Yu-Gi-Oh! Animation Highlights

I think even people who aren’t traditionally geared towards nitpicking at animation can tell that last Sunday’s episode was definitely “off”. Lots of “QUALITY”, if you will. On this blog I generally want to avoid taking time to point out all of the less-than-stellar animation the series tends to have, and bring attention to the moments that Yu-Gi-Oh shines in. That being said, last week’s episode is a good example of when a lot of things go wrong in animation production, so let’s see what’s up.

Top Image:

Animation Directors: Kazuyuki Igai, Naoki Aisaka, Satoru Shiroishi.

This alone actually isn’t so bad. While one animation director is usually the gold standard for Japanese animation, it’s an ideal at best. Many episodes of even ongoing anime have plentiful, even absurd amounts of animation directors working on a single episode. (See any mid-season episode of a WIT Studio show like Titan, Rolling Girls, or Seraph lol) It’s not necessarily bad, but it usually means that the one AD that was originally assigned to the episode can’t reasonably correct all of the cuts in time, so other animators have to step in and pick up the slack. Not ideal, but not uncommon for YGO, especially ARC-V.

Igai is an AD in every Studio Blanc episode (more on that later) from episode 28 onwards. Aisaka has never worked on ARC-V before this, and Shiroishi is a first time AD on ARC-V, who did key animation on the three previous Blanc episodes before this one. That’s about where things get messy…

Middle Image:

Blue underline is key animation. The red underline in the KA group is “Studio Wanpack”, which is pretty infamous for having lower-quality work. When you see a studio instead of names in credits, it’s a good sign that the work handed to them was either menial, or either side didn’t feel it was worth to credit actual people behind it. Not good stuff, generally.

In low-quality episodes, the number of key animation staff can be a decent hint as to what happened. If there’s a lot of names, that means that the studio had trouble getting the episode done on time, and had to pull in a lot of people to help get it done. Not quite the case here as this KA list is a tad on the large side but nothing absurd.

Green underline is 2nd key animation. Underlined are “Ace Company” and “Studio Mark”, again, same deal as when whole companies are credited for 2ndKA. 2ndKA ideally shouldn’t be necessary, as it often means that key animators didn’t have time to make detailed drawings so they had to ship them off to another part of the process to get them done. There are plenty of ARC-V episodes with little to none 2ndKA. Industry-wise however, it’s increasingly common.

Bottom Image:

Production Assistance: Studio Blanc. Effectively the entirety of the animation production on the episode was done not at Gallop, but this studio instead. Not an uncommon practice, and Yu-Gi-Oh has been doing it pretty much since the beginning. About ¼ to 1/8 episodes are in-house. Not much!

Studio Blanc’s ARC-V episodes are 5, 12, 20, 28, 36, 44, 52, and 61.

Now, let’s look at the content of the episode itself. First, the good: 

There are plenty of cuts (mostly stills) that have a nice line weight to them. They’re on model. I can’t really call it animation, but for what it is, I’ll take it. Some of these look like Hiroshi Tatezaki (who was KA in this ep), but for some reason I can’t convince myself that ALL of these are him. I know for sure that Yuya in the middle-left is though. That’s his style. There’s also this cut below that gets reused a few times, that has Tatezaki’s style of timing, and the heavy black shading. I really like Tatezaki’s work, I may have to make a post about him later…

In addition, there’s this mysteriously good looking summoning shot. My two instant guesses would be uncredited work by either Kenichi Hara or Junpei Ogawa, sort of leaning towards the former. A few people think it’s Ogawa, but I can’t be too sure. I really don’t know.

(I hate having to neuter these gifs to get under the size limit)

And now, the not so good:

I tried to make sure I wasn’t getting any inbetweens, so these are all shots that you shouldn’t have to go frame-stepping to find. They’re all missing a fresh coat of polish that could have at least lessened the blow. The six still shots I posted above probably got the attention they needed, but even with three animation directors, two of which are incredibly inexperienced, a lot gets through the cracks when you’re strapped for time. 

Next week episode is in-house and AD is Hidekazu Ebina, so we’re in for a treat. If anyone has any questions, or if something is unclear, don’t be afraid to drop an ask. I’m here to make sure everyone understands animation!