Just saw Wolf Children. Besides Eva 3.0 overall, this is the 2012 film I liked best, and in terms of animation etc. it easily takes the top cake imo. Maybe the character animation is not on the same level as Momo e no Tegami, but the storyboarding and directing more than make up for it. Okiura is I think, first and foremost an animator. You can tell the difference in the focus on certain technical aspects. Hosoda is first and foremost a director and storyteller. The stuff we see better supports the content of the film.
One thing that struck me is that there are a lot of montages in Wolf Children. A lot. And they really make you realise how film itself, the images themselves can be used to tell a story. The story follows a relatively long narrative of more than a decade. One method would've been to simply use timeskips. But the montages work so much better as a means to transition from one period of time to the other. They're not just some gateway from time A to time B. They also show the develoopment in the story, and in the characters.
Also the storyboarding was fantastic. One non-spoilerfic example (although there are at least 3 scenes that go above and beyond with this kind of subtle visual storytelling) is when Ame visits a wolf at the local zoo/center with his mother, because they were eager to learn more about being a wolf, how they mature and so on and so forth, and every scene that takes place here shows the bars of the cage. That's a tiny visual cue that shows and tells so much. Whenever they are in that room, it's always a back-front or front-back view separated (usually) in the middle by the cage-bars. Even when the "camera" focuses on the wolf or one of the characters up close, it's still through the bars, always. Very simple but very effective layout.
The film also uses CG very well, and it is perhaps the first one where character CG (for the crowds) wasn't all too jarring (more recently there were CG crowds in the Blood-C film as well for example, and those stand out pretty badly imo). There are scenes where you notice but also scenes where it strucks you after the fact. There is this scene where the kids all rush out of the classrooms for example, and at first I didn't realise it was CG. If they do it more like Hosoda does it, I would not mind seeing this kind of shortcutting and costcutting more often, even though I will always prefer traditional animation. Again speaking of CG, backgrounds this time, the scene where the 3 run through the forest in the snow was pretty impressive, and I kinda think that it wouldn't have looked as good with traditional background animation.
As for interesting animation cuts, besides the ones that were previously mentioned, the film is generally full of them. I remained with the scenes where Ame and Yuki run around, and when they fight in various instances. Again, not just because they were very nicely animated, but also because they follow a very clear pattern which serves the narrative in its entirety.
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Anonymous2013-02-26 9:05
>>683
Now I'm looking forward to it even more, that sounds like a very positive appraisal of the film.
How does the directing and animation compare with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time?
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Anonymous2013-02-26 9:17
The fuck, sakuga@wiki's now all pink and shit
Something looks missing as well
Can't really properly compare the two in more detail since Ookami Kodomo is pretty clear in my head right now while it's been a couple of years since I last rewatched tokikake but I think this film is better, if only by a little. I think The Girl... had a couple or so scenes which were more "spectacular" so to say, because the story allowed for it. In general this film was more Slice-of-life-y.
Oh, one interesting thing I noticed, as a parallel between the two if you like, was the scene where the children's father/Hana's lover then, was running to meet her and the layout and animation kinda reminded me of the Tokikake scene where Makoto runs for a long while. I don't know if it's an intentional "reference" or just similar because the director likes doing this kind of "action" (although I don't remember other Hosoda films besides this and Girl who leapt through time that feature one like this) but it sort of struck me as one. Kinda like, "ah yeah, there was something like this in girl who leapt through time too, right?".
And speaking of slice-of-life type of approach in the film, there is a montage with "daily life" early on in the film that was very nice. Sort of in the style of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" if you've seen it, where we're just shown what characters/various neighborhood families are doing in their apartments etc with the "camera" placed far away, so that you can see the building mostly, and the characters through the windows, on balconies etc. It was very cool, showing us the community of which the main characters are part of doing mundane, day-to-day things in an interesting fashion.
Anyway. There are a lot of great scenes in the film, I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Haha.
I just got used to using the site and now I can't tell who works on an episode anymore now that the sidebar is gone
goddammit
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Anonymous2013-02-26 13:59
Am I right in saying anything cel animation can do, digital can as well and sometimes even better?
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Anonymous2013-02-26 14:12
>>691
In principle yes, but there are always differences between hand-painted and filmed cels and digital productions.
Whether you prefer analog or digital is purely subjective of course.
Depends what you mean. 3D digital animation can't do everything better than cel animation. But traditional 2D animation done using digital tools can do everything better than traditional animation doen on cel. It removes all the limitations and imposes no restrictions (although in practice it does impose one restriction - the resolution of the image).
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Anonymous2013-02-26 14:35
>>692
So modern anime lacking multi-tone shading and "warmer" colors(as nostalgiafags like to point out) is not due to any limitations of digital animation, but rather a shift in aesthetic preferences among animators?
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Anonymous2013-02-26 14:37
>>693
Yes, I was referring to digital hand-drawn animation. How does it limit the image resolution anyway?
Exactly. You can actually draw with even more shades now because you have a much, much wider choice of colours to use.
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Anonymous2013-02-26 14:42
>>694
The grey-out/washed out look of animation these days is done on purpose and that really ticks me off. I remember watching a behind-the-scenes for the new HxH anime and they actively apply a washout filter to get rid of color satuaration.
Simply because in practice the animated footage is done at a certain resolution (decided upon in the composition/photography stage). You could theoretically use vector graphics and other tricks that allow for theoretically infinitely large resolution (not quite, but in a certain sense that you can zoom indefinitely) but that is far from being practical. Cel animation also has this limitation but in a different manner - the film/cel can only hold so much detail. The advantage of course is that the theoretical resolution of cels is much higher than the current standard. Still, scan at higher and higher resolutions and you eventually reach a point where no more detail is added simply because the paint itself is smudged and whatnot that close up.
>>699
I like the effects but the whole scene just looks off. And there's no chance to fix it for the BDs... because it's exclusive to the BDs. But hey, compared to how the show usually is like, this is a goddamn luxury.
>>683
This more or less mirrors my impression except the montages. I thought that if the film had been longer with those scenes played out as regular scenes it would have been stronger. That would have been more expensive and taken more time to produce and probably put of a some of the audience it aims for so I understand why montages were used instead but they don't feel ideal. I'm mainly thinking of the parts with the father. The similar but not really montage scene with the kids growing up in the classroom was good though.
I see where you're coming from but at the same time I wonder if this approach was used because we as viewers should have a similar vantage with the two kids, since the story mostly revolves around them growing up, and how each deal with the absence of a father/wolf figure in their lives. It feels deliberate. And like you said, it's a compromise; personal preferences aside (I too wouldn't have minded at all if the film were longer) I'd say they nailed the balance. And it was cool because the editing format allowed for some pretty nice stuff that you woulnd't have had otherwise, because they just don't work in longer cuts. Some of those montages felt like some sort of equivalent to a musical moment in Disney films, and I think they took some artistic licence during them, for example the scene where they slide down the hill in the snow. Can you really do that in real life? I don't know, but it looked really great.
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Anonymous2013-02-27 8:20
>>707
What animator wants to draw loads of balls rolling about?
@Thomasintokyo - ThomasRomain ロマン・トマ
Coming back from a party with Bones staff. We were celebrating the production start of the next project. It has big names associate to it!