| The animation director for the cult favorite "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure"
said he wished he could have made it more bizarre. Yasuhito Kikuchi said
on Friday during an Anime Expo interview session that animated comedy is
a lot like live action comedy, and it's not easy to get it right. "Comedy
is harder to do than drama," said Kikuchi. "It's hard to get the timing
of the lines right. If it's 0.3 seconds off, it's screwed up." |
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| Kikuchi managed to escape the drone-like existence of a Japanese salary
man (he once was a computer programmer) for the world of animation. "It's
a more positive thing and a more fun job to do," said Kikuchi about anime
as a career. "It's because I can create stories. There are a lot of stories
inside me, but they're all secret." |
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| Anime production has to deal with the computer subculture that Kikuchi
left, through programs that replace cel animation and render three-dimensional
objects for filming. Kikuchi isn't fond of the rendered, sculpted look
of 3D and wants the traditional flat look of cel animation to continue.
"If you're going to use a computer, you might as well make a live-action
film," he noted. "It's okay to use 3D, but as it's used right now, it doesn't
match up well with the traditional animation." |
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| Kikuchi started as an inbetweener, an artist who handles the grunt
work of drawing most of the cels. He advanced to the post of key animator,
which lets him draw only the first and last cels of an action sequence.
And much of that action involved female characters: "I've worked on a lot
of shows that involved a lot of girls," he said. "I'd like to do more stuff
involving guys, maybe Shakespeare." |
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