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Your Ultimate Guide to Anime Ending Credits: Part III

The best animators involved with the project and notable freelancers will undoubtedly show up; the opening has one minute and thirty seconds meant to immediately sell the series, so it's often going to have some of the best pieces of animation in the whole thing – sometimes actually better than the series’ peaks.

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The best animators involved with the project and notable freelancers will undoubtedly show up; the opening has one minute and thirty seconds meant to immediately sell the series, so it's often going to have some of the best pieces of animation in the whole thing – sometimes actually better than the series’ peaks.

While this is true for probably 95% of anime, it always amazes me when you see an OP (or more likely, ED credits) there were... obviously not done by the best artists/animators. It's especially jarring for Eds that are mostly just a still image so you're forced to stare at one of the most poorly drawn stills in the show for 1 min+. Like, I'm pretty sure Pierott has interns do the Naruto Endings.

As a general rule openings will require a handful of key animators (and endings even less so), with an animation director and perhaps chief supervision. Having multiple supervisors and dozens of key animators isn't unheard of though, which is quite scary when you consider the short length; in instances like that they might have required a key animator for every cut or two to be able to get it done. Some sequences need to get finished fast.

Yet another great entry to this series. I think I've learned more from this third entry than the other two combined, great stuff.

Since we've finally reached the topic of outsourcing and production assistance, I had one question that I've had for several years now. Who is and what does Triple A do? I'm sure its because their name is in English but I see them in credits all the time. At first I was thinking the A might mean its in the Aniplex/A1 family, but I have seen them on so many non-Sony series I can't tell. My best/gut guess is they might be a CG house? Any info would be great I can lay to rest this burning question lol. Google has turned up nothing

On a somewhat related note:

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As a general rule openings will require a handful of key animators (and endings even less so), with an animation director and perhaps chief supervision. Having multiple supervisors and dozens of key animators isn't unheard of though, which is quite scary when you consider the short length; in instances like that they might have required a key animator for every cut or two to be able to get it done. Some sequences need to get finished fast.

For some time now I've been puzzled by the first opening of Hyōka in this regard, since it had more key animators working on it than any of the individual episodes (the first one came closest, with 21 against 25). It's hard to associate KyoAni with troubled productions, so I've been wondering what the story was behind this one.

Another question came to mind reading this new article. Are there reasons we sometimes see logos for other studios in the credits while other times its spelled out in kanji or often katakana? Just the style of the OP/ED or maybe they might want to be more anonymous? Do you think a larger company might want their credit removed if the project became controversial or something? Japanese corporate politics can get weird. I'm sure there's more than a few soured relationships between some companies with all the things that can go wrong in production.

Triple A is a Korean studio that is typically used to draw in-betweens, but has drawn key animation for some episodes at times. They are not listed in the giant Sony company structure either.

ultimatemegax wrote:

Triple A is a Korean studio that is typically used to draw in-betweens, but has drawn key animation for some episodes at times. They are not listed in the giant Sony company structure either.

But Triple A is a Japanese company; or am I mistaken?
http://www.triplea-2002.com/company/index.html
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_A_%28アニメ制作会社%29

They operate differently for shorter work like openings and commercials. The Evergarden one recently had 6 key animators (basically 1-2 per cut), which is basically what they require to animate entire episodes. I guess it makes sense to make regular size key animator units when you've got all those people available in-house and need to animate something impressive. Stuff like this is another reminder that common trends don't always apply. For the most part you should take a large number of animation directors are a very bad sign, yet the Love Live movie has as far as I know the highest count anime has ever had, just because Sunrise's policy with projects like that is getting TONS of people to polish them.

So I met up with Asao Yoshinori from GAINAX Fukushima just several hours ago and I asked him about what it takes to be a part of production management and well, besides the usual requirements, apparently I also need some kinda special license? I wasn't able to ask on how I'm able to get that license but I hope that somebody can help me out on that. Anyone?

Knowing how much the Japanese love their occupational licences and exams I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they were to introduce an "anime production licence", but as far as I know the only kind of licence anime companies require prospective production assistants to have is an ordinary vehicle driving licence. This was mentioned as a necessary prerequisite in all the PA job ads I've seen. Makes sense, since the PAs often have to physically transport cuts and recordings to and from studios, freelance animators' homes and TV stations.