Watched a little bit of
Puchi Puri Yuushi (
Petite Princess Yucie to the Franco-English-speaking world), a show that I adore well beyond reason.
I'd seen it before, but I felt that I'd watched enough
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 for one evening, and I still had a beer to finish, so
Yuushi it was.
The contrast was enlightening. I'm not going to go into the thematic differences between the two shows here -- I'm only halfway through
Tokyo Magnitude, so I'm still thinking about it -- but the difference in animation is astounding.
PuchiPuri is a kind of old-fashioned looking 2003 series, and it uses all the cel animation tricks -- the sliding panels, careful framing, precisely-timed cuts. Anything to avoid the difficult bits.
And the funny thing is that that's less jarring than the (sometimes quite bad) character animation on
Tokyo Magnitude. I was actually quite surprised at how quickly I was able to adjust to
Yuushi's limited animation. I can only conclude that it's a matter of skilled direction, working in the constraints of a medium with which I've become familiar.
But it's an important point, and one that I don't think gets mentioned often enough: traditional animation reached an amazing level of development, and evolved techniques that can produce something great even with a limited budget. Modern anime still hasn't gotten that far -- sometimes things will move in an unnatural way, or the pressure to make everything move will result in character animation that doesn't mesh with the background. Certainly computers have made great things possible -- the backgrounds in
Tokyo Magnitude are wonderful -- but they come with their own problems.
And of course,
Puchi Puri Yuushi was animated by Gainax. It's not a surprise that it's technically brilliant, even if it is one of their lighter works.
words from chris, 2009-10-17 05:10:59, los angeles
