Forum - View topicWhy do character designers usually act as animation directors as well?
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NearEasternerJ1
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From what I can tell, the vast majority of anime use the character designer as the animation director. But designing is not the same as drawing multiple movements within a sequence. Just because you can draw doesn't mean you can animate. Ghost in the Shell 1995 seems to be one of the few anime where the designer is not the animation director and that movie has great animation.
It's always confused me. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5169 |
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You should submit your post/query to: answerman(at)animenewsnetwork(dot)com |
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Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
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The credit 'animation director' is in some sense a misleading term. Something more appropriate might be something like 'animation supervisor' or even 'animation corrector'.
In the animation process, a cut of animation is assigned to a key animator, who creates the cut of animation, minus the inbetween drawings, or with them in looser detail. Every artist has different style, so their key animation drawings will often look different and idiosyncratic. Thus, the animation then goes to the animation director who 'corrects' the drawings, changing things like minute facial details and eyes, or changing other things about the form to motion to make it look better as they see it. This increases consistency throughout the production, and adds a level of quality control to avoid mistakes. So, character designer and animation director being the same person makes sense, though of course this isn't always the case. As far as I'm aware, most of the time animation directors and character designers have been animators in the past. |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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I have checked the encyclopedia for a few artists who did character designs that I like and I think that all of them had a lot of animator credits. Most seem to have started as in-between animators, which I guess is an entry level position, and then became key animators and then character designers, and most are also animation directors. What I have looked at is only a very small percentage of the character designers, but there does seem to be a pattern of starting as animators. |
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Blackiris_
 Posts: 536 |
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Which makes sense, because character designs for anime and characters designs for other media, illustrations and so on have different requirements. That's why, even when a mangaka or illustrator is credited with "Original Character Design", there is always someone who adapts those character designs for animation because those original character designs usually tend to be too detailed or otherwise not fit for animation. It makes sense, of course, that someone who knows to animate draws the character designs that are supposed to be animated. Otherwise they may not meet the requirements. In that sense, a character designer's job is often more about making designs that look good in animated form and can be drawn without too much hassle than about creating pretty characters.
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Touma
Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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I just checked the credits for Keiji Gotoh because he did the character designs for Those Who Hunt Elves.
He started out doing in-between animation for several years and then did key animation for several more years before doing character designs. Looking at his credits made me add a few shows to the list of those that I want to watch again. By getting me to think about character designers this thread has inspired me to watch more shows than most discussion threads do. |
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mbanu
 Posts: 160 |
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If you're trying to understand what exactly an "animation director" does in anime, I'd suggest watching Moon Animate Make-Up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orhh6TZ6qCE It intentionally didn't have an animation director, and as such is just a series of key animations connected together by a script.
When people talk about how "fluid" an animation is, they are talking about the animation director's work. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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I think ever since the 90's the importance of the credit character designer has diminished drastically. This is because prior to the late 90's anime was more about showcasing a particular artist's style than telling the story. It's like character designers were considered on par with gods and many of them were the same people who wrote the story as well.
Notable examples include Rumiko Takahashi, Masamune Shirow and Yuzo Takada. They wrote great stories but it's really their character design work that set them apart but none of them were really involved in actual animation production because there were other experts in that field and the techniques were still evolving at the time with hand drawn animation. But when computer technology became the forefront in animation starting in the late 90's it took away the importance of graphic design on physical media and created a void for digital artists, many of whom were the same ones involved in animation also. This resulted in a sort of fusing of the definitions of character designer and animation director and the fame in which one could achieve simply by writing manga and creating beautiful works of art featuring the characters of those stories became a thing of the past. Any artists fitting the original definition of character designer quickly faced extinction in the world of anime. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1803 Location: South America |
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Past, don't that implies that instead of declining animation should have had an improvement in writing quality?
I though Masamune Shirow's manga was quite great IMO and in terms of writing and world building not just art. I didn't know people though his fame was mostly for the art style, his last manga is not even drawn by him (Pandora Crimson Shell) becuase he said his style got obsolete. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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Maybe artists like Masamune Shirow couldn't maintain popularity as just graphic artists and character designers because they couldn't really change their style. If they did it would only be like they were emulating styles of more current artists. And eventually everyone, except diehard fans, get tired of a particular style in favor of new and more representative of what anime looks like today. To stay in the business many old school character designers had to fall back on their story writing abilities and let a new generation of artists take over for the artwork and visuals. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10068 Location: Virginia |
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@Past
Without getting into the merits of your argument, I think that Masamune Shirow is a very bad example to support it. Shirow's later career shows that he got out of writing and drawing manga because he was too busy with other things. He has been a character designer for multiple games and a few anime, has done illustrations for magazine covers and for some albums of classic music. He has put out multiple art books (some of which are very erotic). All of these are much less labor intensive than manga. I suspect the ongoing popularity of his manga and the GITS movie provided enough income that he could pick and choose what he wanted to do. He is also an early and very enthusiastic adopter of computer assisted illustration. His comments in his art books show he was heavily involved with computers by the mid 1990s. He was also heavily involved in the CGI anime versions of his Appleseed manga. When he said his drawing style was out of date he was likely referring to the fact that his female characters are mostly adult women (and look it) and not high school girls that could pass for elementary school students. I also suspect he was not interested in getting back into the drudgery of a regular manga. @NearEasternerJ1 As a very simple answer to your original question, the work of a character designer is mostly complete before any of the animation begins. Since they are animating his designs, it is likely that "animation director" is in most cases considered an extension of character design. It also means one less person you have to hire. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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Well, I think my point is also that character designers had to diversify to stay afloat if they wanted to have continued success in the anime/manga industry. I'm not really focusing on Shirow in particular, but it's definitely true that his varied artistic talents were put to good use for decades. Jose Cruz already pointed out he was probably a bad choice to use of the legendary character designers of their time. But what I first mentioned was about character designers that don't really fit the job description of animation director anymore because in the past character designers had a much more significant and romanticized role in anime than they do now.
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