Animation Appreciation Thread #19

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The Sakuga Wiki [JP] - http://www18.atwiki.jp/sakuga/
Good Animation Blog - http://www.pelleas.net/aniTOP/
Other websites: http://pastebin.com/q0saM3Qi
Animation on Twitter, Tumblr and Youtube:
http://pastebin.com/EGi9EH5a

IRC channel:
#sakuga @ irc.rizon.net
Sakugabooru: http://sakuga.yshi.org/

Appreciate sakuga fall pls

>>168
This is very true, but I think even beyond technicalities, good animation can 'communicate' without having characters emoting or whatever. I don't want to sound pretentious (I know I will), but I think Iso's rocks in RahXephon "speak" quite a bit as a work of animation, beyond being just well-observed. Same for Ohira's simple movements done with his particular approach- Wanwa has a ton of scenes without any acting or even without any discernible character, really, but it's pretty profound in the way abstract painting is. It gets to the core.

That said, there's plenty of good acting in Japanese animation, and I don't think using symbols is all that bad- it's when those symbols lose their freshness and start being used in trite ways. With animation you practically can't avoid relying on symbols, literal acting works with real people because they have all the facial and bodily features that subtly communicate emotions, whereas animation designs will be stylized one way or another basically by necessity. Thus your movement has to be stylized to exploit that.

Junkers Come Here, Only Yesterday, My Neighbours the Yamadas, A Letter to Momo, Hosoda's films, Tokyo Godfathers. All of those have really good character acting and they come from roughly different (but not THAT different in most cases) traditions.