 This is how
the future of anime changes: not with ink and paint, but with electrons.
Animator Scott Frazier guided a group of Otakon fans through the new wave
of animation software on Friday, packages such as the Retus Pro suite that
he demonstrated on a screen. Some of the packages take over from the old
practice of drawing and painting cels, others create rendered, three-dimensional
shapes and backgrounds, and a few combine 2D and 3D elements. From a show
of hands in the audience - and from their questions - it was clear that
the people at this Otakon panel were very familiar with the new techniques
- and wanted to become animators. While the old way of cel animation
is on the way, out... |
 ...Frazier
is worried that there could be trouble ahead for the Japanese animation
industry. In short, the Japanese economy isn't recovering from its late
1990's slump, animation studios are getting less money for the same amount
of work they did a decade earlier, and the industry may be slowly strangling
on the cash shortfall, Frazier feels. As a result, production houses are
having a hard time switching to the new computer systems because they can't
afford the equipment. "What if you need forty computers? That's a lot of
money, more money than you're making if you're using cels," Frazier said. |
 Computer animation
can be less expensive than cel animation, Frazier observed, but it's not
a guarantee that the animation will be smoother. Some of the early anime
that uses computers to create 2D shows uses a trick of moving characters
across the screen, shadow-puppet style, instead of animating them as they
walk. There's also an ironic point to the finances of animation and
imports: according to the Wall Street Journal, Nelvana gets $100,000 to
convert every episode of Card Captor Sakura into "Cardcaptors" for English-language
broadcast. That's less money than was spent on the original episodes (which
Frazier said were the most expensive anime productions of recent years,
along with Cowboy Bebop), but that's still three times as much as an anime
studio gets for a typical TV half-hour. |
 Frazier thinks
that cel animation still has a place in anime, because some effects can't
be easily duplicated on a computer. Take the familiar effect of shimmering
daylight: Frazier said that's created with two scratched cels rubbed together
in front of a slide projector in real time, and computers have not yet
been programmed to do the same thing. Beyond the finances of anime,
it's still a form of art, and the techniques take time to master. Take
the example of animating Gundam's giant robots. Frazier notes that these
machines are more human than robots, moving like large people. And Frazier
wonders if Japanese producers yet understand how to create shows that appeal
to overseas audiences. |
