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http://www.pelleas.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=238
In credits, sakkan is usually translated into English as animation director, and that is good enough for the general animation fan. However, his job is quite different from that of animation director in an American production. In many cases, ideally, the sakkan is also the character designer.
Sakkan is short for Sakuga Kantoku, which literally means "work-drawing director". If I can be allowed a bit of leeway in interpreting the term, when I say "work-drawing", I might compare it to the term "workprint" in general filmmaking,. That is, an artifact of production which is not the finished product, but a stage of the work-in-progress that is never seen by the audience.
In Japan, the layouts are usually drawn by the same animators who will eventually be animating the scene. The layouts are handed in and go through a series of checks- once by the director, then by the sakkan. The sakkan at this stage makes any corrections in composition, posing and perspective, then the scene is sent back to the animator.
When the key animation drawings, the genga, are done, they go through a second series of checks-- the director looks at them, makes notes, then it goes back again to the sakkan for correction.
This is what the sakkan does: after flipping the drawings to decide what needs to be corrected, he pegs the first piece of genga on his desk, then pegs a blank colored (usually yellow) sheet over it He picks out the problem areas and draws over them with a clean line, making sure his new lines dovetail into the shapes of the usable parts of the genga. He places the next drawing down and repeats the process until he has corrected the entire stack. The trick is in making sure that the original parts work with the corrected parts, but also to make sure that the corrected parts also work between themselves. It's a bit like playing 3-dimensional chess.
The colored paper identifies the sakkan's work immediately. It is up to the douga (inbetweener) to combine the sakkan's lines with the usable parts of the genga onto one final, cleaned up sheet. I have seen cases where there are multiple sakkans on a project and a chief sakkan (or director) might make additional corrections (on yet another different color paper) on a sakkan's corrections over a piece of genga. On projects where robots or vehicles are featured prominently, there may be a separate sakkan that specializes in that (mecha sakkan). Sometimes, if the original genga is completely unusable, the sakkan redraws every piece of genga himself. The highly skilled ones are able to do this without any roughs of their own, in a sense, using the bad genga as the preliminary draft and drawing perfectly clean key animation in one pass. The genga is usually not sent back to the animator unless he has totally misinterpreted the scene. It is usually faster for the sakkan to simply redo it than call for a retake.
In any given studio, there is usually a small handfull of very talented animators and lots of mediocre ones. The sakkan system enables the studio to maximize the output of their best artists while allowing the average artists to do most of the grunt work. Most of the hours that go into animating a scene happen at the beginning, as the animator has to work out technical matters such as cel levels, camera instructions, perspective, and registering elements to the background.
By using the sakkan's skills only where they are needed most, the studio can give every scene the same degree of polish without having to waste the sakkan's time on drudgery.
Having said that, the sakkan's job is the most stressfull and demanding of anyone's on the crew. An ordinary scene can not usually be made excellent with a last-minute fix. A sakkan's effort salvages animation that would otherwise be unacceptable, or bring substandard work at least to a level on par with the rest of the work. That is why his job is so frustrating. A sakkan is usually skilled enough to be able to produce excellence if allowed to simply animate from scratch. However, he must spend his time trying to redeem the failures of lesser artists. It takes a very special type of personality to make a good sakkan. I doubt many American animators would have the temperament. Not because of any lack of skill, but because it would drive them crazy.