I mentioned briefly in the previous post about Aki Tsunaki and Takahiro Kagami’s relationship in the past, (if you recall, they both worked under Yumeta Company, alternating animation supervision) now is a good time to start going into Kagami’s work in a bit more detail.
Allow me to use DM #24, an episode with Aki Tsunaki on AS with Kagami participating in key animation for a short bit–to quite clearly illustrate the difference between their styles.
作画監督：つなきあき
原画：星野浩一 藤岡真紀 佐藤寿子 高橋和徳 山崎展義
小山知洋 加々美高浩
Animation Supervisor: Aki Tsunaki
Key Animation: Koichi Hoshino, Maki Fujioka, Kazunori Takahashi, Noriyoshi Yamazaki, Tomohiro Koyama, Takahiro Kagami
Now, this is how Tsunaki generally draws the characters:
Not so bad. Relative to a lot of other animators on DM, her work is actually pretty decent. The character animation and layouts are a little on the safe side, so I’d be lying if I called it dynamic. But rather safe than an off-model mess. So it’s acceptable. I tried to find as many stand-out shots as possible, but there’s not much here. Now, there’s one scene near the end of the episode where Kagami takes his role as key animator, and the difference is almost like night and day!
Here’s the clip: http://a.pomf.se/pxeqoz.mp4 (trying different ways of uploading video clips here… really don’t wanna have to fight Youtube’s copyright, and tumblr sucks for more than one video per post)
To finally get the point, what makes Kagami’s style stand out so much is his dynamic layout choices. From the wide angle of Anzu running towards Yugi, to another wide angle behind Anzu. The low-angle-but-not-yet-a-panty-shot layout. The bottom right in the image above especially hits how Kagami draws the characters differently. His way of rendering shading is less “standard” than Tsunaki’s–he uses mostly angluar, sharp forms in his shadows and creates different kinds of shapes with them. Tsunaki’s shading takes up the sides more without using the form quite as well. Kagami also lets the line weights on the characters flow out a little bit.
In terms of character motion, look no further than the sequence (screencapped on the top right) where Yugi falls to the ground and Anzu runs into the shot. Both of their movements have a heavy-ish weight to them. I believe that’s mostly thanks to the way Kagami animates secondary motions. You can see it in the first shot of the video clip when Celtic Guardian runs off-camera, too.
Takahiro Kagami is most well-known for his well-rendered hands, right down the details on the fingernails. You can see that a little bit in the close-up of Anzu’s slow-mo run, but we’re gonna have a lot of fun with that in later posts, trust me.
Even within an episode from Yumeta Company, there’s nothing quite like Kagami’s animation. The blatant shift in presentation style and character motion for Kagami’s cuts shines through–even if it doesn’t exactly move like your typical “sakuga” scene, there’s enough little stuff in here to make this sequence entertaining in its own right.
And just for funsies, here’s another stand-out sequence from the episode that was probably Kazunori Takahashi
While my G&G Directions post had plenty to say about Takahashi, I could have gone into his style a bit deeper. His DM work with Kagami is something to be admired, and now that I know he was a part of Yumeta Company, I’ll likely compare him to Kagami down the line anyway.
Next time, we’ll look at an early example of Kagami as an animation supervisor, and how he can use the same staff to make for a much more consistent, interesting experience.