What’s up with the jerky animation? Is it a part of the style, or is anime done on the cheap? It’s the most off-putting thing about anime for me.
Some shows are a bit better about it then others. To start with I think anime fans here and abroad have gotten used to the jerky animation to some extent. So they filter it out and they just don’t let it bother them. As an anime fan that’s what I do. There’s another possibility I hadn’t thought of. Perhaps the slightly jerky animation is done on purpose. We are talking about a different culture here that I won’t claim to be anywhere near an expert on. I always thought copious amounts of blood squirting from wounds was an anime thing. But if you watch Akira Kurosawa’s movie Sanjuro you see the same copious amounts of blood squirting from a wound. And Sanjuro was made in the early 60’s.
Some people argue that anime is so detailed that making the animation smoother is cost prohibitive. I’m a bit skeptical about this arguement myself. I think the art in Batman: The Animated Series is on par with most anime tv series I’ve seen. I’d have to see how much it cost to produce B:tAS vs. something like Pokemon, Sailor Moon, or Card Captor Sakura.
Different anime projects do have a different budget and a different audience. Kids don’t seem to have a problem with the poor animation found in Pokemon. People didn’t seem to have a problem with the jerky animation in Robotech when it was released in the late 70’s or early 80’s.
Feature films these days tend to have smoother animation. Maybe it is because of the greater budget. I don’t think they’re on par with Disney films or those new CGI animation flicks.
Marc
goldfish, it depends on the anime you’re watching. In many Japanese animation companies, the lead animator only draws every third or fourth frame, and lets his sub-animators draw the frames in the gaps, as it were. Because each sub-animator has a slightly different take, the jerkiness results. In most American animation, the lead animator draws every frame (or at least oversees) and the minions are mainly responsible for coloring.
Certain Japanese animators draw every frame, and their work is as smooth as any American animation. If you watch a movie by Hayao Miyazaki (Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, etc.) you’ll find that it’s not jerky, as he personally draws every frame. Also, now that computers are regularly used, the jerkiness problem is not as pronounced as it was.
You would be completely incorrect here.
US animation is made up of keyframes, which lead animators draw roughly. These can be anything from every 4th frame to every 20th frame, depending on the importance and expression of the action. It gets cleaned up by ‘clean-up’, then there are ‘inbetweeners’ who fill in the other frames. Disney tend to be consistently drawn at 24 frames a second, though some scenes can get away with 12 frames a second. Other animators also vary between the two. 12 frames a second is perfectly adequate for TV animation, though a lot of it tends to be even lower if they can get away with it. Hanna Barbera was never one to further the creative art of animation itself, though it was pretty good at character and story.
Whereas in Japanese animation, my guess is they don’t bother too much with the 24 frames a second kind of inbetweening, and seem to be happy with sometimes as little as 2 frames a sec, and even then just alternating between two images back and forth, givering a weird jittery shimmer to those gaping sweaty “ah! oh! huh?” shots.
Oh, forgot to say why I mentioned Hanna Barbera - they could animate at the slowest frame rates and get away with it.
What I find disturbing about the frame rates of Anime (I’m not a fan) is that the slow rate emphasises itself with that jerky shimmer effect, and annoys me.
Some anime shows go to the extreme in low frame rate–to about 8 per second. You get the Plympton effect as a result.
GuanoLad, you are correct. I was mistaken about this, and can make no excuse. I can offer a link to atone for my sins, though.
On a lot of long-running series, budget has a lot to do with it. I read somewhere (I think maybe here) that an episode of Dragonball Z is budgeted to have no more than 200 or so frames of animation, and it really shows - they fill the space with long still shots, long periods of time where the same 2 or 3 frames are repeated, and sections where the cels are moved across the background without being truly animated.
I’ve never been bothered by the low frame rates of anime and have always assumed it was due to the higher detail one often sees in the artwork. I always took it for granted that it was as much a stylistic choice as it was an economic one.
[highjack]
However, I’m curious about terms I’ve heard about drawing on the 1’s or 2’s (or something like that). I’m guessing it’s similar to what GuanoLad is talking about but I’m not sure. Anyone have any insights?
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Like others said, it’s probably money…especially in a long series. OAVs tend to be really smooth and high quality compared to their TV series counterparts (the Ranma TV series has a zillion episodes). Some shows have parts that, for some reason I can’t fathom (except just for “dramatic effect”), change speeds for a few seconds…like a scene will be normal and choppy, and then all of a sudden the character runs away with dust flying up behind them and it’s ultra smooth for that few seconds, and then back to choppiness (I think it happens in Slayers a lot). No idea why they don’t just stick with the same framerate, heh…
According to ep6 of Goldenboy which has a big “behind the scenes at the animation studio” plot to it, there’s someone who’s job is to go through the keyframes and in-betweens and touches them up to make sure the styles are consistent, because each artist draws slightly different.
Anyway, watch a lot and you won’t even notice after a while, heh…
- Tsugumo
Posted while I was typing, heh…this might be related to the speeding up I mentioned. I THINK (and I’m pretty much guessing here, so I could be wrong) 1’s and 2’s is how long to show the frame…like in Disney flicks they’d be using the 1’s, so you’re showing a new frame each time…whereas the 2’s would be holding a frame 2x as long (so you have to draw less frames)…
I imagine this sort of timing thing is why 3d always seems to move too smooth when someone throws a CG character in with some humans. I’ve always thought they were animating the CG character twice as often as the humans’ frames were changing, so they came across as too smooth and if they’d cut out every 2nd frame in the CG and hold the frames 2x as long to make up for it, they would fit in better.
- Tsugumo