Animators React to Bad & Great ANIME

the titans are so realistically drawn but not realistic at the same time yeah this clip really stands out for having some very fluid animation a really cool approach to perspective the way animation is kind of taught in japan is more energy influenced so why would they have decided to shift to doing fully cg titans thanks to raycon for sponsoring this video stick around to the end so you can get 15 off your next purchase hey welcome back to another episode of animators react we are joined by alex today very very talented cg animator i've worked on things like frozen 2 ryan the last dragon hotel transylvania right now i'm working on the recently announced bad guys over at dreamworks this time around with alex we're going to be taking a deep dive into anime most notably for me attack on titan one of my favorite shows i'm really excited to dive into that one how did you get into anime probably ninja scroll i was gonna say the same thing everybody's really yeah because you couldn't get them so you'd have to go to like blockbuster or video store and hope they had one of the five vhs tapes so it was like ghost in the shell cowboy beef up man i was into toonami as a kid so like dragon ball z gundy wing that was my james yeah so alex what would you say are the main differences between anime and other styles of animation as far as i know that the way animation is kind of taught in japan is more energy influenced so it's more about the feeling than getting the drawings right sometimes people are just like i just won't draw it good and it doesn't matter because you're gonna feel it like some anime leans 100 into that energy idea and so you're feeling it you're seeing them fly around zip around they're just kind of like shapes of the trail so when you say energy based animation the first thing that comes to my mind is the tournament fight from my hero academia what i think hero identity does really great is that it's grounded like as extreme as this is it's within the rules that they've set and you always know what's happening i don't know much about todoroki's fighting style todoroki when he's like first really shown in the challenge he like freezes a robot it's just a one drawing like this i think and then the background is going so you're just like whoa this is awesome and it just kind of goes like this and a big giant ice thing climbs up the robot if you think about it it's just the background moving it's just a drawing of a hand doing this and the background is moving and tracking in a way that makes you believe the character's not really doing anything interesting in this whole scene but it's just like the feeling and the flow and being smart about their pencil mileage pencil mileage yeah what's possible pencil mileage is like if you were to take all the lines that you have to draw that robot and put them in one line it would be miles and miles interesting yeah i made up that definition but that's the idea is is how much work you have to put on is being smart about how you're using your time anime does that arguably better than anyone if you draw a face once and then you draw a mouth that's low pencil mileage so then you can shift your focus and expenses and budget to the scenes where they just go all out when watching like an attack of titan episode and there's a lot of standing around and talking and a lot of shots that like are somebody's hand yeah or somebody listening or somebody's just somebody's mouth or something like that it's like oh there's gonna be a big fight scene at the end of this yeah yeah it's like non-anime people see shots like they're like why do you like this no it's just like one drawing of a mouth going you're like this means something good is coming yeah they're saving their frames for later yeah don't blame me for what happens next uh so this shot right here you know it goes back to the efficiency thing he's barely moving but his clothes are but they're adding these short thick vertical lines just all over around the edge of his body and just like flickering and it really makes the moment seem very intense he's not moving yeah at all and yet the whole frame has so much energy there's like all these wind moving around his clothes are moving his hair is moving but he's still yeah so what you call those is like action lines action lines usually it's first shot like we saw with todoroki zipping across the ground with his hand you'll see those action lines it just gives energy to a shot that you might just have like a cycle of probably only two to four drawings where you're seeing some texture moves we've actually done action lines on some of our anime videos before like anime baseball and yeah fidget spinners it's like it's really easy you just like you put some lines on the edges or top and bottom yeah but like he actually like the outline of him his silhouette is actually turned into action lights too i found that pretty interesting there so in anime their motion blur their version of smear frame or multiples it's almost like the lines are drifting almost off the character the lines start peeling away so it makes like action lines coming off that's why the edges down the bottom are mostly solid but all the edges on the backside they're all like exactly you know what's so funny it's like motion blur is a literal like optical artifact yeah from just how cameras work yeah but as a side effect they also imply motion in a really interesting way and so that's what we've i guess seen animators just try to replicate yeah through various ways so alex roughly how many drawings would be in an episode like this hero academia on an average i think they run around three thousand of four thousand drawings in an episode which is a lot which is a feel like that's a lot it's a lot but that's the limited look you're looking at so when you're like anime is limited it's because it's only four thousand drawings but when you're talking about like a legend of korra the first season has around 18 000 drawings per episode throughout the season long time levi still a runter have you grown some so the kenny versus levi fight is one of the most requested animator react clips we have this clip really stands out for having some very fluid animation and a really cool approach to perspective and notably a cg background and then hand-drawn characters on top of it here we go i love it here we go it's interesting how they make a point to have his face get close to the camera to give you the character moment still in the middle of all of this that's one of the things like it's like the camera it always goes in out in and out and it just adds a lot of energy to what would be just like traveling down a street yeah this shot oh yeah i mean those drawings in the push perspective i love myself some push perspective what's push perspective just that like how big his foot is like there's no camera lens spoiler there's nobody filming this everything has to be created you're choosing to film that moment or this sequence with a different lens you know if you're to film this in real life you know they have shots where it's like the perspective of levi's like a 30 millimeter lens and without cutting without changing lenses or zooming out suddenly you're getting like the distortion of like an eight millimeter lens or ten millimeter lens so that field of view is staying consistent for the background but for levi is going at will like you're saying so it's like this weird disconnect that you can't get even in computer generated imagery the problem is like in cg or in computers it's easy to not think about stuff because the computer is like i got you yeah and so it's easy to be like he got me right and then you like show it to someone who knows or you see it later and you're like you told me you would handle this maya or after effects or whatever like you promised me and most of the time it's like i tried my best you know computers they're math-based you know so you're going to get the mathematically correct image and when it comes to drawing things by hand that's not at all what you're getting exactly you're forced to think about every line because you're drawing it so for a scene like this because of the crazy motion you think it's better to animate the background and the camera first and then decide on your character and what they do or flip that around this is like a 50 50 for me of like what would be better get the background set up and then just like live within it and that might be more efficient time wise but also giving the animator freedom to just be like this is gonna be awesome and i can visualize it and you just have to like track this and i'll give you a few markers or whatever can also kind of open up the gates all right so we're always asking about animations here ren's been talking about anime i'm gonna throw an anime prompt here i want to know about ground-breaking animes i know for example like the original gundam was groundbreaking with how it drew perspective shifts on the robots and its approach drawing missiles for example but i don't know much more beyond that so maybe you guys can help me out and leave a comment about some groundbreaking animes and include why why you love it so much that's gonna be so helpful for us in terms of finding more clips to show alex and other animators that come in okay so now i want to take a look at the titans and how they've changed over the course of the show the titans are so realistically drawn but not realistic at the same time yeah it's like so uneasy feeling which is exactly what you want but yeah it's super intentional yeah i like how the titans are drawn very much in reference to like european paintings like medieval tapestries it gives them a really unique feeling yeah it's so unique but it's like slightly exaggerated like their eyes are bigger their smiles are uncanny it very much so emotes a weird weird emotion you're just like oh yeah because i feel like that's even more effective than if they actually intentionally made them look scary yeah they're supposed to be scary creatures they're big giant monsters that are going to eat you but they went about achieving that scary factor without actually making them look scary the show also kind of fudges its own sense of scale a lot of the time he's huge he looks like a freaking skyscraper especially when he's like walking through in his fist is the size of houses aaron is also very huge here you have people literally standing on his shoulder and like they could probably like burrow into his ear yeah the sense of scale that this episode makes us feel is off from what the reality would be so the colossal titan is a 60 meter titan that's like a little over 200 feet tall aaron yeager's titan is a 15 meter class titan which is about 50 feet but then they exaggerate the scale so much he runs up and is now about to try to stop the colossal titan from moving technically aaron's titan is exactly 25 as tall as the colossal titan he should come up to his knees he's so tiny yeah he's tiny he's at the ankle there but then the next shot he's almost up to the knee so the reason i think they did that is to help emphasize the actual character moment yeah it's aaron going up against this huge unstoppable force and to accentuate that from like a story perspective they exaggerated the scale yeah you know like in that shot he is as tall as the first story of the building that's like what 10 feet yeah he's like now at a like 20 scale of what he actually should be and they're taking liberties with the scale of all this because it helps force the story and the emotions you feel like oh man he's actually pushing back on the titan's foot and then the titan's like this end yeah it's like kind of all over the place and i'd like to think it's for feeling it could be for time and budget but a consistency to things that are trackable i think is important because you're trying to sell people that this is a real world and real characters and they have limits and that's the thing is that the visual context says one thing but the numbers that they're constantly reminding viewers says a different thing it's just i find it interesting and that's why i'm making a whole video about all of this i actually have cg renderings of these titans composited into real life footage to give you a better sense of scale of how big these titans actually would really be in real life subscribe to the corridor crew channel that video comes out tomorrow i've been working hard on it i hope you like it in the first three seasons with the exception of the colossal titan everyone was hand animated but in the fourth season they switched studios and they made a decision that all of the titans would be computer generated they'd be 3d models with a toon shading rendering to it in my opinion i think it works pretty well yeah i think they did a great job but aaron's titan has a definite different look to him now especially his face i mean that looks pretty good to me so why would they have decided to shift to doing fully cg titans in season four when they didn't really do it for most of the previous seasons i would imagine it's more budgetary in time and just availability of talent uh the studio handling the season is studio mapa they're also doing shows like god of high school and jiu jitsu kaisan which are two of my favorites it's worth mentioning like in the first season of attack on titan you basically get one titan which is aaron's titan and then once in a while other titans show up yeah in season four there's like four different titans on screen in like every episode at the same time yeah yeah and so you know you run into the issue that you know it's almost like the same issue it's like mechanical drawings like drawing gundams you have these crazy complicated figures with a whole bunch of detail that that detail needs to track with them as they move so you know how do you solve that how do you solve that problem because as you're talking about you have a budget with how many frames you can draw you know so if you do the whole character in cg you can change poses and do everything you want and it's not costing you any drawing yeah this wasn't like day two of season one where they're like should we just do this in cg guys i think it's like they did it then they're like how do we make this crazy leave eye shot what if we did the background in cg that worked out no one really cared we did the colossal titan which has a crazy amount of detail and stuff in cg everyone was like that's really cool yeah and so now we have these designs we have this animation language we have all the stuff we need to inform the final product we're going to be able to get a tighter thing so this is a cg model here yeah that one feels more cg you can see the cg more it used to be more in the shaving and now it's more in the movement i would argue they're trying their best and they're doing a good job i think aaron overall is pretty great but as soon as you enter the cg realm you think now what can i do instead of using it as a tool to get what you were able to get before more efficiently and so it's gonna feel different which immediately when your four seasons in is gonna be like something feels off that's gonna stand out it's not the style of the show the style of the show is based on its limits and so from an animation perspective they're trying to get a little bit more out of it it feels like and i think with this they probably bit off more than they could chew i think they chose it for probably the right reasons but then they just don't have the experience yet i would say somewhere like studio mir who worked on voltron i think voltron is one of the most successful tv series with 2d anime style animation and cg animated stuff that doesn't feel jarring and they are pushing like the frame count and stuff with their cgs but it's just integrated in a really unique way because of how they're layering their effects so do you think the cg titans worked out it's hard to say if it was successful or not in the sense of matching what was there previously i'd say no not a hundred percent but the result i think is successful in the sense of you're getting the story you're seeing cool action it feels like it's coming from the same world i would say out of all the aspects that aren't working there needed to be probably a 2d pass over the cg for textures and line work just for the little details and scratches they like to do and then the animation needed to be limited further i don't think it's far off it's like 85 percent there and people are reacting very strongly like too strongly yes 100 too strongly this the amount of work and complexities in this season alone are insane and then to do what they did with the titans is a mountain of work that they accomplished and told the story and did everything they needed to do the technology is like almost there have they drastically improved within the series whether it's a different studio or not i would argue yes so whether it's successful or not are they making progress in integrating cg into anime in a smart way and a good use of it absolutely so you're sitting on the bus you got some time to kill but you don't want everybody on the bus to know that you're watching anime well what do you do they put in some wireless earbuds that's right these are the raycon everyday e25s if you are in the market for something that has seamless bluetooth pairing raycon offers high quality sound at a price that's half that of the starting competition the earbuds themselves come with six hours of battery life and they have a self-charging case there are no wires or stems or things sticking out of your ear good seal so you don't get a lot of background noise and they don't fall out very easy you want to watch your anime you want to blast it these offer more bass you got a whole bunch of colors you got a whole bunch of fits and you know what if something doesn't work out they offer a 45 45-day free return policy and on top of that if you click the link in our description below or you go to buy recon calm quarter crew you get 15 off these raycon earbuds are nice and they have been a long time sponsor of the channel which we really appreciate anyways thanks waikon and uh you know the next time you just want to blast that strange rock and roll anime intro for the show that you're really into well these are the the ones you'll turn to to make it happen jamming out to the beginning genesis i mean come on that opening song for neon genesis it's the most banging theme song for any anime i mean the attack on titan one very close very close but nothing beats cruel angel's thesis anyways back to the episode alex you dropped so much knowledge on us about this crazy world of animation and like animation's one of those things that it nearly draws you in when you sit down there's like there's some it's like music it's like you don't need to understand why it just does for shedding some light in this process thank you so much i really appreciate you coming in thank you for all of you out there who would like to see more of alex's work you can follow him personally at snowmation or check out some of his bigger projects at double plus productions oh and real quick don't forget subscribe because tomorrow attack on titan is being put in real life what would it look like well you're probably looking at it right now but stay tuned tomorrow we'll see you next time especially if you've subscribed

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 2,695,437

Keywords: react, animators react, cartoons, anime, manga, attack on titan, my hero academia, colossal titan, make, new, behind the scenes, making of, shot breakdown, eren yeager, eren jaeger, animation, finale

Id: BT-nixC0pOA

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Hope its corridor crew...their ambala reaction was lit lol🔥

[u/naveen7725]

I love these guys. They also react to ambala flying car scene

[u/DeeKay017]

I only watch their india cgi reactions