Chicks On Anime

Background Art: An Insider Perspective

Well, to tell the truth, working in Japan was something I had planned to do within a year to a year and a half from now. When I saw an offer on the internet for a background layout position on Basquash!, I decided to try my luck and here I am!

You see, for me, the content (story) and the form (character animation) should be linked. Great works of animation tell the story with bold and daring animation. I am not saying that a piece where these aren't linked can't be good, but when I see the eclecticism of Yuasa's work, for example, I am blown away. Even within one single piece, he won't be afraid to completely change the visuals from one scene to the next, and the techniques used, from traditional cel animation to cut-out to pastels, just to fit the mood of the story. Mind Game is an excellent example. Of course, Yuasa is not the only animator/director to do this, but I think he is one of the rare artists to systematically do it, and to do it well. It's like his life motive.

We should also remember that he is working in the tightly constrained Japanese industry, where things need to be bankable. I think he just doesn't care. *laugh* He is able to find a balance between the mainstream and the auteur mindset. That is another reason I admire his work.

I recently talked to Stan (Stanislas Brunet), who also worked on Oban. He has been living here in Japan for a while, and he started to work on Basquash! at a pretty early point. He also did a lot of designs. His opinion is probably more valuable than mine. So in his opinion, the main difference between the French and Japanese artists would be in the profile of the artists. Apparently in Japan, the way things happen most of the time is that the animator will create a rough layout and the backgrounds are then simply and directly sent to coloring. Sometimes there is oversight to fix the perspective if needed.

Oh! I forgot to mention that I am talking about television series here, not feature films. So that's the first thing, concerning BGs. They belong more to a "coloring type" rather than "drawing type." I know that Thomas willingly kept the line visible on final backgrounds for Basquash!.

Also, you should know that there are not a lot of good animation schools here, and because of that, animators are usually trained directly inside a studio by an older animator. The thing is, nowadays, studios don't have these kinds of resources anymore, neither the means nor the time for this kind of long apprenticeship. Additionally, good animators are usually overwhelmed with work so they don't have the time either. So what happens is you end up with some young animators who aren't really comfortable with perspective and volume, simply because they couldn't take the time to learn it properly.

So we, in France, but also in United States I think, are trained in most of our animation schools in a way so we can be versatile and proficient (we can basically make our films alone, from A to Z). And what happens in Basquash! is that we just "added" this missing link between the animator's layout and the outsourced coloring step, so we can afford to do impressive perspectives, complicated angles, adding a lot of details and still having a coherent background.

What Thomas did was draw an amazing amount of research. He even designed some ultra-detailed street lamps and the like. All this extra preliminary work gave us a margin of padding once the production on the series actually started. The result is, I can promise you at least eight episodes of gorgeous backgrounds (which is apparently rare because, due to this margin Thomas created that isn't usually there, quality usually drops off earlier in a TV anime series).

But there are a lot of other general differences. Brendan was a feature film while Basquash! is a series, for instance, and the French are lazy while Japanese are hardcore workers, so I don't know if we can really compare them to each other. I have only been here for a month and the rush really starts next week.