It was bound to happen sooner or later! I’m gonna get one of the big ones out of the way and talk about one of the most popular animators involved with the franchise: Takahiro Kagami. As Mr. Kagami’s repertoire of work is very extensive, especially in regards to Duel Monsters, it’ll take me a while to get these posts out. So bear with me!
As I was doing research for this post, I came across something really neat that drastically changes my thought process when writing about this topic. It’s not something I see talked about at all, so I feel rather excited to have made this discovery myself. Let’s take a look at DM #1’s animation credits:
作画監督：加々美高浩
原画：星野浩一 本間孝弘 高橋和徳 つなきあき 林明美
小山知洋 秋元勇一 杉本道明 加々美高浩
アニメーション制作協力：ゆめ太カンパニー
Animation Supervisor: Takahiro Kagami
Key Animation: Koichi Hoshino, 本間孝弘、Kazunori Takahashi, Aki Tsunaki, Akemi Hayashi, Tomohiro Koyama, Yuichi Akimoto, Michiaki Sugimoto, Takahiro Kagami
Animation Production Assistance: Yumeta Company
What’s interesting is that this first episode wasn’t handled by Gallop themselves, but a studio known as Yumeta Company! Considering that Kagami’s episodes are some of the best-looking in the series, one would think that they’d be handled in-house. But oddly, that’s not the case! In fact, the first in-house episode doesn’t occur until DM #4. Crazy, huh?
Anyway, let’s compare that to the next episode done by Yumeta, episode 7.
作画監督：加々美高浩、つなきあき
原画：星野浩一 本間孝弘 丸山修二 高橋和徳 小山知洋
石川修 布施木一喜 加々美高浩
Animation Supervisor: Takahiro Kagami, Aki Tsunaki
Key Animation: Koichi Hoshino, 本間孝弘, Shuji Maruyama, Kazunori Takahashi, Tomohiro Koyama, Osamu Ishikawa, Kazunobu Fuseki, Takahiro Kagami
Lot’s of familiar faces from episode one, right? In fact, this is pretty much the dynamic for all of Yumeta’s episodes. Tsunaki and Kagami alternate ASing the Yumeta episodes for a good part of the series. Although Tsunaki and Kagami share AS credit in #7, Kagami mentioned on his Twitter about how messy production was early on in the show.
“Ms. Tsunaki was the AS on episode 7 and I was supposed to draw substantial key frames… the early parts of the series was quite chaotic.”
“Plus, our episode director had a falling out with the studio and quit, so Ms. Tsunaki helped episode direct as well–so maybe that’s why they put me as one of the animation supervisors? Those were chatoic times, so my memory is a little fuzzy.”
He didn’t actually contribute much to the episode, outside of this lovely cut at the end of the duel.
“On Yu-Gi-Oh! episode 7, we have the first CHIN. And a double-dose at that. On top of that, those are my key frames, too…”
It’s worth noting that Yumeta episodes are typically the ones featuring Jonouchi’s iconic chin.
I’m getting a little off topic here, but you may recognize two of the regulars at Yumeta. First is Shuji Maruyama, who went on to be character designer for 5D’s, as well as AD a few ZEXAL episodes. As well as Kazunori Takahashi, whom I’ve talk about at length in a previous post.
Takahashi actually swaps out with Tsunaki for alternating with Kagami on Yumeta episodes. Tsunaki stops working on DM around the time Takahashi comes in as an AS. Neat stuff, huh?
TL;DR: Kagami episodes in DM are outsourced episodes featuring a small but dedicated group of animators, many of whom continue to work on the series in the future.
This post ran a little long, so I’ll end it off for here. Next time I’ll get into Kagami’s style specifically, and what makes his work so iconic.