One
of the first Mad House animation projects encountered by this page was
the Alexander series created with Peter (Aeon Flux) Chung's distinctive
character designs. Kanemori Yoshinori directed that series, along with
the X series. Inside the industry, Kanemori is best known as a
character designer, and he's faced both of that job's major challenges
- creating new characters and reworking existing manga characters for
animation. Long-time U.S. fans have seen his designs in the sports
drama "Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl," which came from a manga
series. Kanemori noted that character design is the art of simplifying
a character so animators can most easily make a character move, but
there's more than that - especially in the era of digital animation.
Using computers instead of ink and pain eases the basic job animation,
but it also gives animators more choices in production. So rather than
facing things such as a limited color pallette, animators have more
choices, complicating a job that is supposed to be easier through
technology.
Fans
enjoy anime stories and are dazzled by the art, but the heart of
animation is movement. Kanemori admits that animators are obsessed with
movement, to the point they look at unusual movement from a person or
an animal as something they can use in an animated film. And it
might seem odd, but the most movement to animate is a walking human
being. While other things in aniamtion might be easy to simulate,
because people can accept somehting fictional that they never have
seen, nearly allsighted people have seen talking and have a sense of
the movement. Much Japanese animation is melodramatic, and the
animation has to match the stories and be equally intense. "To make
animation real is not not to make it straightforward reality," Kanemori said.
"It is hoew we `fake it.'" If something is moving fast, we can make it
fast to shock the audience - or if we're opening something, we can
change it to give it extra emphasis. Basically, it's how we
overemphasize things."
One
of the first Mad House animation projects encountered by this page was
the Alexander series created with Peter (Aeon Flux) Chung's distinctive
character designs. Kanemori Yoshinori directed that series, along with
the X series. Inside the industry, Kanemori is best known as a
character designer, and he's faced both of that job's major challenges
- creating new characters and reworking existing manga characters for
animation. Long-time U.S. fans have seen his designs in the sports
drama "Yawara! A Fashionable Judo Girl," which came from a manga
series. Kanemori noted that character design is the art of simplifying
a character so animators can most easily make a character move, but
there's more than that - especially in the era of digital animation.
Using computers instead of ink and pain eases the basic job animation,
but it also gives animators more choices in production. So rather than
facing things such as a limited color pallette, animators have more
choices, complicating a job that is supposed to be easier through
technology.
Fans
enjoy anime stories and are dazzled by the art, but the heart of
animation is movement. Kanemori admits that animators are obsessed with
movement, to the point they look at unusual movement from a person or
an animal as something they can use in an animated film. And it
might seem odd, but the most movement to animate is a walking human
being. While other things in aniamtion might be easy to simulate,
because people can accept somehting fictional that they never have
seen, nearly allsighted people have seen talking and have a sense of
the movement. Much Japanese animation is melodramatic, and the
animation has to match the stories and be equally intense. "To make
animation real is not not to make it straightforward reality," Kanemori said.
"It is hoew we `fake it.'" If something is moving fast, we can make it
fast to shock the audience - or if we're opening something, we can
change it to give it extra emphasis. Basically, it's how we
overemphasize things."
