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Otakon |
| Yuzo Sato
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| 2004 |
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 One
of the early animated mainstays of cable television was the Unico
series about a cute young unicorn. In the years before anime started
its American rise in popularity, Unico was the introduction to anime
for many viewers, who probably didn't know it was from Japan. Yuzo Sato
was an animator for that series, which gave him his start in the
industry in 1983. It's hard to imagine that the same artist who created
sequences for that charming series also directed the horror classic
BioHunter, but Sato did just that, barely a dozen years after Unico.
"I'm partial to realistic characters such as those featured in
Evangelion, but I'm also very fond of mascot type characters such as
Mickey Mouse," Sato said at an Otakon panel.
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 Sato
spoke about one of the differences between Japanese and American
animation production. For U.S. animation, it's common for animators to
handle a single character in the same way that an actor has a single
role in a film. In Japan, animators work entire sequences and draw all
the key frames for those sequences, as a composer might write one song
for a musical play, then another composer might write the next song. "A
typical television episode has 20 or 30 scenes, and the production is
given over to different animators. Where the production is tight, we
need to give the production to more animators." The U.S. practice of
individual animators for specific characters is intended to have
consistent "performances" for those characters, and maintaining that
consistency in the Japanese system requires a different approach. "It
is the animators' training to be consistent in style, but there are
animators who have different styles. That is where the animation
director comes. His job is to correct the different styles and make
sure they are consistent."
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 One
thing is the same between the two nations' animators; both often figure
out character movement by watching themselves make those moves in
mirrors. "There are animators who have interesting ways to act out
their characters - it's interesting to watch their work." So the
animators also have to be actors, and understand human movement. "You
would take the character's image, act out a sequence and put that into
drawings. Especially for action sequences, you have to understand
there's a lot of action in anime that would be impossible with real
human figures."
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