While animation done on 3s seems to be the average, the peculiar thing about anime is that the number of drawings per second is never fixed. Different cuts can be animated on 1s, 2s or 3s to convey different effects. At any rate, the number of drawings used in a scene is no indicator of the quality of the animation. Limited animation is just a style of animation, the skill of the animator is what sets animation apart. Great animators will do animation that looks amazing even on 3s, while the work of mediocre animators will look bad no matter how many drawings they fit into a second.

This is why I came to this industry, because as a key animator you can have a lot of control over your scene. Animators should discover the world of filmmaking and expand their knowledge; we are not just drawing pictures, we are filmmakers. Even a painter is not merely painting, you have to put more into your experience into your work and understand what you are doing. Otherwise, it will feel empty.

Sorry, I think I went too deep into animation techniques! But I think it's a shame that these advanced timing techniques aren't written in any popular English-language animation books. Young people who enter the animation world think that traditional animation always has to be in 1s. I don't know why some people set such strict animation rules, maybe they just do it so we can break them.

Just commenting on configspace's post, I think fans shouldn't judge quality by studio/company but as who is involved in the production. It bothers me when western fans make offhand remark about visual quality based solely on studio. I'm not a fan of Naruto and Bleach franchises, but their feature films have great animation because talented animators participate in those films.